 everybody. High hardly anybody I mean. You know it's a real challenge to be the last session on such an intense few days of conferences. My name is Vivian Forsman. I'm with Royal Roads University in Victoria, British Columbia and I'm here to share with you stories. The first story I want to tell you though is that when I applied, when I sent in an abstract to this conference, I actually thought the entire conference was about sustainability slash climate action and using OER to advance this cause. That's not really what the conference is about but that's okay. But I have been saying to people, some of you may be engaged in climate activism and maybe you were on one of the climate strikes about three weeks ago in your city and a popular sign in climate strikes is there are no jobs on a dead planet. Well I just want to co-op that here. There is no OER on a dead planet. So let's work together to make sure we don't have a dead planet. On that note let's go. So my name is Vivian Forsman. I work at the resilience by design lab. I work very closely with Dr. Robin Cox who is faculty at Royal Roads and she's the director of this lab. She's a social scientist. I come out of a background of learning design, knowledge management, knowledge mobilization and educational technology and we've made stuff happen because we've got that mix of skills. I also like to tell people that how I have pivoted my career is how everybody can pivot. Imagine somebody with a background in educational technology after five years being a leader in Canada around climate change. I just pivoted and lo and behold my skills are applicable to climate change. Now it looks like there's only two people that do the stuff I do but that's not true because I've got Krista Lambert sitting right here and when you start to see some of the projects we've done Krista has been one of the stars of the people we have contracted with to do all kinds of OER stuff on my project so just because you see those two names doesn't mean that this is the only people that are involved with all the stuff I'm going to tell you about. Royal Roads University is a small public university situated in Victoria, British Columbia. It's got this iconic castle that movie makers come and use for a set. It's primarily focused on offering master's degree programs to people that are in the workforce already. So they're basically online programs and then you come in for a couple of weeks of a residency experience and so it really works well for working adults and the courses like I say are mostly delivered online so that is a basis for this. So Resilience by Design Lab we are completely focused on capacity building for climate action and so this five-year list of things that you see up here, well Krista how many of those have you worked on? You've worked on getting our OER courses into press books. You've worked on the climate action competency framework I think didn't you? No really. Well anyway you've worked on a whole bunch of these things and one of the ones that I have to draw your attention to that Krista and I did work on recently is the one at the bottom. We built a course for the Canadian federal government called Adapting to Climate Change and it's supposed to be rolled out to all 240,000 public sector employees in Canada so they understand something about climate change so we play around with lots of different opportunities in this area. So let's have some context here. What happened in the summer of 23? Is there a Brian Adams song about that? It was crazy here in Canada. We couldn't breathe. There's a terrible tragic story of a kid who had asthma who died in Kamloops this summer because he couldn't breathe because of the smoke. We've burned, we've scorched, we've ruined 5% of our forests. 200,000 people were evacuated. My daughter who lives in Kelowna and her family with three kids they bunked in at my house for two weeks. My life was chaotic in my life but of course that's what you're going to do if you're evacuated. 6,500 fires and that's just the fire stuff. There's a whole bunch of other stuff that happened. Devastating floods in Atlantic Canada, super storms charged up in Central Canada, in Ottawa. Nobody can ignore the fact that we are hit by climate impacts. So what do we do about this? Well, there's a huge need here within this community and others to build societal know-how to deal with this crisis. The crisis is not going to be just dealt with with fire guides, with long hoses. The solution to this problem is all of us need to be involved in whatever discipline, just like what I said. I used to be in educational technology. I've pivoted to doing knowledge mobilization around climate change. And this thing that Cable Green talked about yesterday is so spot on that open knowledge can help and of course he gave several examples of that. So first of all I just want to put up this thing about climate action because sometimes when I talk to people about climate action they think I'm just a climate activist out there with my sign that says there are no jobs on a dead planet. Climate action is the working part of dealing with the climate crisis. This is the stuff that we build in terms of new skills so that accountants know how to do GHG accounting accounting so that engineers know how to build a bridge so that it doesn't get blown out by the next atmospheric river. Climate action is about integrating all kinds of new skills into our society, policy, practice, all kinds of measures so that we can deal with this crisis. So it's not just me saying this. World Economic Forum had a report a couple of years ago that said two key things that is important for this community they didn't say open but they said we need short courses to upskill people and climate action knowledge and skills is one of the most pressing world needs. So it's an important business. In the Canadian context the team that I work with has