 is from the Nalsum University, so please welcome everyone. Well, good afternoon from an overcast Port Elizabeth in South Africa, my name is Gino Fransman and I'm here representing Nalsum Mandela University and my co-lead panelist is Sarah Hutton from UMass Amherst and we are so, so proud and privileged to be welcoming all of you to our session today. It's titled, Opening Up as the World Shots Down, Empowering Students to Advocate for Equitable Access and Social Justice by Becoming Open-Ed Influences. So a couple of just notes when we refer to open-ed influencers, sometimes we'll use the abbreviated form and call them BOIs. Likewise, the course is called BOI, Becoming an Open Education Influencer and that's our empowerment vehicle. So yeah, let's go. Our panelists today are a group of people who've been super perseverant and tolerant of the challenges posed by COVID as we collaborate internationally. Just quickly to say who they are and to say welcome to them as they join us. It's myself, Gino. It's Koshla Tablanj, Sarah Hutton who I've introduced now, Teresa Dooley and Mark Olson from Nelson Mandela University, Matilda Smith, Kettle Will and Annette Vadine. Welcome to all of you and I hope that we'll have a good time as much as possible during the reveal of what we've been doing under lockdown. So it's been a mad year and it's required all of us to become more than we were before and yet to do less. It was stressful and demanding and some people worked throughout this lockdown. This team is an assembly of many of those people and so I say thank you in acknowledgement for all of the effort and support. Your names are in this presentation and embedded in the course DNA. Yesterday we met across time zones on a Sunday and finalized this presentation document and we shared about the amazing experience this has been within COVID's time of crisis, really. I'm glad to say we are looking further than this and we will not just a team but an empowerment course for supporting change. Hello, good afternoon. It's lovely to have you all here. I'm Sarah Hutton, as Gino mentioned and here representing the University of Massachusetts Amherst in Western Mass on the east coast of the United States. For us, the sun is just coming up over the hills. So during today's panel discussion, our group is going to be walking you through this process of collaboration on the becoming an open education influencers or as Gino mentioned, how we commonly refer to it, the BOEI project. This work is done amidst extraordinary conditions for all of us. We will share with you the concept of the BOEI course curriculum, how we manage this project across our institutions and the many hands involved in helping to carry this work over the last several months. This work has been shared between Nelson Mandela University, the University of Massachusetts and the production house, breathed creative life into the telling of our story. Next slide, please. The becoming an open education influencer course is currently a work in progress to ensure that the content remains open and accessible to learners. We've been developing the course modules in an instance of open Moodle, our learning management system of choice. We selected open Moodle since it does not require institutional affiliation to authenticate users, just a valid Gmail address. Today we'll be sharing for the first time parts of our course with you, inviting you to meet our advocacy module. Next slide, please. So we are thinking about our shared project a bit like grocery shopping. We're now gonna be reaching out to the global community to help fill that basket. In the spirit of open and global collaboration, we wanted to share this work with you today as it is in process rather than waiting for that big reveal of the finished product at the end. Our collective work together has brought so many new perspectives, experiences and ideas, and we're seeking to add additional voices to this conversation as we continue the work. So we're welcoming questions, suggestions and perhaps some new collaborations. Next slide. So what are our project intentions? Well, we wanted to collaborate to create an empowerment vehicle that's housed online. Our intentions are that the vehicle should be available and able to be developed for further empowerment of advocates for change. Hence the courses CC by and share like license. We want to profile various stakeholder aims, the experiences, the challenges and the strategies to participate meaningfully in the collaboration and in any collaborations going forward. Mostly we want to share the potential of Bowie and get more of you to do the same. So made during lockdown, as Sarah referred to earlier on, we had a production company called Production House engage with us and help us to create some advocacy materials. This is one of them. And of course, as is on social media, I would need to click on the share again and put the computer sound on. Here we go, one more time. Hello, my name is Geno Fransman. I'm the project leader of the Open Education Influencers project here at Nelson Mandela University. Our collaborators are the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the United States. Production House, which is a local production company here in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. The Open University of the UK and us at Nelson Mandela University. Hello, I'm Sarah