 Welcome to this session, which is on skills for prosperity, Kenya, repurposing OER to deliver large-scale national professional development training. I'm very pleased to welcome our speakers here today, and without further ado, I'm going to hand over to our speakers. Thank you so much. Hello, everyone. It's so lovely to see you today. I hope you're having a really good OER 22 so far. It's been really great to see you face-to-face in London while online. I hope you're enjoying the conference. As Emma kindly introduced us, we're here to talk about the skills for prosperity Kenya project today. What are we going to be talking about with you? We're going to give you a bit of an introduction to the project in a moment, a bit about the background and what's involved and what we've been doing. We're then going to talk a bit about the open educational resources that we've been using as the project and take you through the journey of that OER. We're then going to tell you a little bit more about how we localised and worked with colleagues in Kenya to create the course that we're going to be telling you a little bit more about as we move through the presentation and the programme of training that we've been delivering or we're in the process of delivering with colleagues and then finally do some reflections on the insights and lessons learned from this work. Thanks, Freshly. Thank you very much, Bec. Hello, everyone, and very welcome to this session. A little bit of background about skills for prosperity Kenya and give you a kind of context before we start the story of our OER. The government of Kenya has a vision called Vision 2020-2030 and within that vision, one of the social aims is to improve access to education and the way they want to achieve that aim is through online education. So they are hoping by 2030 at least 40% of universities in Kenya, they are offering online education and improving people's access to especially higher education. So within that aim in mind, the government of Kenya really would like to train the HE staff in designing and providing education in different online forms. And as a result, there was a call and the Open University was appointed within that call to basically help the government of Kenya to build the capacity of staff in providing and designing digital education. So Skills for Prosperity Kenya is a 13-month capacity development project. You may hear skills for prosperity in other countries. There are eight different countries that have quite similar aim of developing staff capacity in online education. And the aim of this project specifically is to introduce staff to principles of effective and inclusive and accessible online education. And when we talk about inclusivity, especially for Kenya, it's from mainly two aspects. First, providing online education that is accessible for students with disability. And second, for marginalized students, especially when it comes to gender. Female students usually do not receive the education compared to male population. And that's one of the aims of this project. The project is funded by UK government by FCDO and the scope is that we cover all 37 public universities in Kenya. Basically Kenya has got 64 universities and 37 of them are public or state university. And they have a legal obligation in supporting government with the economic aims and targets that they've got. And that is why this project that the government, the Kenya government decided that works with all public universities. And another thing about the scope of this project is that the government decided that just training educators is not enough. Everyone who is involved with education in any form, they can be support staff, they can be managers and educational leaders. They all need to be included to ensure that they provide a kind of seamless digital education. So one of the difference that our project has with a lot of other similar capacity development project is that we've got a wide audience and it's not just educators. We also train support staff and educational leaders like deputy vice-chancellors, deans and heads of department. The project has got two stages. And these stages are very much developed with the government of Kenya, when I talk about the government of Kenya, specifically the State Department and Ministry of Education, with the aims that they have in mind. So in a lot of places it is geared towards their priority, even if we felt that that might not be the most appropriate way to approach something. The first stage is our baseline training, which we try to help the majority of university to get to a baseline understanding of digital education. And it's both online and blended education. We offered a training course, an online training course. It was self-paced and had eight sessions. And it was supported by wraparound webinars and an online community of practice. The course was open, it is still open, to 29 public universities from last August, August 2021. And by this March, I don't want to say we closed the course because it's still open, people can approach, but we've moved from that stage. And we are focusing on another stage of project. And so far, 254 members of staff in different roles completed that course and engage with that online training. The second stage, which we're going to focus particularly today, is the mastery capacity training. And for that strand of training, we work with fewer number of universities. There are eight selected by the government. And the purpose is to train these universities to be a pioneer of online education in Kenya. And they support and lead digital education in Kenya for other universities. And this mastery capacity training is much more in depth. And back in a few minutes, we'll describe what it includes. Just briefly, I tell you, within that training, we had a microcredential which trained 32 thought leaders. There are people who were already engaging with online education, and we just wanted to develop their knowledge