 during George and I start when I want. Okay, thank you. So I think we're five minutes behind schedule. So oops, I'll start now. So thanks for those who are here. So some of you were probably or possibly in the room on Friday, May the 25th, 2022, when there was a keynote given by North University, trying to say, okay, this is the story of university that is trying to go open. So there were about six or seven people on stage at that moment, including the president, and they explained how the different aspects of openness were being addressed by a large university in France and what it could imply, perhaps for other people. So today, to explain what's happened with us, 18 months later, there's only me. So I'm not sure that's a good omen, you know, if they say, no, you go and explain, you know, but actually I think we have done a lot of things right and there's some things wrong and I'm hoping to actually tell this story right now. So I've got some co-authors in preparing this slide and especially Saint-Ren-Gilly-Guichoux, who took a lot of time preparing this. So the context. The context is La France. So some of you have been there. If I want to say something about it, it's just that we're quite far away from the sort of system we have here in Canada or that you can have at your neighbor's place in the United States. So La France is a place where there's very many public universities. Most of their education, higher education, takes place in the public universities and these are funded by public money. So that is by the taxpayer. I guess that's important to keep and the fees is 270 euros per year. So that's not the fee for one course. That's the fee for one university ear. And this perhaps you can pay a little bit more for other things and there's some special schools that have got high fees. So this makes sense to, in the moment you're thinking about openness, right? It's perhaps not that same financial barrier that we have to break. There's other things that are involved. OK. Yes, perhaps also say we've got university libraries and they are highly supported, meaning also that in France we don't necessarily have to go and buy textbooks. Most of my students will go through all their career without having ever bought one single textbook. Right. All the textbooks, they will go to the library, they will read from there or they will pick some material that's on the web. So it makes it a little bit more interesting or challenging to actually convince people to go into where we are. Nevertheless, there are other issues, of course. So not university, as I said, is a medium sized university, rather large, 43,000. And with different campuses in different parts of France, those who were there didn't actually get to see the chateau, which is a part of the university. So another thing that is now becoming common in the European universities is what's called the alliances of the European university. So there's a big challenge there that the idea is to put a number of, say, a dozen European universities from different countries together with a common project with European funding, of course, to try and develop things like courses where students could move from one university to the other or where you could get the same diploma into very different universities. So we are not a part of a consortium with some very nice universities in the different countries. You can read here that there's Germany, United Kingdom, even if it's a breakfast set, you can find Sweden, you can find Spain, and so on. What's interesting is that there's money from Europe and there's tasks. And in those tasks, one of them is education. And so it's also a place where we can push the gender of open education. Though there is international cooperation, one of them is what we've just said here, the fact of being inside UNILE. But not university has been involved with a lot of people here for a while. We've been one of the first universities in France to join the OCW Now-OEG movement. And we're also very much involved with UNESCO. I mean, I'm a UNESCO chair and we've got a consistent relationship with them. We're also a member of ICDE and we've got special partnerships with a number of universities, including Sherbook, who represented over there. Okay, so the ambition of not university, as expressed by the president last year, is a holistic approach. It's not to just go one thing at the time. I could actually have a long discussion about this, but I think yesterday I heard somebody saying that's the right way to do things. You shouldn't just approach open education separately from open research, separately from whatever. It's true and it's not true. If you go for a holistic approach, you also end up by having to solve all sorts of problems before even getting started, right? Because people say, well, you know, we shouldn't start the open education until we've sorted the problems about open government. So in a way, it's also good to start something and then to get the other things flowing. So the ambition, so this is just the sort of text that we were right, sort of saying we're open, we're sustainable and we're excellent. Well, that's what we'd like to have as an ambition. So again, the ambition sort of through some pictures, saying that we're talking holistic means open science, open education, open innovation, open government with a set of tools like things like open communities and open educational resources, open spaces. These are things I will be giving concrete examples about, but this is the sort of discourse we are holding with to give it a long-term meaning. So the dates, this is not something that's been going on for 20 years. So with our current president who gave the talk last year, has been elected only in 2019. So very quickly, she started doing things like creating