just finished up this new report called Upskilling for Canada's Climate Transition. It's going to be released in November. We've made recommendations but the key one is that we need sector specific understandings and upskilling. We need all kinds of action in the post-secondary sector to build courses to train people up on their role in the climate crisis and so what I'm going to do I can't release this yet because we're still getting a new cover for the report. We really didn't like this report. There's no intersectionality in that picture and it's about a bunch of boys and hard hats and that's not really what this is about. But anyway I'm going to post this up into the connecting website when it becomes available because for those of you that are here and that aren't this is an important thing for everybody that works in public sector or post-secondary institutions and in NGOs. So more context here in Canada. The federal government published the Canada's national adaptation strategy. The final version came out in about April a few months ago and there's all kinds of stuff in this report demanding that we get our act together on sector specific adaptation knowledge and skills. Now just a quick primer for those that aren't deep into climate action. There's kind of two sides to the coin. Climate change mitigation is controlling greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change adaptation is dealing with the compounding and cascading effects of climate change that we see in the headlines every day. Floods, fires, drought, heat domes, etc, etc. In the national adaptation strategy, maybe you can't read this, they say that by 2027 it's just about 2024. That's three years from now in Canada 75% of members of professional associations engineers, planners, architects, so on will have the right skills and capacity to apply climate change adaptation tools and information. Do you think they have that today? No. Do you think I'm busy trying to make sure they do by 2027? You bet. And I invite each of you to figure out where you might want to play in this huge momentum where we need to do this upscaling. So I talk a lot about capacity building. That's kind of a government term. Workforce development, capacity building, they're kind of interchangeable terms. And capacity building really includes a range of different ways that we build knowledge through training, development, through communities of practice, through hanging out at conferences like this. We're part of a capacity building movement. So you'll hear me talk about that. So what are some of the challenges that we face in climate adaptation capacity building? Well I'm going to go through this list of six different pieces. I'm just putting that there for your quick read so that when I click through these slides you know that we're getting near the end. Okay. So the first one is it requires a whole of society approach. No kidding. Here we are, most of us are focused in the post-secondary sector, I believe, but it's not just post-secondary. It's working professionals. We need to build momentum within our K to 12 environment. We need to support populations with specific vulnerabilities and it may not be through post-secondary education or formal training. It may be more community development approaches to capacity building. So whole of society needs to understand their role. And you know the guy that was up here earlier saying what our greenhouse gas emissions were from being at the conference and he said it was equivalent to 75 million phones being plugged in or whatever, whatever that means. I went out and I said to him afterwards, why don't you say that we spewed as much greenhouse gas emissions here as if there were 40 people driving fast porches to Toronto. That might have been a better metaphor. He also did not show that we'd burned so much greenhouse gases getting on airplanes coming here. These are the things we should be talking about. Complexity. Climate change is multi-sectoral, multi-dimensional, multi-disciplinary. It's multi-everything. And so if we're going to build capacity in this game, we need everything from academic programming to applied skills. You know when you think of here we are in Edmonton, all these people that work at Fort McMurray in the bitumen mining business, those people need a reset on new skills so they can move into perhaps the now closed down renewable energy in Alberta. Yes, that's true. The Premier decided that Alberta, even though it was leading on renewable energy they closed it down because the oil patch doesn't like that. But we need applied skills training to make sure those people that are working in the fossil fuel industry can migrate into other jobs. We need competency frameworks to understand what are the skills that are required. We need all kinds of continuing professional development and communities of practice and peer networks. So there's a place for this for everybody and I'm going to get to the open part soon because the ideal world would be, every piece of this would be developed as OERs. Keeping pace. I've got to tell you I get sort of disappointed with our educational institutions at least in Canada. Just about every university and college in the country has a climate action committee. But you know what they talk about? EVs in the parking lot. Okay, so I thought post-secondary institutions' core purpose was teaching, learning and research, not parking lot maintenance. And so it's great that they're putting in EV chargers but we need to do so much more. So they're typically they're focused on changing energy consumption patterns, our universities. There's such a lag time on curriculum. You know if you were to build a new masters program like we did at Royal Roads recently called the Master of Arts in Climate Action Leadership, you need at least a two year timeline to build that maybe longer in some jurisdictions because of