Hutton. I'm the head of student success and engagement at the WEB Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst. And I'm one of the project partners for becoming an Open Education Influencer. I'm Teresa Dooley and I work with the student staff at the WEB Du Bois Library in the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I'm also a graduate student studying to be a librarian. This project's so important because the learners who go through the course are going to be the future researchers and faculty who really revolutionize the existing educational model. Hello, I'm Carol Will. I'm an academic librarian and I'm also the learning commons coordinator in a very large research library on the campus of the University of Massachusetts. Hi, my name's Intemesha Monseca and I am a doctoral student in public law at the Nelson Mandela University. As a budding researcher, I've come to realize that a co-component of producing quality outcome is access to high quality resources, therefore being an open education influencer is important because I'm part of the movement to process a philosophy of eliminating barriers to access. Open Educational Resources, while offering the opportunity to have education be more accessible and affordable to students, which is incredibly important, also provides the opportunity for students to see their own voices reflected in their curriculum. What does the BOEI project mean to me? It means opportunity for those who wouldn't normally have a chance to publish, to actually create their own materials, distribute them, and also have access to the materials of others. Working on the Becoming an Open Education influencers program with colleagues from Nelson Mandela University has been such an extraordinary experience. As we navigate these challenging times, we've been able to get to know each other better, support one another, and lift each other up. It's given us a lot of hope. Many students have been writing exams at home because of COVID-19. For most of the year, they've not seen the inside of lecture halls. So what's happening to outstanding tuition fees then? That's, SRC says the fees for 2020 should be reduced. Joining me now. And technical glitches are, I think, to be expected. So, made during lockdown. So, what is social justice according to the literature and what is informing our project? Well, the research on open educational resources for development or the Royal 4D project outputs offer three main challenges in the global South. And so, what we're really looking at here is the realization that open, and we talk about open and open educational a lot, the realization that this openness isn't necessarily open to all. And that's an important distinction to make. Conrad and Prinsley's opening education, theory and practice volume, includes perspectives from multiple educators, researchers, and advocates for open who explore that critical tension between open and closed. When examining closed education, there are nuances of oppression, hegemony of power, and strict boundaries set between those who have access and those who do not. And frequently these boundaries exist between those who control the creation and dissemination of educational content and learners. And the creation of this Bowie curriculum we're seeking to empower students by not only helping them to understand the landscape of open education, but also how to advocate for its adoption in their schools, communities, and governance structures. By empowering these students and giving them the agency to facilitate that change, we're helping to bring their voices and perspectives into their own educational process and shaping that change from the inside out. Open at the margins, another one of the texts highlighted here, highlights the fact that the creation and dissemination of knowledge are impacted by access to technology, resources, and socio-political structures. Our ongoing work has brought many of these issues into focus, particularly with the approach to creating open content in the academy, the prestige economy, and the pressures placed on educators to focus their scholarly energies in specific areas at the university's behest. By doing the groundwork with university students to advocate for open now as they're coming up through their academic process, they can carry these concepts into their work and move through to become educators and hopefully agitators within these structures. As Teresa was mentioning in the video that Gino just played for us, the students that we're working with now are our future researchers, our future faculty, and so we're really looking to lay that groundwork to deconstruct a lot of the traditional, you know, economies of power in the knowledge creation process. Next slide, please. So, what does equitable access mean? Well, in the global south, OER, as it responds to educational challenges, according to Rother D, has the potential to improve the quality of education in three ways. Mainly by exploring how OER can improve the quality of learning materials, how OER can improve the quality of teaching practice, and how OER can improve student outcomes. We acknowledge that in the global north, the focus is predominantly on affordability. So, what was our strategy as the opening of this year from Nelson Mandela University? Well, we wanted to create an empowerment vehicle in support of these aims so that