positions instead of just saying that the vice rector or the vice president was vice president for education. That became very quickly vice president for education and open education. So the word open started really illustrating the different positions. So then we also have the UNESCO chair, which was around there, and a very important moment for us was organizing open education globally. So yeah, it's something that works. I mean, if you want your university to move forward, organize the conference. Because suddenly people from the rest of the world arrive and people who are not facing issues on open education will be seeing people around with who they can talk to. So it works. This is something that really works. And perhaps the last one is, and I'll talk about this later, is that we're starting to actually get money to open, which is interesting. So little by little at the beginning of the discourse of saying not university is an open university. Well, OK, people will listen to it politely. And then little by little, it interests at government levels. People say, well, we should give this a chance, right? Everybody else is trying the usual stuff. These guys want to try something different. We should actually support them. And so I'm not saying money is pouring in. That would be completely wrong. But we are starting to receive money subsidies to open the university. So it all obviously helps because you do need people to do things. So the valuable starting point was the conference. And that conference, well, we felt was a success. I mean, we didn't have as many people as we're seeing around. Well, yes, no, we did have more people in the room in this very moment, right? But in general for the conference, right, there was much more people here. But still, there was a big crowd. And there was a big crowd of European people, which which was also important for us. There is clearly a necessity in countries like France to have relationships with European partners. OK, so what have we done since then? So this is, you know, have we been good boys? Have we have we done something? So what we've been doing is doing all sorts of meetings. The keyword has been onboarding, which is very nice. If at the top of the university, there's a decision made, we shall now open. But you have to onboard everybody. You have to explain what it's about. So we've done all sorts of concrete things to try and on board people. So what are the sort of things we do? Here are three examples. So the first one is an activity where we created and we've been running in various times, which is a hands-on activity. I create my first OER, I've left it in French because it is in French. So it's for during one hour and a half. We get them through the process at the end of the process. The person have created the text with an image and have had to sort out a little dilemma with the licenses. Perhaps they've embedded a video and it's been there for their job. So it's a way of saying, OK, well, I now have done one first OER. So it helps and we can share it, even if it is in French, obviously. So the second one is when we started doing this, we found out we were actually spending a lot of time having to actually explain what OER are because it's not that obvious. And then we tried explaining what OER are and that didn't work either because, you know, if it's me talking about OER, people will listen politely. But I'm answering questions that they have not raised. So the idea is how do we get people to raise questions? So we invented this activity, which is a rather fun activity. I think we've got Milani somewhere has got the card safe where people want to know what it's about. But basically, it's about putting people in groups and giving them 10 priorities, reasons for which we should adopt OER, asking them to play a role. You're a student, you're a teacher, you're the minister of education, you're the dean, you're whatever. And so now put priorities on this, you know, say what matters, what between these reasons for adopting OER or open education matter, and which don't. And that leads to brilliant debates where they have to, you know, decide, OK, we're sacrificing the money issues, the cost issues, because we really think that the issues of sharing knowledge are more important. And then you can talk and we're actually answering the questions they have raised themselves during the activity. So this works really well. We can show you, as I said, the cards if people are interested. And we actually also did it in Canada once. We did it in Université de Laval. So other activities are more like design thinking activities. Again, the same idea is, suppose we have to onboard non-université, how would you do it? Who will you put in what activities? So that sort of activities, we sometimes only have three or four people, which is very disappointing. And in this case, I think Milani will correct me, but there could have been about 50 people doing this activity. So little by little, you know, the word gets around. People ask themselves the right questions and we're sort of saying we've got some of the right answers. Okay, in parallel, so let's say the bottom-up approaches, the top-down approaches, was this EU, and we talked about before, well, the first document this alliance signed was the declaration. So we did nice big documents saying we the people, not quite, we the rectors of these universities proclaim that from now onwards we will blah, blah, blah. So I was in charge of the writing, which was nice. So it was the first document this alliance actually signed. It's nothing exceptional, but it's a way of these people about having this impression of these important people that this is the key, you know, this is going to be what it's about, you know, what we can put forward. Okay, so then we've