 Well, thank you. We're here for a keynote panel on the transformation and transformation and empowerment, looking at open education and professional development. And we have a huge panel. And so rather than me introduce each one of them, I'm gonna ask the panelists to start by introducing themselves and ask you introduce yourself. If you could say your name, your title, what organization you work for or with, and also the professional development program that you've created, that will be really helpful. So let's go in this order of Sarah, Jenrin, Lina, Quill, and Tel, and Tanya. And then we'll pick things up from there. So Sarah, would you like to kick us off? Thank you so much and welcome everyone. It's so exciting to see some familiar names and to see some new names. So this is very, very exciting way to connect with all of you. Thank you, OE Global, for the chance to participate. My name is Sarah Cohen. I'm the Senior Managing Director at the Open Education Network, also known as the OEN. The OEN runs a series of leadership development programs that act the root of what we do for our community of institutions. Specifically, we run institutional transformation through open education and that's through leadership development, often for staff, but often we see more and more with faculty members and administrators, which is exciting. And then we also run our certificate for OER librarianship. This is, we just closed our applications on Friday. So we're in the midst of going through that and are welcoming our third cohort for this seven month program that really connects people with mentors, a community of peers, and obviously quite a bit of instruction that results in an action plan for people to take back to their institutions. And then we also run a series of publishing, OER, pardon me, open textbook publishing initiatives that also support leadership development. Thank you. Thank you, so. Jenrin. Hi, and thank you for having me. I'm really so glad to be here with you all and glad that Open Education Global could host such a wonderful multi-time zone event. So my name's Jenrin Wetzler. I am the Assistant Director of Open Education at Creative Commons. And it is my pleasure to get to focus on open education globally. And specifically, I get to manage the CC certificate program, which trains educators and academic librarians and open licensing and Creative Commons licenses in particular and how to work with other open licensed materials. And then also how to engage in these different open communities that we have online. So in education and open access and Glam and more. So currently we have these two courses. Actually next year we're going to be debuting the CC certificate for Glam, which is a training program for galleries, libraries, archives and museums. Happy to talk more about all of this and the kind of initial results that we're seeing from these training programs so far. But I will cede the floor to fellow panelists. Sure, Lena. Thanks so much, Paul. And thank you so much to my colleagues and to you, Paul, for having us all together. My name is Lena Patterson. I am the Senior Director of Programs and Stakeholder Relations at Ecampus, Ontario. And I come to you from Toronto, Ontario, which is the traditional home of the Mrs. August of the Credit, the Anishinaabeck, the Chippewa and the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat and Toronto's Treaty 13 territory. And this land acknowledgement is important to me in my privilege as a settler and this practice reminds me I'm accountable to these relationships. So it's such a pleasure to be here with you all. And Ecampus, Ontario has been invited to speak at this panel because we run a program called Ontario Extend. I'm just gonna drop the link in the chat there, which is a professional learning program that is grounded on the key skills, knowledge and attributes that people require to teach and learn in a digital environment. So the primary goal is actually digital fluency. And so some people in this program might be asking, hey, well, what does that have to do with open education? We actually use kind of the concept of digital fluency as an on-ramp into conversations about open education. So the program has six modules, teacher for learning, technologist, collaborator, experimenter and scholar. And the sixth one is curator. And it's through that kind of skill and kind of set of attributes that we use to introduce people to the concept of open education, start to talk about how you find resources, how to kind of analyze those resources and how to integrate them into your teaching. Extend itself is an open educational resource. It was created through open practice and built upon the work of other open educators. Just to name a few, Simon Bates, the associate provost to teaching and learning at UBC actually developed the model that Extend is based on. He openly licensed it, and that allowed us to take it and build our program on top of it. And then the team at Ecampus Ontario led then by David Porter, massive contributions from many Canadian open education practitioners that you all know, Terry Green, Alan Levine, I'm counting him as Canadian in this one, Valerie Lopes. And then recently we partnered with Wayne McIntosh and Claire Good in New Zealand to kind of do a transition of the program. So it's got its roots in open education, it's got its roots in the open community, but it takes a little bit of a different approach to how we talk about professional development in the open field. And that's it for me. Quill, over to you. Yeah, thanks. So my name is Quill West, hello. I am an open education project manager at Pierce College, which is in Washington State. And I'm actually here representing a project called Regional Leadership in Open Education. And Arlo has an arm of our work called professionalism. So rather than develop professional development programs, Arlo is actually trying to get an understanding of what is available and what is needed in the field, meaning the professional field of open education and the many