and skills in the area. Plus the mastery training, it started back in June 2021, and it will continue until December 2022. And unlike the first stage, it is very practical and hands-on. And it's got practical elements in addition to the online training that the participant will receive. We will be working only with eight universities because of the depth of this training. And the training will include only 80 members of staff, 10 from each university. But what is important here is how we produce this training by just using one open course. And today, we are telling you the story of that open course from when it was created. And now, we will focus on what we are doing with that course for Skills for Prosperity project. So the Open University created this online professional developed course back in 2018, which is called Take Your Teaching Online. And it was available, it is still available on our OpenLearn platform as a professional development course, and people can get a digital batch when they complete it. In 2020, when COVID started, we had several calls and requests that we really need to train our staff. And for one of the projects, which was Pathways to Learning project, again covered Africa, we had only one month to produce a course to train educators in African countries. And for that, we repurposed and added some wraparound material to the original course and offered it as a six-week teacher training course to, I think, around 500 educators, if I'm not mistaken, in different African countries. And then in 2021, again, for another call, we had to train this one, this time not only educators, higher education or further education, but NGO and charities, they wanted to train their trainers in order to offer their training online. And it was another group within the Open University that they took that original OER Open course, really, really reuse it and remix it with new material that was geared toward the trainers who will be working in a very specific context, usually with low technology resource context. And they offered it as a six-week course, totally online. And then when Government of Kenya approached us, we literally had, after the inception phase, we had two months to offer two strands of training. And it was really, really short. And we thought what we can do, because creating everything from scratch, we didn't have time or the budget for doing that. So we went back to our old friend, Take Your Teaching online, and we repurpose it for the Skills for Prosperity Project. However, that's a very interesting story, because we also had some obligations to show staff will improve skills and knowledge after completing the course. So we have to bring some more theory, and Beck will explain how we repurpose this course to meet the Government of Kenya requirements. Thanks so much, Fireshti. So, as Fireshti mentioned, we're going to be focusing in on the Mastery Capacity Building program. So I'm going to tell you a little bit more about how we developed that, specifically over the last period. So we started off last year by conducting a needs and assessment, working with eight universities, as Fireshti mentioned. And in order to better understand both the individuals we would be working with and the universities, we did a number of things. And one of these was to conduct a needs assessment. This was based on the Gist Digital Capabilities Framework, and would help us kind of understand and identify skills and knowledge gaps. We also had engagement with Vice-Chancellors in discussions with a number of different people to really understand. It was part of a process as well, just to make that clear. As we'll see in a moment, this was part of a kind of iterative and ongoing discussion with people to understand their universities' needs and strategic priorities. Next, we looked at, oh sorry, Fireshti, if we can go back to the earlier slide a moment, sorry. Thanks. Next, we looked at the learning outcomes of the course and the needs assessment and mapped them onto the original open course aims and content. And then we spent time with colleagues at the eight universities that we're working with to discuss with them, introduce the program that we've started to kind of design, and have discussions around capacity building projects. Fireshti mentioned these projects. They were a really key part of the program, the mastery capacity building program, because it's about putting into practice what the course has been covering. But also, these projects are really focused on individual universities' needs and strategic priorities. So we wanted to get that discussion obviously started, kind of have that conversation, get to know colleagues in Kenya. And we did that last August through a series of eight co-design workshops. We also presented the kind of program at this point and got feedback from colleagues, colleagues then. Thanks, Fireshti. Thank you. So as I mentioned, we have the kind of key course itself, as Fireshti mentioned. And we also created this kind of additional content to help support colleagues. So we have the online course, which we'll kind of talk a little bit more about the structure in a moment. So this was kind of had eight blocks, and I'll kind of walk through those shortly. So we have the online course itself. Then we also built into each block an expert webinar. So whether it was assessment, learning design, OER, we would have an expert speaker come in and run a session for colleagues in Kenya on that topic. We also have a Facebook online community of practice for discussions. So this is a place where people can go to connect with colleagues. So as you mentioned, we've got eight universities who are working their way through the program. This is a place where people can connect, as well as kind of discuss what's happening in the course, and share resources as well, and so on. Finally, and key and related specifically, and particularly to the capacity building projects, we have regular mentoring