got other things related with open education. We've got webinars, we've got blogs and things of that sort. So we're still working and doing all sorts of little things. I mean, it's not about just one activity. There's lots of activities going on in the university. And as I said before, and that's the last line, this is not my slide, but the last line is September, we did get a big grant. So there's a lot of money. So we're hoping to be able to get forward. But it's not just about the money. It's about two things, it's about the university gambling their capacity of asking for money based on the open idea. You know, they're not gonna have more than one card. You can't go out with two projects to the ministry. So they said, no, okay, we're all gonna, this is our card, this is what our trump is. We're playing with openness trumps. And that matters a lot because people start thinking, okay, university is choosing, this matters. And the second thing is also when you do get the money, it means that you've convinced at the end. And so that for the national authorities is good sign. It means that these ideas are working. This has not always been just true. I mean, three years ago or two years ago, I remember that we already tried to go for a project based on open education or openness in general. And when we went for the interview or the discussion with the jury, the questions of the jury were just, I'm sorry to say, frankly stupid and showed that they didn't have any idea about this. It was just, you know, we were some sort of left wing activists that were trying to say, let's have everything for free with public money. I mean, they kind of understood that there was an actual construction behind this. And things have changed. I mean, so we are convincing and this is good. Right. So that's what some of the things we've been doing. So now what are we doing? So now what's going to happen from now onwards and now that we've got the money to go on? Well, it's again, we're trying to go for open spaces, go and do so these open free educational resources, open it to communities in practice. So a number of projects where we either build and distribute where we are or we train and help the teachers to try and go and adopt these things. So here's some of the examples of the things that happened in just the next few months. We're creating an OER factory, talk about it in a second. We're also creating a platform. So once we've created some OER, we put it in the right place, surprisingly or not, we didn't have that. So people would create OER, but then perhaps have them on their own webpages or over place. So we had to do that. And then we're even holding now in a few days in December an open education week. It's a small event, but it's a way to get the ball rolling and also to have the university reflect upon what we're doing. And there's a number of things happening. The AMNA also talk about Open Madoc. So La Fabrique d'Herel, as it's called in French, is actually a title we have pinched from people in Quebec who have got a successful Fabrique d'Herel running for now three years? Two years and three? Four years, okay, for four years. And the idea is to have a place where they actually not only learn how to do OER, but they actually, they put together, this is the critical idea that they already presented last year in during the talks. They put together the librarians and counselors and they always need these two people to work together with the professor, which then makes that's the knowledge, the know-how is spread in a better way. So we're having one of those. We're starting it now-ish. I mean, as I said before, December. So the first thing you start doing is of course finding stuff that you've already been putting on webpages left, right and center and trying to just check that they fit the format. And hopefully by next year we will be actually producing new OER. The second one is having an OER collection. So again, we're trying to find examples elsewhere. So I think we're in the spirit of openness, which is you find a good example somewhat. In this case would be Université de Louvain in Belgium. And they've got a successful, well-managed collection and they've dealt with a number of problems that you usually have with this. It's basically based on D-space, but it's still going to be used as an example and we're hoping to launch it, by the way, we are launching it in December. The third thing, which is, it might sound trivial, this is not about OER, this is just about openness. So like many countries, we've got Moodle or like many universities, but our Moodle is not very open. Our Moodle is closed by the teachers by all sorts of security issues. And I can't know what the teacher next door is actually doing. I teach machine learning, if in mathematics there's somebody teaching machine learning, I can't know what he, it's not true, I can ask him. If I ask him permission, he may grant it or not. And it has happened before that the teacher will say, no, I don't grant it, you're not part of my pupils. So the idea is to at least internally start getting into the habit of having a first layer of openness, which is the layer of openness between us, between us and between our pupils. I know it's something that for some of you who are doing that for ages, it might sound trivial, it is not trivial, it is so difficult to put. We have got barriers and barriers of people who aren't going to express immediately what they're doing, but why they are blocking things. But there's huge ideas to block it. So the idea isn't to oblige everybody, the idea is to be open by default. I think that was one of the expressions that was used yesterday. I'm being, anybody is allowed to say, no, I don't want anybody to look at what I'm doing, but at least it's a decision and it's