different roles that people play within open education. And the reason why we want to do that is because we're trying to both look at opportunity gaps within professional development and open education, but also trying to help people who are trying to get a sense of how to do this work, where they can learn how to do it, because right now it's such a diverse and dispersed system of professional development across the world. Thank you, Quill. Very meta. Tell, over to you. You muted, tell. Hi, Paul, hello, everybody. Thank you for having me. I am a professor at the University of Brazil here in Brazil. And I had the UNESCO Chair in Distance Education. And well, I'm here because of the Open Education Initiative, which we have in Brazil since 2017. And we have, I'd say, three major programs for professional development. One that we started just now. We have a first cohort of teachers in basic education. And we're running an open education leadership certificate. And the idea is to come up with a good cohort of teachers, about 200 of them, that will become leaders in the regions and spread the word about open education. It's sort of meant to be a push on Google and Microsoft certification. So we have an open leader. We have a program for higher education, which is called an OER Ambassadors Program. That's happened for about two or three years. And they're listed in our Ministry of Education site. So we have OER Ambassadors all over the country in higher education that can help folks with open education in their institutions and their regions. And the last one is something we run with institutions and governments, which is the open policy game. And it's sort of a way to get people thinking about how to change internal policy. That's awesome, Tel. Thank you. And Tanya, nice to see you here. I'm glad you made it. We were wondering. We're just doing intros right now, Tanya. So if you could just give us your name, and title, the organization you work with, and just a little short introduction to your professional development initiative. Sure. I work with Spark Open Education Leadership Program. It is an intensive year-long program designed primarily for librarians who are interested in starting open education leadership initiatives on their campus. But now we've expanded it beyond librarians. And we've included other people from campus and state leadership positions. And the program was primarily we have an intensive 10-week what is open and kind of goes through all the modules about open education. And then the second semester is an implementation time when you have to actually do something and implement an initiative on your campus or in your community. And then we've graduated 64 students in our fourth year. So very exciting. That's fantastic. Well, thank you all for these kind of like intro to your professional development initiatives. There's a lot to unpack there. And I wonder if we can do, maybe I'll call this a lightning round, really short answers of just the origin for your initiative. How did it get started? Yours has been going for a while, Tanya. So why don't you go first? Tell us what the origin of your initiative was. I was working with Nicole Allen back in 2017. And she was flying all over the place. This is real. She would be every day somewhere. And I'm an online educator. And I have a background in online teaching. And I said, you know, we can scale this. You don't have to fly everywhere and do keynotes for everybody individually in person. We can find a way to scale this so that everybody can get all of the information they need and learn from open education leaders, teachers, in an online and distributed format. So we worked together and I designed the curriculum. It was pretty basic at first. And it's grown over time. But it really came from that place of not wanting to wear out these amazing open education leaders like Nicole, who were putting so much effort in. And I just didn't see that it would be a sustainable situation for anyone to continue all of the in-person teaching. And little did we know that COVID would arrive. We have to have online courses. So now we're sustainable. Great. Tell, how about yours? What was the impetus for getting it going? We can't hear you, tell. So for us, it was trying to find a way to act. And this will sound maybe bookish, too bookish. But it's kind of true. It's trying to act, maybe you got a bit of a delay. It's trying to act systemically. So we were trying to find out what some of the problems were with professional development in higher education institutions. And we noticed that we needed to do some research. We needed to find out what was going on. And then we noticed there were some policies that we were advancing, but that there was an incredible need for professional development. And we wanted to create something in the scale of Brazil that would be able to take the load off of us having to do professional development over and over again and to sort of give other people the opportunity to continue with this work locally and to do it better than we could considering the diversity that we have in the country. And so a lot of this effort in creating the leadership program and the ambassador's program is to say, we can't obviously handle workshops. Great. Yeah, there is a bit of lag with you, but that's all right. Tell I'll get used to it. Quill, what was the motivation around looking at this from your side? So I have two motivations. And I think the first started with the RLO team, the RLO leadership team, getting together and saying, so we don't want to be a movement. We want to be a profession. And so what does that mean to be a profession? But the real reason why I think this work is incredibly important to me is because when I started in open education, I was the only person I knew with a full-time job that was open education at an institution. And I looked around and said, how do I do this job? Can somebody help me? And everybody went, we're waiting for you to tell us how to do it. And so I was like, OK, I'll figure it out. And so