sessions. So these involve not just members of the core team, such as Fireshti and myself, but also other colleagues external to the core team coming in and providing support for specific projects that people are working on. So for example, A, B, and there's a number of different things. So with the eight universities, we've got a total of 16 projects. So in total, so each university has between one and three projects that they're kind of working on that are addressing their particular kind of focus and strategic needs. So just to move on to talk a little bit more about how and what we did to kind of localize the content. As Fireshti mentioned, the course itself has been designed not just for educators, but also for managers and support staff. So really had to kind of look closely and think about how to redesign the content, how to make sure that when, for example, activities are asking people to do something, you know, they are addressing everybody who's going to be participating in that course. So it could be that we're asking people to look for an OER, for example, for their own teaching, but also for in the role where they're supporting other people. And then also something maybe related to their own role, so that there's something for everyone in each of the kind of course activities and in the material itself. Thanks, Fireshti. We also replaced images in the course to be more context representative. One of these, for example, in the accessibility block was there's an activity around alt text and asking people to look at a particular image. This was replaced with an image of a Kenyan bus, the Matatu bus, so that it's something that's relevant to people rather than being something that, you know, I think the example was, was it Paris, I think, Fireshti originally or something? Yeah. So we were really looking to kind of make sure that, you know, when people are looking at doing activities and so forth that they're really relevant to the context that folks are working in. As you can see, as you might have seen through the presentation, we've also got some fantastic images designed by Brian Maitis, a visual thinker. So if you were at the opening keynote of the conference, you would have seen Brian then. We worked with Brian and colleagues worked with Brian to generate a whole set of images for this course that are relevant to contextually relevant. And of course, as Brian explained on Tuesday, the way in which he does that is through conversation. So we brought together Kenyan colleagues to work with Brian, as well as Lena Cheshire, colleagues from Lena Cheshire, to ensure that the images were really, really relevant to the course and that they were going to be something that people would also, hopefully, maybe want to reuse as well. We used examples and activities from Kenyan AG throughout the course and also added in this kind of co-designing capacity building projects. And that was the kind of practical element of the course, as I mentioned a moment ago. And this is really very localized and specific to each university. So this is kind of bespoke training and support for colleagues to work on these projects. And then finally, we used the distributed award system. So for each of the blocks of the course, there is a badge, an open badge that you can earn, as well as a big golden badge if you complete all eight blocks of the course. We've also got a certificate for colleagues to acknowledge their work on the course and other aspects. Thanks, Freshly. Wonderful. So you can see in detail here a little bit more of what the course itself looks like. On the left hand side, you have the course homepage. You can see there's one of Brian's drawings there. In the middle, we've got the kind of eight blocks which I'll walk through in a moment that take you through blocks one to eight. And then on the right hand side, we have the certificate and then also a selection of the eight badges and the golden badge as well for the digital education course in the middle. Thanks, Freshly. So just to give you a sense of what we were covering in this course, as mentioned earlier, we developed this course and mapped, used the digital, the just digital capabilities framework, which was also modified as well to fit the context. I should mention that earlier. And what we did was map the content that we're using onto this. So you can see here we start off by looking at online learning and teaching before moving on to learning theory and design. We also then kind of start to cover AV and selecting technologies. Oh, lost the slides a moment. And before moving on to accessibility and inclusion, assessing learners before OER created Commons, learning analytics. Sorry, we've just lost Freshly. So that's why we've lost the slides. No worries. But if you're happy to to share your screen, maybe. Yeah, no worries. I can do that. Yeah, I've got the slides just here. So let me just pop those up. Apologies, everyone with the background on a moment. And while we're about to share the slides. Oh, here comes Freshly. Hi. Hi, I'm really sorry. I don't know what happened. Oh, no worries. That's okay. It's the joys of online conferences. There we go. Okay. So sorry. Do you want me to pop this? Oh, wonderful. Thank you. That's great. Thanks so much Freshly. That's lovely. Thanks Emma. Wonderful. Okay, cool. Thank you so much. So, yeah, so we kind of moved through assessing learners to OER, create Commons and learning analytics before kind of moving on to learning together. So communities of practice and then change management and changing practice. So looking at ways in which people leadership in different roles and contexts. So as I mentioned, there's eight blocks, as you can see. How do we structure them? We started the program in November. And then we moved to it will finish in June. The course is structured with three kind of sections for each of the blocks. So you can see here, we have a kind of opportunity for people in the first week or section to kind of study