all the curriculum committees and external parties that have to weigh in. We need to move fast and going through these long lag times doesn't help. The structure of learning as I put up earlier that climate change is a very multi-disciplinary multi-sectoral issue and so much of our teaching and learning in our post-secondary institutions is siloed into the school of engineering or the school of this or the school of that when in fact we need a very trans-disciplinary approach to this. Accessibility. Many of the courses that I've been involved with developing we offer through continuing studies departments that cost about 500 bucks each for a four week course that can be used towards getting a microcredential but it excludes so many people that won't can't and won't pay 500 bucks and finally fit the perceived lack of fit irrelevance to needs and learning styles and I feel like that's what's happened here at this conference with only about 15 people in the room is that this is a really important topic it's not just because I'm talking about it we're all facing it and we're hardly even there's hardly anybody in the room okay well whatever it's the last day meaningful reconciliation as we've heard every day in this incredible conference bringing in indigenous ways of knowing and perspectives is absolutely critical to this and it is a fantastic opportunity to act with our reconciliation agenda and there's so much knowledge and wisdom within our indigenous communities to inform how to deal with this climate crisis and then finally not quite fine the lack of shared understanding of what's needed you know when I talk to people just on a casual basis about so what are you doing either in your profession or your neighborhood or your home about climate change people are like they're flux about what to do so that is a very universal problem what to do and you know it's easier quite honestly to do stuff in your workplace than it is to do stuff at home in your home you need to put a solar panel on the roof and maybe there's some subsidies in your neighborhood that allow you to do that but that's still a big home renovation project it's harder to do stuff at home than it is to do stuff in the workplace now of course you could be driving an EV and parking it at the university with the plug in but anyway so lack of understanding okay so what have we done to address this resilience by design lab got funding from the Canadian federal government starting in 2019 and we built all kinds of OERs we have 11 courses that were co-developed in multiple universities in British Columbia and we built all these courses on a range of different topics and they're all up in the BC campus press books platform now that's something you did Trista did a lot of background work here and they're a little bit hard to find in the BC campus directory because they're not an open textbook they're courses and so if you just search for climate you'll find them and so that's one of the key things that we've had underway I just want to I don't think Paul Stacey's in the room but I just wanted to acknowledge that the inspiration for doing everything in OER came from my good friend Paul Stacey that we've known each other for years and early in the game I think I was going for a beer with Paul saying you know he said what are you up to these days Vivian what are you up to Paul and I told him he said you gotta do OER Vivian and so that's what we've done and in addition to doing all these courses as OERs we have also developed this master of arts in climate action leadership as a complete open pedagogy masters degree so thank you to Paul Stacey I think this entire conference owes a lot to Paul Stacey okay so here's the list you can't really see it I know but there's a bunch of courses that we've developed there's two at the bottom that are waiting being turned into OERs one of them is a CCND this is at the University of British Columbia they were a little bit tepid about having their courses as CC by but anyway there's a lot of courses there they're all up in the thing you know here's the one that actually has been picked up and reused is climate change perspectives for project management because project management is universal and it's an interesting course to evaluate what the risks are in your project that could be derailed by a climate impact so that's one that's been picked up and the person that developed that course was invited to Kenya to do a workshop so some of them are being picked up but as we all know in the OER game never enough so I just invite all of you that are in the room if you want to get underway at your university with some climate programming just pull these things down fix them up for your localized requirements and have at or they're there ready for use in addition we've acted like a little bit of an online program management organization we've brought in NGOs that did not have access to a learning management system and we've hosted a whole bunch of courses at Royal Roads University using the Moodle Learning Management System and we work very closely with this group called Climate Risk Institute where their focus is on upskilling for engineers and city planners and so we have a lot of really detailed courses let me just give you an example of what this PIVC protocol is that is taught to engineers in engineering school even today the design process is very much focused on historical data for doing a design of a bridge or whatever and obviously designing to historical data doesn't make any sense engineers need to design with climate data otherwise they build a bridge that here in British Columbia will get blown out with the next atmospheric river so engineers need to learn how to design using climate data not historical data so that's one of the courses we teach so we have also worked very closely on building a micro-credential strategy so all of those courses that