throughout my time doing this work, I thought, OK, it'll get better for people. And then I realized not that long ago, maybe two years ago, that there are still people who are getting hired to do open education work and looking around and going, how do I do this job? And our answer is, we still don't have a unified way to tell you how to do that. So my work is really about inviting new people. Because otherwise, doing open education is about who you know rather than what you can find out. And that creates opportunity barriers. Thank you. Lena? Yeah, you had me reflecting, Paul. So I mean, Extend was created in 2017. And it's interesting because it came out of a funding program that we did as a province. So the provincial government put some money into the system. It was a competitive process. And the results that came out of that demonstrated that there were some institutions that were able to really capitalize on that funding and that there were others that did not have the capacity to do that. And so we went into the process with a couple of key principles. We wanted to lift all boats. We wanted to have a low barrier to entry. We wanted to create something that was shared. And we wanted to build inter-institutional collaboration so that capacity became something that we had as a province, not that certain institutions had on their own. And so Ecampus, Ontario, as some of you know, is a consortium of all the colleges and universities in the province. And so we have to, we bring a systemic perspective to everything we do very much like what Tell was describing. And so that's where it came from. That really simple need to kind of level the playing field and make sure that we created something that was, that could be either done by an individual. So it's, you know, you can go through the program self-paced on your own at any time or something that could be picked up by an institution integrated into their teaching and learning center and run through their LMS. Or, and this is the version that we have the most success in, is it's run centrally. And instructors come from all over the province and participate in a facilitated process. Cameron? Sure. Well, I feel like I could actually turn the question around on you, Paul, since the SEC certificate was actually Paul's brainchild when he worked at Creative Commons. But from my understanding, the certificate emerged from a growing need that we saw in the US, but then also around the world for open licensing expertise at different institutions. So in the US in particular, I know there was a Department of Labor grant for about $2 billion that institutions got. And then we're faced with open licensing requirements on their grant-funded resources, but little expertise on how to actually open license their resources. So the certificate was a way to train up more experts in different institutions that needed area of expertise. And since then, we've seen it kind of grow and morph. So I think the original area of focus was addressing a very specific need, but I think now it's kind of blossomed a little bit more, which is a lot of fun. Nice. Sarah? Gosh, it's so exciting to hear from everyone. At the OAN, I think we had a professional development or leadership development program that was stemming with our members. And like Martha pointed out in the chat, actually, she pointed out that you jealous that you have a position to work on open education. And our community of members would keep reaching out saying, we're going to be hiring, or we'd like to hire someone for open education. Do you know anyone? Or can you help us with the job description? And it started to bubble up so much that we essentially, like we tend to do in the OAN, is look at our community and say, this sounds like a need within our community for some way to help people apply to those positions or to create kind of those benchmarks for open education librarianship. And we sought out input from our community using our members. We were very fortunate to have some real incredible people to help us develop that program based on what they knew they needed to go from kind of a project mindset into a program. How do you think about this programmatically instead of this, as if it's going to be finished? It's a journey, not a destination. So I think we really looked for something that would provide a deeper dive and that would also continue to support what we think is essential is talking to each other, that it's not one person that gives you this input or tells you what to do. It's actually, there's so many ways. So the cohort model was really vital to us and reaching into our community and encouraging people to create community around open education. Thanks, Sarah. I mean, one of the things that I was excited about with this panel is how the emerging open education professional development programs kind of show a maturation of the field. We've been all doing this work for a while. It's growing. How can we enable those who are getting involved to acquire the skills and knowledge to do this work effectively? And so it's wonderful, I think, that there's a mix now of professional development opportunities people can access and use to get those skills and competencies that they need. One of the things that I'm really kind of keen to hear you all address is in the context of open education global, which is this conference, we're addressing a global audience. And I wonder if you can speak to who takes your professional development program, like who are the people that actually sign up, how many people would you normally put through and what's been sort of the scale, I guess, that you've been able to achieve either regionally within whatever regions you're working or even internationally? And maybe I'll start with you, Sarah. This would be interesting. OK. Well, I will say that the certificate and OER librarianship is not limited to our members, like most of the OEN's program. We actually opened it up because we wanted to be able to support people that are not members, but anyone who needs that level of