we could expand the potential and benefits of open and OER, most especially via student advocacy. So, what was the content development process? Because, of course, it was quite a process. Well, for the first couple of years, I led a team of student advocates here, and we wanted to create a course content for Bowie as an open education for a better world project initiative. This was after years of trying to advocate for open in the higher education landscape in South Africa, and finding that with a transient student cohort, the people that had been empowered by doing were very often exiting the system, and in that gap, there was an opportunity to create something that would help to empower additional human capital. So, we kicked off the program at Nelson Mandela University, and we shared our progress at OER Global in the fall or autumn of 2019, where the first connection with the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, occurred in Milan at OER Global last year where Sarah and I met. Over to you, Sarah. So, yes, I remember that rainy, that rainy day at a picnic table. So, during that conference, I had gone to Gino's presentation with the OES and talking about the program that they had been working on for so long, and learning about what had already been established at Nelson Mandela University, we were looking at developing a workflow process to help us collaborate between those two universities. And so, like Gino said, there are a lot of people, and there's so much content involved, so much content. And so, when we started collaborating together, we outlined this step-by-step process to help us communicate with one another on project status, content ownership, and how the module builds would work in Moodle. You can see here below on this slide, that the process started out with developing that framework for each module. There are six total. And the team at UMA would create that, would work on creating that module manual, which is a standalone handbook that can be used to make the content accessible outside of an MMS. That manual then get passed along to me for in-depth review, development of assessment and learning checks, and then the build in Moodle begins with our system engineer, Koshla. The content developed in Moodle would then get reviewed twice, thrice, and then again, to ensure that all of that content, the technological components, like the assessment logic and portfolio, compiling properly, the e-portfolio compiling properly, and whatnot were functioning. So each one of the module content manuals we've developed pulled together recommended readings from colleagues, students, and myriad open sources, like the OER Commons, Open University, and OpenStacks. We shared all of the working documents in Google Drive, embedding common learning reviews of particular sections or areas requiring the development of assessment components. So the next slide that Gina will be talking about simplifies that collaborative review process a bit. Yes. So as far as the content development process, well, it was quite rigorous and comprehensive. And for this, we also want to just acknowledge the work that Ann-Mart Olsen did in taking what had been curated across the span of, I think, like two years between myself and the various cohort of open-ed influences who were at Mandela Uni. And turned them into module templates. Those are also on the Google Drive and are constantly and consistently being reviewed, updated, and challenged in terms of, does it do what we want them to do? If we look at the module content, this is the diagram that Sarah just referred to. This is updated as of yesterday, and you will see that each one of the six individual modules follows the same process for standardization and also so that we can consistently keep track of what's happening in each individual iteration. Today, we are pleased to be able to share a completed advocacy course. So, when we were first learning about the Bowie program, my immediate thought was that this curriculum would be a great fit for integrating into our peer leaders program in the WEB Du Bois Library, UMass. This group of around 20 to 30 student leaders works in the Learning Commons, a hub of academic support for students, and also serving members of the public since we're a land-grant institution. So, on this panel, and you were introduced to a couple of them earlier in the video, we have Carol Will, our Learning Commons coordinator, Theresa Dooley, our student training lead in the team of Learning Commons supervisors, and Annette Vadnez, Student Success and Outreach Librarian. These three all support an extensive learning and leadership opportunity for our students, helping them to hone research skills, engage with the public, and face some really tricky technological quandaries. So, these students that I'm referring to in this peer leadership program are really the face of the library. They support basic research inquiries, check out materials or patrons, help them navigate the libraries, and provide technology support. They have a lot of interaction with their campus community, and I thought, hey, wouldn't it be amazing to have the Bowie program integrated into their training, and therefore their daily work so they could help share those practices with our patrons, as well as their fellow students as they move through their classes and student communities. Well, then