 Thank you all for coming. This is the final session for day two of Open Education Global 22. Welcome. My name is Gino Fransman. As you can see, I'm from Nelson Mandela University, which is in South Africa. And I'm thrilled to be here representing the Open Education Influencers, or as we call them, OEs. Let's go. So we have a team of Open-Ed Influencers at Nelson Mandela University. I'm the project leader, and I'm speaking about the last five years of the project's existence and where we began, just basic visuals, and then where we are now, where I get to go into some more detail about what we've been doing, but more especially what we want to be doing. Our team for 2022 is Miss Nikki and Ray Paine, and I know they're watching in South Africa in our hometown of Khebecha. Yes, it's a sand word with a big click. Hi, Nikki. Dr. Philip Kitching, Miss Hannah Toblanche, and Lindsay Young. Hi, guys. We are funded by the Siapumalela program. Siapumalela means we succeed, and it is funded by the Kresge Foundation. And thank you, thank you, thank you. We could not do this without your generous support. So before we continue, you might look next to you on some of these seats and see something from Nelson Mandela University. We have a small social media campaign going where we'd like to amplify the work we've been doing by sharing some branded content with you. You might see a cap, you might see a lanyard, you might see a set of headphones, but there are also several of those little pamphlets which speak about the OTF, which is the Open Textbook Fellowship. What we want you to do, find one of these items, okay? Like I said, there's the different items. There's also Mandela bags. You can take them shopping out wherever you are. Take a selfie with the item, right? Wherever. If you don't feel comfortable putting your face there, put a cap on a statue. I mean, it's France. Just your original selfie to Twitter. Use the tags Mandela Uni at Mandela Uni. It will tag the university. We are trying to amplify Open in a university that has yet to embrace the cause. Help us, okay? Our hashtag is Open at Influencers on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. And of course, OE Global22, because we want to win something here. The best prize and properly posted selfie wins an autographed copy of a new publication of Nelson Mandela's affectionately known as Madiba's Quotes and Anecdotes. We'll announce the prize winner tomorrow, not after the conference, because most of you will have left halfway through. We know. These are some of the items. Look out for them. I've also placed them all around the conference venue. If you find it, think about it like an Easter egg hunt without Easter or eggs. You found one. You'll find it. Okay. Now you know what you're looking for. This is Nikki. That's Lindsey. Hey, guys, once again. You can find us on these social media platforms again. These are our tags. So what are OEs? Open at Influencers or OEs, and you can say that out loud, are ambassadors for open who increase awareness of open education resources and open education practices. OEs facilitate the adoption, creation, and licensing of OER. Open at Influencers energetically advocate for the use of open textbooks across purpose. So it doesn't matter what you're doing. Why can't we make a free open textbook? OEs doesn't matter what the discipline is. And schools, primary, secondary, high school, university. In 2022, OEs facilitate the creation of open textbooks as they do all of this. So we situate ourselves firmly within the UNESCO Sustainable Development Goals. I'm the 2022 hub coordinator for open education for a better world. So we are also busy helping others across the continent engage with open, but even more so generate real, meaningful content for their respective spaces for the benefit of open but of the development of our societies in the global south. We have six modules in the Becoming an Open Education Influencer course, which is free and online on the Engage.mandala platform. My mentor in open education for a better world, Dr. Robert Farrow from the Open Education, I mean the Open University UK, and the GOGN group is right there. And once again, Rob, thank you so much. This would not have been possible without you. I'll tell you more about what Bowie has been doing. So we've got six modules. We are in the global south. Have you heard of Ubuntu? Ubuntu is a philosophy of sharing. It's an African philosophy. Which means I am because we are. I mean, doesn't that say open? So Ubuntu second module is open. Then we've got advocacy. How are we helping others to open? We need to bring this message to them. So then we need to facilitate the message and how it gets engaged with. So that's online, but it's also face to face. COVID has made online such a big pressing need. So we help you to use these platforms to do so to spread the message. Of course, influencing. We have this word in social media that's influencers. Lots of us look at it as a negative. Let's use open to positively use that term. As a student, you need to influence a lecturer and educator who often looks at you as a student. So how dare you tell me about open? We give you some tools to do so. We look at the sustainable development goals because all of this happens because we are in a big, big world and everything is interconnected. We have steps for enrolling into the Bowie course. Again, like I said, engage.mandala.ac.za, we are so proud because we've been able to help realize the ideals, the intentions, the ambitions of creating an open campus which is not restricted by being a registered student at the institution. Very