support. We were originally funded through an IMLS grant, the Institute for Museum and Library Services. And so our original, our first cohort was US. And I, gosh, I'm trying to remember how many were in the original cohort. I'm so focused now on the current cohort. This year, we allotted 64 spaces for this year's cohort. But we saw many more applications in that. So we're in the midst of evaluating if we can grow the program. And I'll say that we typically do, we are still focused primarily on a US audience that we did open it up and say that anyone can attend. But knowing that the curriculum, and in particular, the licensing, the way that we cover open licensing is US-centric. But we've actually received a number of international applications from people who said, we understand, but we still want to. So I think that's an area where we still have quite a bit of work to do. Our work right now is actually on trying to welcome and invite applications from traditionally underrepresented institutions and communities within the US, specifically tribal colleges, the HBCUs. So we are really trying to focus our energy in that way less to the international at the moment. Work still to be done. Dreams. So I know your program actually is kind of more global in its orientation, and I'd be curious to hear you talk about that as well as the ways in which perhaps some of the global parts of the world have localized it or built their own version of it. Sure. Well, first just echoing Sarah's note about the kind of continuous, not challenged, but area of opportunity for us to always expand offerings to meet a broader crowd. This is something that we focus on as much as we can with the certificate, which is global. So so far after launching in 2018, we have graduated about a little under 800 participants from 50 countries. I think about 1,000 or so have run through the course, but not all have graduated. But we've been able to expand the number of countries involved and participation options through scholarships. So we've had about 25 countries then represented through our scholarship participation and a number of folks drawn into adaptations, translations, audio options, and so on, which really then helps us extend the reach to additional audiences too. So like my colleagues, we have our options online, which are all CC bylicensed. But we're also making certificate content available in Arabic, in Italian, soon, Burmese, Yoruba, Bengali, and then hopefully Spanish. And then we'll broaden the scope a little bit to include hopefully all of the UN languages and so on. We'll go where there's an audience for this. But yeah, I think having some incentive for different participants to, one, help us focus on the content, making sure the content applies in their local countries, having participants help us with different remixes so they can leave workshops in their local communities based on their needs that they know much better than we ever could, or adding local case studies to our existing CERT content has really helped. And then the language translation is huge. Recently, one of our CERT facilitators, Jonathan Ports, translated all of the content into audio recordings, which is also extending our reach to new audiences as well. So it's kind of a horizon toward which we continuously work in terms of broadening access and opportunity for non-native English speakers and non-North American audiences. Thank you, Jenrin. And thank you, Cable, for posting the links related to what Jenrin was just talking about in chat. That's super helpful. And Lena. So Paul, the question was about, I'm so distracted by everybody's responses, it's about the participants, right? Yeah, who's been taking it? How broad a reach are you enabling? I know your primary focus really is the provincial system of universities and colleges. But I also know that even your program, or maybe especially your program, is also generating global interest. And so if you could speak perhaps about the initial deliveries within your purview and then what's been happening lately. Thank you. Thank you. That was for Quill and Tal and Tanya as well. So first of all, the people who take it, it's very foundational extent. So it is not tied to a specific role in education, which means that we have instructional designers, teachers, educational developers, librarians, graduate students, all sorts of different people take the program and for different reasons. And it is designed to be totally flexible. So it's broken up into six modules. And so if you just want to take the one module, you can do that. So there is no start to finish linear path. You can move through the content in a way that works for you, which opens it up to different people of different interests. So we have a very diverse group. We have over 900 extant educators that we have that have participated in the program in Ontario. We also issue digital recognition in the form of a badge to people who create, who complete. It's a process to submit evidence. You submit your evidence upon completion, and that is assessed. And if it meets the standard, then you receive a badge. And so you can get a badge for any of the one modules or those cumulated into a capstone badge. So we've issued over 450 badges since we started. In terms of internet, so that's in Ontario. We count the Ontario numbers because that's our jurisdiction and that's our reporting requirements of government. But we are really interested in collaborating with anyone who's interested in adopting the Extend Program, and I put in the chat a link to the presentation of my colleague, Lindsey Woodside, that's happening right now in a parallel session that features a video from our colleagues at Otago Polytechnic and where they talk about the process that they went to to kind of import the program and adapt it for their needs in New Zealand. And so we're kind of using that as a really good model of practice that we highly recommend others follow. Because our data, while the program is open and it's out there and anyone can take it at any time, what our