COVID happened. Our libraries have not been operating normally since March 14th of this year. We haven't had any student employees in the Learning Commons since that time. Honestly, it's kind of been breaking our hearts. So our plan to start with the Learning Commons peer leaders and then engage student leadership at the state level got shifted around a bit. So there are three other student groups not specific to the libraries that have been engaged as a part of our open advocacy movement. Next slide, please. So we have worked with our Student Government Association, the SGA, on our campus for the past few years, collaborating on how to educate students on open education, how to make textbooks more accessible to the libraries. These students on the SGA also serve multiple curriculum councils and Faculty Senate working committees who work on many different projects in support of student success on our campus. Next slide, please. So our SGA student members are also engaged in the work of the Massachusetts Student Chapter of Mass Perg. So Mass Perg is the local chapter of U.S. Perg, which stands, the Perg part stands for Public Interest. It is a citizen-funded national organization operating over 47 of our states in the U.S. that advocates on behalf of public interest acting on behalf of the common good. On the local level, one of the main campaigns of the Mass Perg chapter to make textbooks more affordable. So far we have been working with students in this local chapter who have crossover with our SGA student members to fly around local campuses, educating student peers on OER. The mission of our Mass Perg, U Mass, and our student chapters to work with professional staff at colleges and universities. So that's our university. We're also part of a five college consortium in the Pioneer Valley area in Western Mass. And their work is to make sure that their peers have those skills and the access and opportunities for training that they need to create more sustainable educational future for themselves and all of their peers. Next slide, please. So the state of Massachusetts formed a statewide OER advisory council which made specific recommendations on the adoption of OER at that statewide level in 2019. This statewide OER advisory council working group which is co-chaired by our colleague, Marilyn Billings and Susan Tajen, coordinator of instructional technology at Northern Essex Community College, led a team of 21 folks from the University of Massachusetts system, state universities, and community colleges to study and make recommendations to address a growing legislative interest in lowering the cost of educational resources, issues of achieving equity for underserved low income and first generation students, and the enhancement of instructional effectiveness. So the open education resources strategic initiative was one of those resulting recommendations. As a part of the initiative, a new group of student advocates has been established to focus solely on the integration of OER across the state. Next slide, please. We've recently connected with the student advisory council bringing the BOE program and content into their awareness, sharing our intent to not only have students take the course modules, but also eventually contribute to creating content as a part of the course has them very excited. We're meeting in the next few weeks to discuss how to implement this content. It would have been earlier, but you know, pandemic. So our intended process has shifted quite a bit but also accelerated some of our collaborations and it's been a really bumpy ride at our university over the past several months, but we're continuing our work and to make these connections at the state level. Onto Gino. Well, speaking about collaborations and keeping things going, just a quick image to show that we've been working throughout this lockdown and it's been an incredible experience. As a rather infamous individual recently said, COVID, COVID, COVID, all you hear about is COVID, COVID, COVID. This pandemic extended our timeline but also provided benefits to the collaborative as well as helping us to build amazing relationships. A challenge that we had and we have today as well. Well, the electricity supply in South Africa is tricky and it really means that we've been resilient and tolerant of working times and work strengths at odd hours over weekends and on public holidays. Regardless, the intention and the ambition has always remained to build an empowerment vehicle. And remote work, internet and technical resource access has been illustrated as a challenge and it's a challenge of learning and teaching globally. Time zones, so we worked asynchronously, we worked synchronously. It means that we wait for responses sometimes eight hours noting that it's a challenge to be awake at 3 a.m. on her side and be engaging with me early in the morning. So it's lots and lots of appreciation and acknowledgement of these sorts of just, I'd say if it's that we're beyond the ordinary. So let's have a look at Bowie as is built out on Moodle right now. This is the landing page for Bowie. The next slide is the start of the advocacy module and I'd just like to actually read into the record for all of us that this course is designed to help individuals who are passionate about open educational resources or OER, helping them to become more effective at influencing