 All right. Hello, everybody. This is Mary Lou Ford. I'm the executive director of the open education consortium. I just want to make sure that everybody can hear me. So we are expecting more people to join us, but I imagine they'll be dropping in in the next few minutes. There are some buttons on the top of the screen. You can see one with a hand raised. If you would like a microphone or would like to speak, please go ahead and raise your hand. We'll be happy to call on you. We have a chat box to ask questions at any time, add a comment, whatever you like. We're very happy to see you all in the meeting today for our community meeting. An opportunity for us to really interact with you to let you know things that we're up to, to hear things that you're up to, and to have some discussions around topics that are facing the open education community. So we're going to go ahead and just get started. Our agenda today is to look at open education week. We're also going to show you our 2015 year-in-review of activities from the Open Education Consortium. We have two guests here to speak about projects that they're working at, so we'll hear some highlights from community members there. We want to have a discussion around what we should be doing for the Cape Town Declaration to mark its 10-year anniversary. We'll tell you a little more about our Open Education Awards for Excellence, and then we will leave time for questions, comments, or any additional discussion items that you have. So jumping right into Open Education Week, if you have not yet seen the website, it's openeducationweek.org. This year's Open Education Week is March 7th through 11th. We did send out a survey last summer to people to ask what the best dates for Open Education Week were and the overwhelming response was to keep it the second week of March. So that's what we're going to do. The call for participation is now open, and we hope that you are considering what you're going to do for Open Education Week. It's really easy to tell us, and once you do tell us, it'll appear on the website. It'll appear on the calendar of events. If you send us a video, that goes right onto the homepage, links to it. And we also will send you this lovely little badge that you see on this slide so that you can put that on your website or on any promotional materials you have to let people know that you're being featured in Open Education Week. And we'd love your help to let other people know that the call for participation is open. Anybody can submit. The only criteria is that it has to do with education and that it is an openly licensed event or promotion or website or webinar. We also want to make sure that you're aware of the downloads that are available. We have some really great graphic materials to help you promote Open Education Week. Things like PowerPoint, presentation templates. We have posters, we have logos, and we have these great web banners, and they're all right there on the website right now. Just go ahead, grab them, put them wherever you like, and help us get the word out to you. Spread the news about Open Education. We also have a fun social event that we're running to try to promote Open Education Week, called Picture Yourself Open. You can see on the website that there's the opportunity for you to download some templates to color or to upload pictures of anything that features open or open education. We're looking at this as a contest to get more participation and to get wider circles of promotion. We wanted some feedback on that from you. What do you think about running this as a contest or do you have other ideas that we can use to promote Open Education Week to new audiences and in different ways? We have somebody typing in an idea, but if you have any ideas or suggestions or feedback or comments on how do we really get open education week as widely looked at as possible, we'd love to hear from you. Yes, thank you. You go absolutely. We'd love to hear any feedback you have on Open Education Week, how to promote it, what are the best things for us to be featuring in Open Education Week. We'd love to have more collaboration with student organizations. Yes, thank you, James. But your point is that you can give us feedback on it at any time at info at openeducationweek.org. That email is monitored and we'll get right back to you. It looks like we have some strong interest in collaborating with students. I wonder what the best way to do that is, does anyone have any particular ideas? Great, James, you're right. I think reaching out to your local student associations is great, and we will be hearing from Jennifer very shortly on the work that she's doing with adult basic education and reaching adult learners. Interesting, an app that would push OE notifications. That could be very interesting as well. So great, we'll pull these together in a list and get them out to the planning committee as well and maybe get back to some of you individually for further ideas on this. So let's move on to our year in review so that you can hear some of the things that we were up to this year. It was a pretty busy and exciting year for us, 2015. The infographic we've put together, maybe a high level snapshot of it here, is available on the website. We're also going to have it available in PDF form in case you want to send it out to greater people. But we wanted to take the chance to go over it five by slide here so that you can have a closer idea of what we were up to. Some of you got a quick preview of it last week as a sneak peek, but we're really just announcing it this morning to get it out to the community. So we conceptualize this as a journey, and we wanted to take you through the journey of 2015 in Open Education. Starting with Open Education Week last year, as you can see, we had some pretty interesting statistics here. There were 130 events organized around the world that got featured on the event calendar. We hope that that will be higher again this year. We had 20 different languages for events, and we had over 4 million Twitter impressions, which means that's the reach of all of the tweets during Open Education Week, which is really impressive for a five-day event that was really community-organized and community-sponsored. We also had a great time in BAMP. For those of you who joined us there, we were so happy to see you. For those of you who didn't, we hope to see you in Poland this year. So our conference, our global conference, was in BAMP last year in Canada. We had 83 different presentations from 37 different countries. So the conference was really international, very strong representation from around the world. A beautiful setting, a really excited audience. I think some of the presentations I heard from people who attended, they were the highest quality presentations that they had heard at any Open Education conference. People are doing really interesting things. They're happy to share. They're excited to make those collaborations. And we were really happy that those connections were happening at our conference. So we hope to see more of them this year, and we hope to see you again in Poland. We also did a number of member and community service projects. We went over a lot of these during these community meetings last year. So you're probably already familiar with these. If you're not, please visit the infographic on our website and click through to the pages. But we wanted to spend a little more time talking about some of the projects and activities you may not have been as familiar with. We did some really interesting work this year, including work with the Campus Ritual de las Americas, which is a collaboration with the Organization of American States. And their goal is to make quality education accessible to everybody in the Americas. So they're working with a selected group of institutions and organizations to come together and put a portal that will make a virtual hub for the Americas, for learning in the Americas. And