data suggests is that completion is very, very closely tied to facilitation and support, especially local support. And so if you're going out there and you want to do this for real at your institution, at your system, we highly recommend that you reach out to us and contact us so that we can kind of help and collaborate with you to talk about what's involved in actually making it a success. So there's a little bit of a gap there between just the content is free and openly available, and what we have learned over the years is actually the difference between people making use of it and being successful and that community that you build around them and the supports that you provide, I'm sure, as all of these people nodding, no, that's the thing that gets people through. And so that's what we're really focused on. So I recommend anybody who's interested, please go check out the Claire Good talking about what they did at Otago. And that'll provide you a really good point of reference to start with. Yeah, leave this session, everyone. Go over to that other session. No, don't do that. Don't do that. Check it out later. Quill, do you want to talk about this? This maybe may or not be relevant to your initiative. I don't know that it's as relevant to our initiative because our work is really about collecting what all these wonderful folks are doing. Sure. OK. Tanya, can you address this topic of the reach of your participants and the potential global nature of it? Sure. So I would say that the people who take this course are really looking for a very intensive, ongoing, year-long implementation. I describe it as kind of like a graduate certificate program for people who are really interested in becoming a Quill West and becoming a Sarah Cohen, becoming a Jenron Wetzler, and Lena Patterson, and so on. So it's for people who are really looking to lead in their own institution. There has to be a certification and a signature from their supervisor saying that they'll support this person in the work. It's meant to implement a six-month or longer ongoing campus plan. And Amanda is correct in that she said there has to be adaptation in the program. So where we really customize it to people is within their capstone initiatives. So the first 10 weeks is very, you have to learn this content. It's very important that you know all the basics. But once that time is over, we match you with fantastic mentors like Regina Gong and all kinds of wonderful people who come in and help you implement your own capstone and people create their own special flavor. Honestly, I would say that I thought I knew what people would do, like the traditional grant program for faculty or something like that. They've gone way beyond anything I could have ever imagined. And every time we get a new cohort, I think I've seen it all. Everybody's done it all already. And they go beyond it again. So that's where we really see the customization. Fantastic. Tal? So on our end, I think the most sort of global project we have over these three is the open policy game, because we've translated into Spanish and English. And it's been played locally here in Argentina and Peru and Cuba, and it's been played in Poland. And now it's going to be played in Spain and Slovenia. So people are using it as a way to get people that really haven't thought about open education before they sit. They play the game in their organization for a couple hours, and they kind of get a sense of technical, pedagogical, legal challenges. And it's available. It's an actual board game that you have to get out locally and cut. And it's made by game people. So it's kind of a fun way to get started in this discussion. It has gotten a good reach. Locally, I'd agree with everybody that creating the networks and establishing this community is definitely the hardest part, especially if you don't have any funding to keep it going. Sustainability is also always a challenge. But we now have 75 students in this open leadership program here in Brazil, and we'll have 150 next year and another two offerings. In our ambassadors program, it was more like what was just mentioned now, it was a one-year course. And so we have these 30 folks that are, I think, fairly knowledgeable about OER. They had to implement some training in their institutions about open educations, at least licensing and formats and discussing these things. So they've had a chance. That's great. And yeah, that's so fun that the game version of open education is very appealing. Well, look, panelists, I warned you while I was going to ask a particular question, and now I'm going to ask that question. So the question is, what are you most proud of? And I'll tell, why don't I stick with you still? And maybe you can answer that first. I think for people that know me, they know that I always say the same thing. Is I think I wouldn't use it as proud. I'll frame it in your language, because I think it's better than mine. I think I'm proud that we do so much with so little money. It's kind of a challenge to work on open education in a region and in a country that we've sort of fomented from the ground up. It wasn't an agenda item. And we've had a lot of really great successes with a very small crew in a fairly large level. And it's very hard to keep things going. We're trying now to get other people involved as much as possible, because it's very hard to keep it going. And so I guess I'm proud. And I think this is, even if you have in a position for open education, like some folks do, it's normally not a huge crew. I mean, OE Global is not a huge crew. I mean, we're not very big in any dimensions. And so the things that we do, I think, have, it's kind of hard to measure sometimes the impact that we have, but. It's true, OE Global is not a very big crew. Although I think, I don't know about not big in all any dimensions. I think over COVID, we've all been getting big in one dimension with eating more than normal. Sarah, how about you? Could you take this one? I'm not, well, I guess I'll say, I mean, I'm proud of so many things that the