decision makers and importantly to take direct action to affect change in education systems. Throughout this course you will learn about what open education resources are, how to search for and effectively locate OER and how to create your own open content applying creative comments licenses. This is a fully online learner self-paced and self-guided course. This course is designed to help individuals who work for the course and each module should take about three hours to complete. There are six modules that make up the full course. These are open Ubuntu, which is an African philosophy of sharing. I am because we are and it ties in beautifully with the aims of the open community. We are also working on a new course that we are going to be using or introducing today. Facilitation, influencing and then locating everything within a larger global aim and ambition to sustainable development goals. Over to you, Matilda. Good day. My name is Matilda Smith. I'm the director of the law clinic at Nelson Mandela University. I'm the director of the law clinic at Nelson Mandela University. I have taken the Bowie module on advocacy and it takes a number of boxes for me. It has made learning about advocacy easy and inspiring and learning about open educational resources fun and a pleasure. It models what it teaches advocacy. And advocacy is one of the same tools of any legal practitioner. It doesn't matter what your field of practice or study is. Thus, I'm going to suggest to all our law students that they do it and advocate to our course convener that he includes it in our legal practice course. I'm going to make it a requirement that all our candidate legal practitioners take the module. And I'm also thinking about how I can make it a pre-qualification for aspirin candidate legal practitioners, those that would like to work with us and will be applying for jobs with us. So if you care about anything, even things such as funding your studies or applying for a job, then I suggest that you take the becoming an open-ed influencer advocacy module and change the world. Thanks. Thank you, Matilda. So given everything that has transpired in all of the work, all of this work that we've done, we're continuing to look forward and thinking about what comes next. First and foremost, we really need to meet. We begin to know each other online, share lives, pictures of our pets, having my children burst into my office. I'm surprised. I am surprised. I have a four and a six year old. I can hear them running around downstairs. But yeah, everybody's met them. And over this time, we've really bonded over shared struggles dealing with the impacts of this global pandemic and crisis. But we've also shared a lot of joys. And we like to get together in person. So we've been working continuously, working toward these very ambitious goals, despite everything that we've all been navigating, because we're carried a shared passion for this project. We want to continue the work and broaden this collaboration. We're hoping to bring this program to an international conference. Of course, after successful vaccines have been introduced and expand the reach of the program, we're looking forward to continuing to share this work and are eager to hear from the open ed community on how we can continue to shape the curriculum. So with that, I now turn it over to Gino to start engaging you in these conversations. Thanks, Sarah. So we have, it looks like 25, some odd minutes to engage with some of the questions that have been posed in the chat. I haven't been able to look at them myself. So and I hope that you will help to facilitate those questions for us. As we do this, I'd like to put out two guiding thoughts and hopefully get the community's inputs to these. Noting that this is a recorded session and that people would be engaging with this resource ahead without us being present. So our contact details are on the final slide. And we hope that you'd be able to give us some inputs for firstly, what are your thoughts about what we've just shared? And then secondly, how can you imagine using Bowie in your situation at your institution to improve your environment or just to occupy some space wherever you find yourself? Let's go. Let's have this conversation. Thank you very much, Gino, Sarah and the team. Really well done. I'm just going to step in first just to encourage some movements as well. There have been some questions and comments already shared, some really congratulatory remarks as well. And I think that if you want to ask the questions or have reactions to those questions, feel free to also unmute yourself. I think, Jenny, you would like to say a few words too and just address directly the panelist. I think that from my side, I just want to say congratulations to all of you. I think that your approach to the content development is really the embodiment of what open education is or should be about. So it's the co-creational values through that kind of collaboration that you have been engaging in. And I'm not going to respond specifically to this to a second question, but I would be interested in knowing from your side, what were the some of the highlights from this collaboration, this cross-cultural cross-country collaboration? Or what were some of the main challenges and how you dealt with that? I'll take a first highlight. I think the collaborative being able to reach