few of our learning and teaching resources are available in this manner. So we are really proud about this. You can look at this. This will be on the OEG Connect site as a resource for you to consult and share. This is when you get on our learning management system, which is Moodle, these Martin Dougie almost here, Moodle is in the house. So have a chat with him, find out what the innovations are that Moodle has been developing to help us open up education even more. These are the teams from 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021. You'll see some individuals who've been so passionate and so engaged with the cause of open education, and we've got so much content that we've developed in order for them to share the message of how open impacts them and is of benefit in their respective spaces and disciplines and communities. In 2022, our OEs are Lindsay Young, who's a law student at Mandela Uni, and Ms. Hannah Toblonge, who's an aspirant music therapist. Yeah. So we don't have much OEs, I mean open education resources in the performing arts. We are busy developing some. So I put out the call this morning on Twitter, and I said, if you know about anything in the performing arts that we can curate and put into our open and the arts open textbook, please reach out, help us, help us develop. So in 2021, we had some plans in 2022. We are following with those plans. We are building on a mission. Cia and Proctor was here. We are all so inspired by her journey into space. It doesn't just mean space. It means opening up the potential for development in our spaces, in our places, right? So we've got Bowie deployment and evaluation. We've got the creation of content and opportunities for sharing that content. But we've also just got sharing. And again, open education, how do we want to share? The last year, one of the Goji in fellows and a few of us collaborated on a children's storybook, which spread the values of open education. It was called Together. And Dr. Krissy Naranasi and a few of us were really passionate about this. And it was really one of the ways that we got through COVID by trying to do something that was going to reach an entirely new audience. So some of you have children. Some of you have students who are children. Go and look at Together. We also had an open education colloquium, the third in the series at Mandela Uni. The themes here were three Ds. Disrupt, decolonize, but also develop. Don't just break things down and leave it in tatters. No, we want to bold up again and use Open. The colloquium was hosted by Ventriloquist, comedian, and MA social anthropologist, Conrad Koch. And his satirical puppet, Chester Missing, Chester Missing, is hilarious. Watch this video. Click on this link and watch this video. So in the series, the colloquium, what do we have? We had an intro to the OEs. We had our deputy vice chancellor speaking about the immediate sort of ambitions about creating Open at the university in a place where everything is largely closed. We looked at Open policy and acknowledging Open efforts, and I say thank you to Leo and to Javier for making a wonderful contribution to what we did. Mitja Hermol from Slovenia, from Open Education for a Better World, helped us to understand the potential of artificial intelligence in Open Education as well. You can see there's a lot more. Digital Open textbooks for development from UCT, they presented in the session just before this. They helped us along. I spoke about capacity development. It's in the title of the session. So what did we do? We have how-to buddies who are responsible for inducting all of the first-year students each year into the university. You come into a new environment and you just lost because this place is so big. So we looked at professional development opportunities for the how-to buddies, and Bowie was one of those vehicles. They did the six modules, and then they were responsible for about 10,000 new students coming in with the learnings and with the knowledge that they then gained from engaging with Bowie. The Mandala Legal Aid Clinic staff engaged with people from the communities every single day. They also did Bowie and were able to help them understand about the potential of opening up access to information. It really does open up spaces. Staff in the academic literacy writing centre were able to look at using open resources for academic writing support. So all of a sudden, when you leave the university, you still have access to these support materials. And I think that that's such a big thing because normally registration and deregistration means access or no access, and that shouldn't be. You paid for this. Why are you taking it away? Human rights. So members of the Bowie team then presented in several local and international events. And what happened? We got such a lot of recognition, and we are so proud of this. We got a few awards at Bowie Global. I managed to win an award at Bowie Global. Thanks, Bowie Global. I like the award. The trophy is lovely. It lights up at night. It looks so spectacular. Community development in 2022, and that's where we are now, okay? So what are we doing? We have a new cohort of Bowies. I showed you Lindsay. I showed you Hannah. The recruitment, the empowerment. We had an induction, and now we are in the action stage. So we have an open textbook fellowship which launches the pilot stage two in 2022. And thank you to the UCT.4D team for 30 minutes after I arrived at the hotel on Tuesday. We had our first support workshop for our new authors. So if that doesn't say commitment after 32 hours of travel, and then still being