OEN community has done. I mean, I feel like we've grown so much over the last four or five years now. And I think that what the certificate program has made me so proud of is seeing the ways in which people really want to take action at their institutions that, you know, I mean, it's a lot to learn. Open education, I think we forget. I think we talked about this on one of our planning calls, but I think we, people that have been in this space now for a number of years, it's almost like you forget how much it is to almost wrap your head around. You know, we joked about our legal department, for example, you know, we'll be like, what is this, what is this CC stuff you guys are talking about in here? You know, that's written into all of our stuff. And, you know, it's educating so many different aspects of the institution. It's not just the individuals, it's the organizations. And those organizations are made up of so many people that just don't, are wondering what, you know, what are you talking about? What are you trying to do? And I think that I'm so proud of the people that have helped inform this program, that have taken this program, that are going to take this program. I anticipate the advances that they're going to make, not just for their students, which is nothing to laugh at, but it's also, it is about institutional transformation. It is helping organizations and people imagine another path, then closed off or just us. And I'm proud of that. I think that's really what we're doing. And we're doing it together. It's a community. It's an effort together. And I'm, I couldn't be prouder to be a part of it. Oh, that's lovely. Yeah, systemic change, I think is an interesting part of all this. Tanya? Oh, I have to just give a shout out first that one of the biggest proud moments is just that two women got on the phone and figured this out together. I'm really proud that I'm sitting outside the ice skating rink on the phone of Nicole Allen and we were dicing this through what could this be, right? Way back. I'm also super proud that it has evolved so much since that time, that we have listened to so many people who are here on this call. We take all of your advice. We take all of your input. All of the improvements that our students suggest. We have taken it all and improved it. So it's a completely different thing now because of all of your wonderful input. But the thing that makes me ball, the thing that makes me like, if I died tomorrow, I would be so okay knowing that these outstanding students like Abby Elder and Will Cross and the people who are out there doing things, they're getting promotions, they're getting new jobs, they're defining the field and they have gone way beyond what I ever imagined. Like I see those students up there and I just am so, so proud of you. So thank you for all you do. That's lovely. Jenrin. This is kind of analogous to a couple of the points already made, but I'm most proud of our facilitators. They're really incredible, very driven, intelligent community members that really kind of embrace the spirit of collaboration and sharing in open education. And I think their passion has really ignited the rest of the participants that run through our program, which is so wonderful to see. So I actually had one quick example of this just as a slight aside, since it involves Spark as well. So I guess I'll start with the Spark alum. So from my understanding, Carrie Gitz was a Spark participant going through the leadership program through Spark. And as her culminating project, I think she created an OER training for Austin Community College audiences. So Tanya, correct me if I'm wrong, but then she ended up, I think overlapping professionally with a CC participant who's now an alum, Judith Sabesta. So Judith said that because of her facilitators, spirit of collaboration and one-on-one time, he spent so much one-on-one time giving her particular attention to her work and so on, she not only had or developed more expertise and confidence in creating remixes of resources, but more than that, she realized the importance of reengaging with the community and giving back. So not just taking from the community, but offering something forward and how that's necessary. So she then adapted the original content that Carrie created for Austin Community College audiences in Texas, made it a Texas-wide resource. And not only that, but they've been so successful at this, they have new US states asking for remixes of their work, which is just so inspiring to see this kind of ripple effect. And I think our facilitators, obviously our participants are responsible for this. So yeah, I'm very grateful for all of them. That's great. Lena? You got some people very excited in the chat. Yes. Yeah, similar stuff. I mean, I think that we all kind of go back to the people who are involved in our programs and where they go and what new heights they reach. That's where you get all of your validation from, right? You're like, this is important work. So I actually pulled up a testimonial from a colleague from Conestoga College in Kitchener, Ontario. And this is what I'm most proud of. I'm just gonna read it. She says, as educators, we're always looking to hone and perfect our craft. The Ontario Extend program challenged me, frustrated me, and in the end helped me grow as an educator. I encourage every educator to work through the entire program at their own pace and come out the other side stronger in their craft. And I think what this encapsulate for me is that what we managed to do with the Extend program is create a safe space for people to cross those thresholds of their learning that are so uncomfortable and so difficult. And that's, and Alan will know, we worked at this for so long and I'm sure we still don't have it right. But this idea of what does a space look like where people are able to enter into and feel comfortable taking a risk, trying something new, doing the kind of experiential learning because it's all experiential, our program, doing the kind of experiential learning that really