the content online, the expert webinar in week two, for week three being a focused kind of point at which we hold mentoring meetings for university projects. And spanning all of those and the entire course is of course the community of practice Facebook group. And within the course itself, we also built lots of time for people to kind of catch up as well. So there's lots of breaks built in so that people can kind of spend time catching up or revisiting course material. Thanks Freshly. Okay, I'm conscious of time and that we've got two minutes before Q&A. So that was the story of how we reused and repurposed that OER for our purpose. But it's an important part of it is what we learned. First, we learned, I mean, that OER really helped us to save a lot of time and money, especially considering that we really, really have limited time to produce this training and to offer it. Also, if you remember, many projects went through the budget cut during the COVID because the government priorities changed and our project went through two budget cuts and using OER really helped with that production process. The process of repurposing the original course, let us to come up with some creative approaches especially when it comes to creating learning activities. There are certain things that because we weren't face to face, we're not able to do. And we thought that, okay, we have to offer a session on teaching people how to teach practical, for example, STEM subjects or disciplines and how that is related to the dean of a faculty. And then we come up with certain type of activities that the dean, the librarian, the learning technologies and the educator where all had to work in groups in order to do that activity. And I think that was one of the really learning point for us as people who are providing the training. Another thing that we learned in the morning, we were reflecting on that and we are still learning. We knew about the Kenya education system. We knew where are the gaps. We did the needs assessment. But if I'm honest with you, we didn't know. And still, we don't know much about the education culture there. And that's very important. Like when you consider a new context for using an OER, an element is the cultural aspect. And that is something that we are learning still. And we are adapting our project based on that. One of the things that this repurposing process enabled us is expanding the audience in sense of the roles. As we told you, the target audience for the original course was only educators, but now it's extended to educational leaders and other groups. And repurposing OER also helped us to update the original content. There are content about, for example, green education or changes in, for example, using education as a means to social justice. These are all the things that we added to the course and we are using it for updating further. And about one last thing about the future of this OER, after the skills for prosperity, actually currently we are in the process of reversing the original course to offer it as a free CPD. But with the more updated content and with some additional topics, which weren't really hot topics back or important topics back in 2018, some, at least three Kenyan universities started repurposing and localising the course further in order to offer it to more staff, because we are working with limited number of staff in each university, but they are repurposing it to roll it out to more staff within their institution. And finally, when we hand in this course to the Ministry of Education, they are planning to use it to train staff in private university. I'll stop here. Thank you very much for listening and Bek and I are happy to take any questions if there are. Thanks so much. Thank you so much. That was fascinating and I have loads of questions. I don't know if we'll get time for all my questions, but we have had one question from an attendee, so I'm just going to put this on screen now. How did you discover more of the education culture in Kenya when constrained by the fact you couldn't travel there because of the pandemic? Thank you, Anna. That's a good question. I can start and then Bek, please feel free to chip in. What we did, we appointed a Kenyan coordinator, a coordinator who is based in Kenya and help us a lot with communicating and understanding about culture. Sometimes even she has to look at the communication that we have with the participants say it's better not to say it in this way or do it that way. Another thing is within IET, we've worked quite a lot with different African countries and we had another project with Kenya, so we liaised with those colleagues and we used some of our experiences from previous project. And as I told you, we are still learning quite a lot and we are adapting the course and I think some of the things that I don't still feel comfortable is being this flexible and changing things in the middle, but I think that is what we have to do in order to make sure the training is still meaningful to participants. I don't know, Bek, if you have anything to add? Just very briefly to add in, as I mentioned, we built in points where we have conversation with people and spaces to have that conversation. So last August particularly was an important opportunity to spend time with colleagues and talking about their universities and getting to know each other a bit more and continue that. And I think the capacity building project, mentoring sessions that we have with people also provide a really important aspect of that as well. Thank you so much. We're just running up to the, I think we've just hit the 30 minute mark, so I just want to say thank you so much once again to Fareshta and Bek. That was a really fascinating presentation and we can continue the discussion or questions in Discord. Thank you everyone for attending and thanks once again for, to our presenters. Thank you. Thanks so much everyone for, it's great to see you and thanks so much Emma. Thank you.