out internationally and find willing spaces, comforting spaces, accommodating people who shared a similar goal. And the goal has always been our primary sort of motivation. And that's been that we want to help. We want to help people. We want to help situations. We want to help develop competent professionals out there. And we also want to just push open into the space that is still largely closed for so many of us and for so many students out there. Thank you very much, Gino. Any other reactions from other panelists? I think for me what has been fantastic about the collaboration is that across the North-South divide we have found commonality in values, in vision, and in what the objectives are. And for me that has definitely been a highlight. Thank you, Matilda. Sarah? I echo the comments made by both Gino and Matilda. It's been a really incredible experience getting to know everyone and to find those commonalities. And to share, discover that we have this shared passion for moving the open education movement forward across our institutions. And meeting and talking with students at Nelson Mandela Uni. I mean, it's unfortunate. And then that's one of the part of one of the challenges is that we haven't had our group of students to reciprocate in those conversations as it we've been navigating these very complex economic issues at our own institution. But because of these relationships that we've been developing, we have a lot of hope that that is coming. That's something to look forward to. And especially for the OEs and our students in the libraries and in, you know, Masberg and the Department of Higher Ed Student Advisor Council having these students all get together and have these conversations and experience that, you know, have that opportunity to develop these types of relationships is really, it's very exciting to think about. I would invite any one of my three colleagues from UMass also to share their experience over the past several months. Well, this is Carol. I have been increasingly more excited about this project. I will admit in the beginning I was quite new to OER. I've been exposed to it. We do have a program at UMass that I am exposed to. However, this involvement internationally has been just so incredibly thrilling for me as I learn because I am learning as I go. What has excited me so much is getting me out of my own kind of space and thinking about the world and meeting people from a place that I probably wouldn't think that it's muted. Yeah. Carol, would you please unmute yourself? I had my bar down. Okay, so I'll quickly say what I was saying is how I am new to OER, how exciting it has been for me to learn because in this project, as pointed out, you do not have to have special skills because there are times I've felt, oh my goodness, you know, I really don't know enough. But the point is that you are learning as you're collaborating, you're learning. And one of my favorite parts has been meeting people from around the world. And what I was saying when I was muted is how exciting it is to me to get out of my own little world because I've been in my own little world, especially during the pandemic and be able to connect to people in a place that I might never have connected to. And I would love to come visit Gino and the crew in South Africa someday. Got it. Thank you very much. Any other reactions? I'll add, I think Carol touched on something that was actually very helpful was that we had a stand at Thursday afternoon meeting and that was something that I started looking forward to like that engagement. It was almost far social. For me, it was the end of the day we were wrapping up. And in addition to the fact that that was almost the motivation to work, get it done, that was your deadline. But you also had that accountability to people that you don't know but are also feeding you personally. So it's a professional-personals relationship that was phenomenal. And actually seeing the different strengths because all of us have different strengths. So I might, I will learn curriculum development. Gino is our open education guru and everyone contributed. Sorry, I'm not going to go through everyone. Everyone contributed in a special way, but in real time you could actually see it happen. And that was phenomenal. It was that relationship was amazing to see. Can I possibly invite Koshila to say something? Because Koshila came on as we started just putting the module outlines there and then we saw a gap for a learning developer who would be able to translate what we had put in the module, which is just copious amounts of information into something that was coherent, that was able to be engaged with and that wouldn't turn someone who was trying to access this course or these modules off simply by overwhelming them. And I think that we need to acknowledge that Koshila has done an extraordinary job. Koshila, over to you. Thank you, Gino. I'm going to go back a bit. So for me when I came in, I took this project on almost as a personal development because I had never developed an online course. I've been working in IT, more specifically in development for many years and recently I veered into the learning space and we got into lockdown and I was crazy. I was watching stats and graphs and charts and this project is actually, for me, it was a bit of sanity in all the madness. So in the process, it kept me, my focus