helps them rethink what's my job as a teacher? Like what does that mean? What does that mean to me? What does that mean to our students? And there were so many decisions along the way where we tried to kind of create that bit of a holding environment for people to be able to take those risks and it's something we're still grappling with. But this says to me, this quote that we have accomplished that for a couple of people. And I think, Sarah, you were saying, creative concepts, like there's a lot, right? It's a lot to learn and tied up in all of that for the extent program is technology as a scary thing. Like, you know, how do I even start? And how do I find myself in it? And how do I own it? And how do I create that safe space then for my students? So all of the ripple effects of that are what I'm most proud of. And these quote, these testimonials are the thing that I had in office. Maybe I should just start. Maybe this wall behind me is what it means. I should just start printing them out and putting them up because those are the kinds of things that keep us going. Nice. Quill, would you like to say something about this? Sure. So I think one of the things that I'm most proud of in this project are actually the number of people who are willing to share their vulnerabilities in terms of what they didn't know or didn't feel confident about or like were doing but weren't sure that they actually had had the right training to do because we asked people to share what are the things you think you need to know to do your position, to do your role. And a lot of people shared a lot of vulnerabilities or a lot of mistakes they had made or a lot of opportunities they'd wished they'd had for professional development. And I'm just so very thankful for the community that answered those questions but also really, really impressed with the way they wanted to add to the comments and the way they did by sending us like here's the training I built because I didn't know how to do the thing. So I'm really proud of the work that people were willing to give to this work and how open and how supportive the open community wants to be of new participants in our field. It just impresses me every time somebody sends me a new training and says, hey, would you put this in your list? Here's why I think it's valuable. That's excellent. Well, that's all very moving. And I can see we're kind of coming down the stretch in terms of the time we have although I think we could all continue talking for the rest of the day but I'm going to ask one more question of each of you and maybe I'll try to kind of integrate or weave in a couple of components to it. One is that we're in the middle of a pandemic and so I wonder how COVID has or hasn't affected your program. And in addition, I would welcome you speaking about what's next, what you have your initiatives underway, what do you see on the horizon going forward? And so if you could kind of reference perhaps the horizon going forward and perhaps how it's been affected by the COVID, I think a round of statements from each of you on that would be fantastic and I'll start with you, Quill, if you're all right with that. Sure, so I think one of the things that COVID highlighted for us is how much it's possible to get your work sidelined by emergencies and how important it is to be tenacious and optimistic and keep working towards things. I think our next steps revolve a lot around making recommendations to the community in terms of what is available, why is it good, what will it help you achieve and also finding ways to get that into the hands of people who are interested in doing open education work but don't know how to get started or do not have institutional backup in terms of being able to pay for training, right? Because that's one of the dangers of a lot of the professional development that comes with a certificate right now. It's great if you can afford it and it's really hard if you can't. So that I think is a big step for us in the work we need to do as a field. Thank you. Sarah? Such a wonderful question. Quill, I really, I loved what you said and it really made me think about and I wanna call out someone who's on the call, Amanda Coolidge at BC campus is on the call and we ended up looking at they had created, at BC campus I created an infographic about COVID and OER that we embedded in our presentations and our courses and it really kind of helped us all remember it's yet one more reason why open is the way to go. So yeah, Amanda, thank you to the whole BC campus team always. I also will say that I think for us COVID helped us reimagine what it means to get together. The OAN has always loved the time that we get together. We used to get together every summer for a week and it's really helped us reimagine what it is to be together. And I think we're learning so much from everyone who is reimagining that, including OE Global and last week's open ed conference and just the tremendous creativity and resilience that the open education community is showing during this time both in terms of that gathering but I also think in terms of our commitment to keep going. So many people were frightened away like, oh no, our faculty can't do this right now and actually we're finding it's quite the opposite faculty are banging on the doors of so many of our institutions and members saying, what was that that you told us about? The open textbook library that the OEM manages has seen record breaking numbers of people looking in the library, the growth we're seeing in the textbooks that we're adding. I mean, this is a really, I am an optimistic person I'm a sunny person if you know me at all everyone on the call who knows me knows but you know, this is an amazing time to see the way that the open education community and higher ed is rallying around this work and I'm optimistic about it. So yeah, I'll stop talking. Thank you, sir. Jenren? Yeah, so first I agree. I think this time not to diminish the tremendous suffering and challenges and trauma that people are facing but it seems like this is