you've seen on those lists can be mixed up and aggregated in groups of four to earn a micro-credential and the micro-credential thing means that we've had to build assessment into these courses because that is what's required for micro-credential and an important part of this is that all of this stuff ties in with a competency framework and that is what the British Columbia Ministry of Higher Education is really keen on that if they're going to fund micro-credentials they have to be tied to a competency framework so we've already got that and also these micro-credentials can be used as if they were three credit courses within some of these master's programs at Royal Rhodes University so we're really keen to use micro-creds as a way to invite people in and test whether they feel comfortable with moving forward this kind of stuff and then go for it. I mentioned a little bit about this infrastructure resilience professional. This is the credential that Climate Risk Institute awards people that complete their courses that are designed for engineers very similar to a micro-credential with an awarded recognition. We have brought in Indigenous knowledges and perspectives into this portfolio. Janice Brooks is just such an interesting Indigenous woman who did all the development of this course and it speaks to what we heard in the keynote this morning that when we develop courses around Indigenous knowledge they should be created by Indigenous people. This one is I have a very compelling video that I don't have time to show you here but when I upload this whole thing into the Connect thing I will include the video from Janice Brooks because it gives you a sense very similar to what we heard here today of the importance of bringing Indigenous perspectives into the climate crisis and we built this competency framework. It was such a big project we interviewed I think 130 people globally that are experts in climate change adaptation to understand what are the competencies that we need to have as a foundation that turns into learning outcomes basically in a course so that what we're building in courses actually has relevance in the marketplace. So we built the first round, we launched it, we used the Ecampus Ontario Open Competency toolkit to do this and we're now rebuilding it yet again with some new context. And there's a bunch of slides here that you can't possibly read just trust me we built a competency framework. The latest thing that we're up to, thank you, is we've put through a proposal to the federal government to fund a digital platform I don't know if we're going to get it but we'll see what happens and the stuff that's going to be there is we've got a tentative partnership with the company D2L who has a new product called Course Merchant and they have offered to help us build a course and program portal that will house all courses, microcreds and academic programs and NGO training that is related to climate change and sustainability across Canada. We think this is important because people like perhaps those of you in the room you know you'd like to get on board with this stuff you know you need some new skills. It's hard to know where to start and so we're going to have this portal so that you can scroll through easily with a nice tile thing to see what's out there and what you can afford both in terms of time and money to get on board with the right skills to be part of addressing the climate crisis. There's also practitioner networks, communities of practice and we're embedding some interesting AI into the platform should we get funding to basically find experts on just about any topic. I know you can do that sort of through Google but this will have some kinds of you know thumbs up on it so that you know that the person you're talking to about boreal forest drought in northern Alberta actually knows what they're talking about. And the master of arts and climate action leadership so you know I'm just about done with my time. I put this QR code up. This is a two year program, completely open, built in WordPress built on the climate adaptation competency framework and it is an open it's CC by anybody that wants to download bits and pieces of it have at or we feel that we have an urgent problem and this knowledge needs to be shared as openly and as quickly as possible I'll just leave that up for anybody's taken a picture of the QR code okay one more person wants the QR code so I hope this QR code works it's the first time I did this did it work okay good it was like I feel like I'm real cool now I'm doing QR codes like everybody else so in summary it's a problem but it's a human problem a lot of people think it's a scientific problem when you look at climate data and you see those IPCC reports that are published a lot of people probably think this is a technical problem well the problem is us as we all flew to this conference right I know we are so hungry to get back to face to face we burned a lot of carbon folks get into this conference the climate change is a human problem and there's so many dimensions of it changing human behavior is really complicated that's what all these courses that we're developing are basically about small pieces to help change human behavior and capacity is a big project and we're doing our best to bring in multiple perspectives build partnerships across jurisdictions that's why we're working with this NGO called Climate Risk Institute and on and on it goes okay so I have exactly 8 minutes left to hear from you so thank you can you turn it off anybody have any questions or comments after my I feel like I'm on a bullet train here you know we have half hour to tell complex stories and just like okay then done so I'm giving you guys now 7 minutes to have a conversation well I think you did a great job it was exactly what I would expect from you Vivian that was fantastic my question and my the thing that I'm