a publicly made decision that the person might be questioned about. But even without getting to the questioning, it just means that being open by default becomes the thing. So if we just do that, that is going to be, in my view, perhaps the biggest game changer for how people start working inside the university. And if people have got the advice on how we should do this without having another French Revolution, I mean, I'm prepared to take the ideas. So inside UNIWEL, the good news is that there's a work package inside the work package which belongs, or which is run by not, there's actually something called T7.7, you can see here, which is UNIWEL Open Education. So there is an idea adopted by this alliance to go open. So it's a good idea. Not pushing the agenda is able also to push the agenda in 10 other universities, which is also interesting. Again, I'm probably in charge of that. I don't have a clue how it's going to work. We're going to try. So very next, very next, very next, not many things happening here. So very next, the open educational research. Yeah, so one of the things we've been noticing is at least in France, we don't have enough of that. Not enough researchers investigating, looking at the issues of open educational research. Here, I was lucky to move from room to room and I tried to go as much as I could, not to the policy rooms, but to the research rooms. And it was great to see all the different activities that some subgroups were actually doing in research. Obviously, GOGN is the best example of what research can be about. But the research agenda in open education, in my view, is not clear. There's going to be subgroups, might be the social sciences working very hard in their direction, but what about the economy? Or what about the links with artificial intelligence? Again, in research. And so we're hoping to use this. And the first thing we need to work on is on the research agenda. So we're going to do this a first time here now in December 2023 with a two-day symposium in Nantes. It's going to be in French. That's another one of my hobbies, some of you might remember from Austria. Very keen on multilingualism. So in this case, it will be in French. We might have another workshop, who knows, in Spanish at another moment. But we have to sort of get into working on topics in different languages to bring different people to the table, especially in research. And it's also a concern of the unit in network I was speaking about yesterday. Okay, this is just a messy slide where you can see lots of partners just to say that it is important in this thing to not be isolated. So Nantes Open for Collaborations is already collaborating in all sorts of ways. And what we're most interested in is in people or universities that have, you know, there are perhaps a few steps ahead of us who've already achieved a certain number of things. So it's not about having an expert group of two, three people moving very fast through one department. Here the issue is the whole university, trying to bring a university, which is a standard university, to a degree of openness that is not at all common in the French universities. It is a huge challenge. So we're certainly helping, I mean, looking forward for any help will be welcome. Okay, no, these are just some nice little pictures. If not, to finish my talk. Thank you. Yes. Okay, so that's two, where's the half? How did this turn out? That's the half. Okay, so, well, let's start with the second one. We did give a talk on day one in the room there, which is exactly what we're trying to do. So we're not using machine learning. What we're using is going straight for the beast using chat GPT and different AI alternatives to try and sort of, if not generate OER, generate parts of the OER that we need to actually get somewhere. But we do have other projects, one called Claha, which is a project where ideally, let's give you the deal, you're a teacher, you write your synthesis of what you want to do, you know, your syllabus, you press on the magic button and this becomes a query to knowledge base in which you then receive things like saying, okay, for this chapter, you should use this and this. For this chapter, you should use this and this. So this is a running project. Hopefully I might even talk about it next year. But we are doing that. So yes, we've got all sorts of projects where we're trying to use either machine learning or artificial intelligence to not yet to produce OER, but more to sort of take those bits of OER that are already there and to somehow combine them to produce courseway. And so then the first question was about what are our objectives for OER? To be fair, I'm a big fan of OER, but the university thinks that open education, and I think they're right, right, is more important than OER. The bigger picture in for a university is not to produce OER or to get OER adopted. The bigger picture is really to make sure that the teachers become or the professors or whatever become open educators. That's much more important. The Moodle example is just trivial. I mean, I've got great hair. I believe the university in France is less open today than it was 40 years ago. And this is what internet has achieved. It's very disappointing, right? All we've done is close things that before I could go into the coffee room and I could pick up the courseway by my different colleagues. Today I cannot get access to the courseway of my colleagues. I went to a meeting two years ago. I remember it was to prepare the next edition of The Masters. And so we sat there and the documents that were distributed to us was the syllabus we had written five years ago. And we all said, but you know, we've all changed. That's not what we're doing. And the guy who's in charge of the course said, well, that's all I've