a time that is really ripe with opportunity for open education and open education development. We've seen more people receptive to the ideas of sharing resources. We've seen a swell of support for that initially with the onset of COVID and I expect that with COVID also with the UNESCO OER recommendation and a number of other factors this is a really pivotal moment in our kind of our trajectory for open education and our development programs in general. So I feel optimistic about that as well. I also, I keep reflecting on what's been happening this kind of as we mentioned sort of a ripple effect of sharing after getting this expertise in our different trainings and seeing how this ripple effect is just growing in our communities is really empowering and so far this has not been intentional on our parts I mean, we're certainly supporting it but it hasn't been anything that we have deliberately gone out of our way to collaborate on or to do anything more than perhaps highlight. So in terms of what I see in the future I would love, love, love to if others are interested set up some kind of informal listserv or some other way of connecting these different professional development initiatives and just sharing the opportunities or lessons learned sharing some things that are really incredible populations are working on so that we can be more intentional about this ripple effect in the future. So far it's been organic but I think we could see some really wonderful things with a little bit more intentionality. Thank you, Jenrin. We only have a couple of minutes so I'm gonna ask the remaining speakers to be brief in their remarks. Lina. Sure, Paul, thanks. So a couple of things, picking up on Sarah's point about growth and COVID had a massive impact on extend. I mean, you can imagine that suddenly a program about digital fluency becomes something that is on top of everybody's list because they need all their faculty to know how to teach and learn online. So that was huge for us. I mean, we saw 200% growth and the period that was the same as the year before. So that's been great for us. So we're really trying to figure out what is scale look like and how do we bring this opportunity to more people? How do we support it for the most success? And the things that I think are the most promising in terms of scale have to do with recognition of the program formally by institutions, hopefully around the world, but absolutely in our province. That is something I'm working on a lot to make sure that the skills that these people are gaining as they go through the program actually mean something as they carry on with their professional life into whatever college or university they wanna work at. That's a principle of relevance that I believe is really important program should have. And the other is mentorship, actually leveraging all of the incredible people that have come through the program that are just dying to share what they've done. How do we support them? What is the incentive structure look like around them to allow them to then go out and support other educators in the system? So that's another key part of scale that I'm really optimistic about. Thanks. Thank you, Nina. Tanya? I'm just gonna do a shameless plug. If you look at the chat in a recent Inside Higher Ed article and a link to the Bayview Analytics report that I just did with Jeff Seaman. And we found that OER initiatives work. And so all the things you're doing are working, just keep doing it. So in this kind of pandemic, you're asking how it specifically is with that. Jeff has got new research that shows that faculty are more receptive to digital materials than ever before in history, ever before. This is our moment, people. We are initiatives work, our training is working and anything you do to help this cause and to empower somebody else, do it. Just do whatever it takes to keep it going. Thank you, Tanya and Tao, finally. So I agree with what everybody said and I'll just highlight one thing that's been very important to us because of the pandemic is we've had to do a lot of work on showing the difference between open and free. And so we've had an onslaught of businesses coming in and showing and offering platforms and services and under the guise of open and sort of like an open washing and it's been in a massive scale globally. And so we've had to start a bunch of projects and create resources and videos and sort of wrap open education about this digital around this digital rights movement and make it an integral part of how we see open education because issues of privacy and data collection for minors and all these things have become such a big part of what we do in open education now that a lot of times this is just not a topic that we talk about. So now it's become a pillar of what we do in open education and we've developed a lot of resources to talk about this. Fantastic. Well, on behalf of all of us, the people who are here participating and listening to you all, I just wanna thank every single one of you for the effort you've put into creating and hosting and managing and growing these professional development opportunities. I think it's really had a huge impact on the field. I look forward to someday, perhaps we'll have like a graduate degree in open education where all these programs are kind of integrated. That's kind of something I can see in the horizon, perhaps not that far away actually. And so thank you all for agreeing to be part of this rather large panel and for putting up with my facilitation and thank you all to the participants. I encourage there are a ton of really great resources shared in chat. I really encourage those to be next put up the Inside OEG Connect. And so those of you that shared them, please go ahead and put those resources up inside the OEG Connect space for this particular keynote. And thank you all for everything that you're doing. Keep on going, as Tanya says. Thank you so much, everybody. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You can end the recording now. Thank you. Thank you all.