running into at most institutions in Ontario is I think there are two pain points you pointed to one of those that was the curriculum stuff seems to be really difficult to get anyone to give up space they see it as giving up space in their curriculum and I don't know how we get them past that the second is procurement procurement is could be massively powerful should be massively powerful and yet we still have universities building buildings that have zero thinking around climate change in them and I just don't understand how we get people past that your first point I went to a session half an hour ago at University of Saskatchewan they've created faculty fellows Ulrich is one of them whose job it is to showcase SDGs in their curriculum but Ulrich is showcasing climate action as one of them and they have a sort of a longer term plan to take the knowledge of these what about faculty fellows and take that experience out to the faculty that's really valuable it's also too slow you know it is the fall of 2023 and by the fall of 2024 in a perfect world every piece of curriculum in our post-secondary institutions should have some hook into the climate crisis and you know this is sort of sounds like you know chasing ambulances but the best time to talk about integrating climate into the curriculum is when your town is flooded you know now is the time let's get going here folks right and so the good news is over the next 12 months there will be 12 crazy crises in Canada that are climate based and every time one of those happens it's time to go to your provost and say hey don't you think we need to integrate some new skills and knowledge about this never ending crisis that we have so that's that the building thing you know just as a point of fact one of the courses we have is about procurement for climate change maybe we need to get the procurement people in every post-secondary institution to take that course I agree so anyway download it for your university localize it and have at it any other comments and questions I want to clarify that it's in the press books directory not the BC campus collection at the moment but it's in BC campus press books but in the press books directory thanks Krista I can't see this lights are crazy sorry about that hi over here on the to your right oh there you are hi Vivian thanks so much for your talk I am associate faculty at Royal Roads I teach in the mallet program instructional design a partner in help in any way what you're trying to accomplish and maybe we can talk offline about this but I went as soon as you said D2L I had a heart attack their proprietary not you know no offense to anyone at D2L their proprietary for-profit company unlike building things in Moodle or WordPress or press books I feel like once you put things into that LMS it will be hard to get them out and explain why we did that first of all we're not talking about bright space we're talking about a new product they have called course merchant that they just bought this company I agree they're a for-profit company you know why we chose them because the federal government uses course merchant and D2L and my hook to get the federal government to pay attention to this proposal is to let them know that we're going to use the same technology that they're using in house and the 245,000 employees that work for the federal government they have the Canada School of Public Service with the tiles that look like blah blah blah and what we are proposing is that they toggle out and they will find a very similar user experience using course merchant and it's really nothing more than a funding and political play to use this if I thought they're you know originally we did a prototype of a course catalog in WordPress and realized this is too complicated it's not sustainable and there may be other products that are more open in you know out there we didn't look at it we haven't been funded yet so if you've got some good ideas sure I'd be very interested to know but the real reason we said we were partnering with D2L is to get the federal government's attention because they already have a license for it. Aha no that sounds like a very sound strategy thanks for clarifying Vivian. But I agree with you we don't want stuff behind firewalls I agree. Hi I'm from Uruguay and I was looking at those open courses and wondering how much of that could be used in Uruguay or in any country in Latin America of course it would have to be translated to Spanish or Portuguese in that we could do but also I was thinking about the content how much of that goes beyond the specific case of Canada. Great question certainly the indigenous perspectives course is very localized knowledge basically bringing in indigenous knowledge that is primarily Western Canadian so that course probably not but you know for those of you who have been involved with course design and development you know the challenge the first step is just getting some structure to what it is you want to build well these courses all have at the very baseline some structure okay. The next step of course in the case of Uruguay is to translate into Spanish or Portuguese for Brazil you know I don't know put it through one of the Google tools these days and then fix it up right and then that's the whole point of open educational resources is go in and localize it but at least you've got maybe 50% of the structure so instead of it taking 8 months to 12 months to build a course maybe you can do it in 3 or 4 months because you've already got the structure. Well like all good sessions at this conference my time is up because other people want to get on the next train so thank you for your participation I'm going to post all this stuff up into connect and I'm Vivian I'm easily found on LinkedIn and I'm always game to help others try to build momentum around this urgent issue of upskilling for climate change thank you very much.