got. Okay, so when it's just so bad after the decision-making process for all the what we call pedagogic teams or whatever, we have to open up. So that's more urgent. So in this case, I would say that the goals of the OER, they are written about how many. We've still got to discuss the quality issues. Those are very important. But there are some numbers. I mean, there are some numbers which is a progression I'd remember of producing five, then 20, then 50 per year. There's some numbers. I believe they're magic numbers. I don't think that they matter so much. No, absolutely. One of the other case examples is we've got a problem in France. The students make loose choices when it comes to go into university. One of the drawbacks, if anything, of the university being cheap is that somehow they perhaps don't take the same energy to make the right choices when they go into it because of what all sorts of reasons. And so then they'll find themselves in the first few weeks, finding out that they're in the wrong thing, they're enrolled in the wrong place. And I just found out when I was speaking to these students that were having to re-choose that they had access to exactly the same information that they had when they were in high school. They didn't have access to say, well, go and have a look what's happening in that room over there. Well, you've chosen physics, but really you could choose chemistry. But for that, we have to open the curriculums. We have to understand what's happening. So yeah, that's one of the examples. But the best example isn't that, isn't even from us. The best example is an example from Politecnico Milano in Italy. I think it's a beautiful example where they've made open not only inside to their own pupils, but to the pupils in high school. So when they're in high school, they are able to make decisions on what they're going to do next year based on that. And they even get encouraged with the teachers in the high school to start preparing the lectures. And this is what we call in French, la cerise sur le gâteau, you know, the really, the big advantage is as soon as they arrive, they're allowed to take the exams. They don't even have to go through the studies because they've been able to study the material in advance and they gain whatever that means, perhaps, you know, two or three credits through that. I think it's a brilliant example. And that only works because you're going through an open education, open education resources, projects. One of my favorite examples. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Yeah, and it's a difficult one. Thank you for a bad question. Now, there's lots of little moments of happiness. Obviously, you're happy when, as I said, you know, when a lot of money pours in because you know you're going to be able to do things, but more because of the two reasons I was saying before, just because it really shows that it's not just commitment, you know, something you say for policy, but it's something that really matters both the university. And in this moment, I'm seeing how it's starting to matter at national level. So those are probably my biggest happiness. But then we've got a great team, so just working with the people that makes it nice. I'd say that, I'd say two things. A bit what I said before, the problem is that when you're too holistic, things get jammed. So for open education, it's much more complicated because you've actually got to be working with the companies and with the outside world. So the rhythm at which you can do things will depend on your capacity to sign contracts and to sign things. So for the moment, we do know we're in places. For example, they've moved us to a part of town where we are in contact, not just with the university people, but also with the outside world and also with the companies. So there's a lot of meetings happening. So I would say we're going in the right direction. We're starting to have courseware that we're trying to use in different settings to do different things. We're not good at sort of coming out with saying, look, let's see if this software to do multilingualism, we should do a startup with it. For example, that we show to not be capable of doing. And as far as governs go and the open governments pass. I mean, I like the idea and I think we should, no, not pass. I can do something about it when it comes to open education and in that setting, I will certainly do something about it. But when you're starting to talk about open government or open democracy, you're clearly going to go up into the highest fees of the university. So pass means that. I mean, I'm going to encourage them to do things, but you're right. In the case of open education, we should involve in a different way the people. You're right. So yes, I mean, in one critical sector, which is the medical sector, there is a huge open data initiative for France with all the particularities of the medical data where you can't be just completely open. So you have to do a number of things, but that teaches you what works and what doesn't work. So there are things happening. So that's as far as open data, I would say in that setting there is. And as far as open research, it is on the agenda and there is a vice president of research and open access. So it's part of his mandate and things are happening there. But again, it's very difficult where all what Cable was saying about the published and perished system and the fact that you need your publications in just those journals that are the wrong ones, we have got all that. But yeah, being holistic means we have to address that also. Yes, I'm not sure we've got time. Is the next speaker here or are we on coffee break afterwards? She's here. So you tell me off if you want me to stop. So we're done. So she told me to stop. OK, thank you.