recorded, I mean, what does? So this is what one of the flyers for the open textbook fellowship looks like. Our university is driven by what is termed an academic reference, a humanizing pedagogy. Our students are not just vessels that we're trying to fold. No. They are brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, family. But they are also professionals in training. They are potential walking, sitting, breathing. So what do we want to do? We want to help them. I want to just leave this and go to a piece of something that we created for you to speak about one of our open textbooks. This is Ms. Nikki Ann Raepen, and she's speaking about Open in the Arts. Hello. My name is Juno Fransman. I'm the project leader of the Open Education Influencers Project here at Nelson Mandela University in Quebec, South Africa. Hi there. My name is Nikki Ann Raepen, and I am an open textbook author in open education and performing arts. I am based in South Africa. My country has a troubled past, with many looking for opportunities for educational empowerment. I am Hanitsa Blanche, a third-year Bachelor of Music student studying at Nelson Mandela University and aspiring to become a music therapist. Recently, I also finished the Becoming an Open Education Influencer course, also known as BOE. This has rooted me in the values of openly accessible education. We will be crafting a series of introductory courses to the performing arts genre as mentioned. We look forward to bringing you this openly accessible resource. As a student, I know what a financial burden purchasing a textbook can be, and there is often much reluctancy towards buying them. The growth of open resources could very well bridge a gap between students who cannot afford to buy textbooks, but it could also spark a desire in many to learn and engage with these open materials. Being able to share training in the performing arts under open education resources platform is of great value to me. I'm very passionate about the arts and have witnessed the improvement and empowerment of youth, especially through this training. I've seen the development of self-esteem, self-discipline, confidence, dawn skills, acting and presentation skills, and I've seen people to go on to earn incomes from this training too. My hope is to see open resources used more extensively in music and the arts. And to grow a culture where more creatives are developing open resources. A culture of Ubuntu, which means humanity and compassion towards each other. I believe that music is about expressing yourself and sharing that beauty with others. And what better way than to share our knowledge and techniques to educate others on open platforms. Education has the power to equalize, to level the playing ground for a diversity of backgrounds. So, I believe in the transformational power of open education resources to change the lives of people who are willing to take action. The late Mr. Nelson Mandela, former president of our country, once said that education is the most powerful weapon with which to change the world. Close quote. Through more educational opportunities for people who are willing to learn, open education resources provides that opportunity. Stop there and I just say how proud I am of this team and what they are trying to do. Firstly, yesterday we had such an inspirational session from Dr. Sian Proctor, and I feel that I'm surrounded by people who embody that message about what open is and what open should be. Never mind, could be. We have another textbook and I have just two minutes. We have another textbook by Dr. Philip Kitching. And this looks at helping students who are coming into the education system very often afraid, very often intimidated, very often just scared, right? And self-coaching, a guide, constructive conversations and introduction to self-coaching for students. Dr. Kitching has 15 years of experience as a mentor to students coming in. So his job is literally to create facilitators to success at the university. We are so excited to see what this textbook becomes. Both Philip and Nicky's open textbooks have also now gotten funding to become open courses, which will be housed on the engage.mandala site as well. Finally, what's open education without the input from the library? I know there are several librarians here and we are so excited that now, because of the open textbook fellowship, we can call the library as collaborators in South Africa at Nelson Mandela University with the open education influences. Already now they are helping us to curate support for the identified resources required for the high at risk modules. These are modules where thousands of our students come into the university, take them, but the dropout or attrition rate is so high we need to help them and we believe that open education is one of the avenues to do so. Finally, we are also making an open education repository at the institution where we don't just make the big stuff available, but the small stuff that helps, that contributes to creating something bigger. So from my side, our website is there. It's openedinfluences.mandala.ac.za. My message to you, use our support, use the content, spread open, but make change real. We've got a May during lockdown series of videos about open OER and our collaboration where Sarah Hutton, where are you from UMass Amherst and our team really collaborated right across the lockdowns. In a global collaboration where, if you look, that's a lot of people collaborating to make a difference in my country. And I could not say thank you, and these are just some of those faces. You might recognize some of them.