away from what was happening around me and just I got to speak to people. I was actually telling Gino the other day that he's probably the one person I've had most contact with over the last few months, which I would never have had. And just the sometimes nonsense we talk takes away the whole madness around everything. So the project was sanity and a bit of insanity. And then the other thing at the beginning of lockdown, I sat down and I thought to myself, we always complain about not having time to do stuff and not wanting to venture into anything different. And I said, if anybody comes out of lockdown and out of this pandemic and not have learned a new skill, then they're not trainable. So I sat down and I thought, okay, I want to teach myself a bit of learning experience design. And this was the perfect opportunity I had the best team to work with. So they had started all this groundwork. And I think that made it easier to develop because I wasn't involved in the content. And when I looked at the content for the first time, I looked at it with a clean perspective. I didn't know where the history, I just then followed sequentially on how it would logically make sense. So that's just a bit about me. And then the thing I mentioned yesterday in, I'm not an expert now, but I've been through many of these modules many times. And when I hear that drum beat going with the introduction, I can actually see Gino bouncing in his chair. Like this. Yeah, like that. So the one thing that stood out most for me was the relationships. And the Gino's opening slide, let me go back there, with reaching your full potential is all about relationships. And that I think is the success of this project. Like that's my rambling. Thank you very much. If you don't mind, I would actually like to ask Jenny Heyman to unmute herself and have a reaction, especially in relation to the second question that was posed on your slide, but she also had additional comment or question in the chat window. Jenny, sorry for putting you on the spot, but it seems like you would like to speak. Can I stop sharing my screen for now so that we can see one another? Okay. Okay. Hi, everyone. Hello, everyone. Hi, Gino. It's Jenny. It's so nice to see you too. I'm not going to turn my camera on because it's early and I haven't finished my coffee. So I had a couple of questions. Gino, I was curious to know if you are focusing on or have gone in a special way to involve teacher in service teacher candidates, those who are taking your education programs at Nelson Mandela because the use of OER and their primary and secondary practice and especially sharing among each other might have a lot of value. I agree. So the spaces that we've sort of tried to sort of infuse our intentions and ambitions because let's just remember that it's not 100% complete and until it's 100% complete, we're not having people engage with it in order to learn from it yet. However, what we have in the pipeline here at Mandela Uni is that our first year experience students will all be taking the course in its entirety. We have how-to buddies who are student facilitators who will be sort of the guides for incoming students, but they also tend to be students who are at postgraduate level or further along in their academic journey. So we want to empower them so that they can empower others. It will definitely be a focus for us to reach out to our education faculty and to see that teachers in training are given access to the course. I think that this is something that Seira touched on earlier as well. We need students to be the advocates here. So the more people that we can expose to Bowie and get them to complete it and earn those badges which we are in the process of setting up still. These all help to take a checkbox of competences, of abilities, of awareness, of being able to do things I think more effectively, more efficiently, and to actually land on successful spaces and outcomes when doing so. So yes, I appreciate your sort of motivation for us to include teachers in training. It's a definite important space for us to try and influence. Thanks, Cheney. Thank you, Gina. I had a second question if I can around the quality assurance process. So it looks quite rigorous, which is super exciting. What is the student reaction for that, right? It looks like, as a student, if I look at that, I'm like, oh, that's a lot of work. Maybe I don't want to do that. So how are the students reacting? Are they reacting positively to the idea that the finished product will be very high quality? I think I can just speak for two of our current influencers here at Mandela University. So they are Kelly Liberty and Blungisi and Flongo, and they are somewhere in the attendee list. Kelly and Blungisi had absolutely no idea about Open before joining this project. They were recruited into a situation where I just wanted to get students involved. And the frustration had been that previous cohorts of students had left the academic journey. So for the last month or two, Kelly's been co-writing some of the transitions, some of the summaries, some of the content. So after a year and a half of being involved in this project, Kelly is an influencer, but she's an open practitioner. And likewise with Blungisi, Blungisi just started at the beginning of this year and was thrown into the deep end when lockdown occurred and had to learn through doing. And this is literally what this project is all about, empowering student advocacy through doing, not just through leaving something on a page where it sits and stagnates, it's action through advocacy. So I think that to paraphrase what they've said before, and I see Kelly's here at the bottom. Kelly, you can turn your video on if you wish. To just paraphrase what they've said before, it was a baptism by fire and yet now they've sort of developed an armor and are able to facilitate others into the open community. Seder, do you have something to add perhaps? Yeah. I mean, I think for both of Jenny's questions and all ties together, as I just popped into chat there, we've been so appreciative for the contributions of our OEs because they're really showing what the future and trajectory of this program is all about is that you have students move through the content with the intent to have them become contributors. And that's the really exciting part about this because they're helping to shape their own educational process, which is I feel like fundamentally the biggest piece of this. And when thinking about tying back to the Jenny's previous question about involving pre and in service K-12 educators, I mean, that's another wonderful part about this is getting these pre-service K-12 educators involved in moving through this content and then also contributing to it, you can then start infusing a focus on open from kindergarten up. I mean, have it really start the ground work very early on. And for us at UMass, we work very closely with our College of Education. And I am in the College of Ed as a doctoral student, but also work with many of the ed tech folks who do the K-12 teaching and learning. And as a part of us focusing on supporting the undergraduate experience and students moving through their first years of college, we work a lot in looking at that pipeline too of development and what are students coming in here with and being able to have conversations with these K-12 educators about, this is where we're looking to go as students come here. And can we work together to build that curriculum for the pipeline? But we offer that opportunity and I'm so excited to introduce that. We've been laying the groundwork with our College of Ed and other collaborative courses that we've helped to develop with a focus on open. And so I feel like it's like they're primed, like we're ready to really just kind of make this, I want to say blow up in a good way. I see that there are some questions there in the chat window. And I'd really like to get to some of them. I see, I'm just going to watch on my screen at the moment. And I see Paula says that there are a lot of key soft skills included in this process and students are learning them by doing. Is there any official recognition of these as additional learning outcomes for them? Well, not at the moment. I think at the moment, if we go into the facilitation module, for example, facilitation would be about, how are you communicating? Five minutes, I see that. How are we communicating? How are we trying to influence in various spaces? That means in person as well as online. So those soft skills are promoted, they are motivated for you will need to engage with various platforms in the facilitation module in order to facilitate the message of open. So while they're not quite acknowledged individually as a set of maybe soft skills, they are definitely engaged and acknowledged in some regard, I think. Andy is asking if we can say more about how openness is represented or developed in the sixth module on SDGs. From my side, a quick response to that would be, well, it locates open as not just something in education, it locates open as a route to reaching to achieving some of the goals of the SDGs. I think that that's one of the shortcomings that in sort of higher education and that open is just consistently promoted for higher education. That's what we are also trying to sort of challenge in Bowie is that open should be used as a tool for empowerment and empowerment can be for any of the SDGs to achieve those intentions, those ambitions, those global goals. I'll hand over to someone else to continue. If I may just ask a very quick question. So if the participants here would like to get involved and provide feedback on the content itself, for instance, what would be the opportunity to do so? How can they do that? I think that maybe I should share my final screen before our time is complete so that you'll get access and see how to contact us. So contact myself, contact Seder, the email addresses are included here. Don't visit our website. Look for us on Twitter, find us on YouTube. You'll notice our Twitter handle is open influencers and not open influencers, shortening of the name there for tweets sake. But please reach out to us. Tell us what you think about what we're trying to do, what we have done, what we should maybe try and do in future. Also speak to us about how you'd like to start using Bowie in your space. This is literally why we are here. We want to expand the reach of this course, not just keep it for ourselves. It's why it's open. It's why it has a CC by share like license. The aim of Bowie is to use in your spaces. So please do reach out and help us to help others. Great. Thank you very much. I think that it's exhausted our time perfectly on point. So I would like to take this