they've asked us to take on the Open Education component. So Marcella Morales, who's our staff member in Mexico, has been working on this a lot this year, curating OER, providing general information about open education, and doing a lot of work on the administration and design of this site. So as you can see, it's a really interesting portal that's just taking off now, and we hope will take off significantly in the future. This year we also started consulting to diversify some of our activities. One of our first and most major projects that we took on was the eLearning Pioneer. This was a program to share best practices in eLearning and open education, specifically for female faculty members in Saudi Arabia. This program was sponsored by the Ministry of Education and the National eLearning Center for eLearning and distance learning in Saudi Arabia. Their logo seems to have disappeared. I guess the price of gas has dropped enough but I can't afford to keep their logo anymore. But anyway, we partnered with some really excellent organizations to make this project happen, including the Online Learning Consortium Quality Matters, and you see the names of the universities at the bottom, UMass, Tufts University, College of the Canyons University of California, Irvine, and the University of New Hampshire, who hosted practicum placements for these pioneers. So to give you a little more idea of what this program involved, there were 40 pioneers, all female faculty, from across Saudi Arabia, coming from 13 different universities. It's an 11-month program. It started last February. Technically ended at the end of December, but we're still in the stages of wrapping it up now. We offered 178 hours of online workshops and webinars, and this was in eLearning and open education. There were two weeks of practicum placements in the U.S. again at those great universities that hosted the faculty members followed by a week of workshops. During that time, they met with 154 U.S. faculty and administrators, so this gives you an idea of the breadth and the depth of the program. They had 220 hours of trainings and meetings while they were in the U.S., so it was really intensive. And this gives you an idea of the arc of the program. Our arrow seems to have disappeared, but imagine an arrow going from the lower left up to the upper right. And it gives you an idea at the top of the goals of the different stages of the program and at the bottom, the activities that we put together to make that happen. So overall, a really intensive, a year-long program that, again, we're just wrapping up now with the evaluations, but it's been really successful and we've had a great opportunity to connect with Saudi faculty that we probably would have not otherwise had to meet and get them really interested in open education. The other project that we wanted to highlight was Marshall McLuhan. And if you're familiar with Marshall McLuhan, you're going to be really excited about this site. And if you're not familiar, you'll get to know him through this site. This is the McLuhan Speaks Special Collection. We worked with them to put our first primary source video up there with the transcripts, and the transcripts are completely open. They're openly licensed so that you can use them in your educational endeavors. This site explains his ideas and his own words. So things that you're familiar with, like the global village or the medium is the message, he explains these in his own words. So it's your opportunity to really dig into what he meant and to see how, you know, his views on communication and technology in the 60s really parallel the developments of the internet and communications today. So we were really happy to work with the McLuhan family to make this happen and to turn it into an open resource. We also wanted to call attention to the diversity of presentations and the geographic spread that we were able to reach with advocacy and awareness raising. This is a map of all the presentations and workshops and seminars that were given by staff and board members this year. You can see we managed to go everywhere except Antarctica. And if you're really interested in what these conferences and presentations were, here's a list of all of the conferences and events where we made presentations or gave seminars or workshops or trainings. So we really managed to cover a great deal of the world this year and we were very happy that people were interested enough to keep inviting us back. And of course we wanted to thank you and our members and our sustaining members because it's really the community that's making open education become more mainstream, become more well-known. And you deserve a lot of credit for all the work you did in 2015. So we wanted to say a special thank you to you. We also wanted now to introduce our guests for the meeting so that you can hear about a couple of really exciting projects that are happening. First we have Designers for Learning. This is Jennifer Madrel who will give us an overview of the MOOC that she's working on to develop OER for basic adult education that benefits adults without a high school diploma. Great. I do. Thank you. You can hear me okay? Okay. Yeah, I think I have a couple slides if you want to advance them. That would be great. So yeah, as you mentioned, our project that we're working on right now, I represent Designers for Learning. It's a 501c3 nonprofit in the United States. We're pretty new. We founded about 18 months ago and our mission is service learning. We were founded by a group of instructional designers and our mission is to find social causes that could benefit from our expertise in instructional design and particularly to coordinate projects to bring instructional designers, instructional design students, or other educators who are interested in pounding away on creating curriculum for, as I mentioned, a social cause. And so our current project that we're working on is to deliver a service MOOC. It's going to be on the Canvas Network platform starting February 22nd and it'll run 12 weeks until May 15th. And the focus is project-based. So all the enrollees of the MOOC will join in on collaboratively designing OER, specifically for adult basic education and the educators and learners who unfortunately have progressed through life and dropped out and did not achieve their high school diplomas or other high school equivalently credentials. And so if you're interested in this, if you want to work, if you want to see what we're all about, you can check out our website, obviously, which is designersforlearning.org. But then if you'd like to enroll in the course, if you head over to the canvas.net MOOC platform, you can see the information there on the slide of how to enroll in the course. Let's just move ahead and then I'll give a little sense of what the... Sorry, I think I double-clicked there. I'll give you a sense for what the MOOC is all about. So here's kind of the frequently asked questions about it. As I mentioned, it's a project that we're supporting at Designers for Learning. But what's really important, and we have a couple folks in the chat room right now. JR Dingwall is one of the designers on the team. I see Alexa's name is there. She was a prior volunteer. Everyone who works with us on this project is a volunteer. We are not funded for this project. So we're kind of the little engine that could. We had a vision. We have an idea. And we just went ahead to design the course and to work with the great partners, as I mentioned, canvas.net. And there was another logo on there. Oh, we are commons. That's where our resources will reside once the MOOC participants design the learning modules. And so we are estimating at this point our volunteers who have helped design the MOOC, as well as those that will be engaged in volunteers to facilitate the MOOC, will be contributing about 1,000 volunteer hours. So literally no money has exchanged hands in any of this endeavor. We don't have funding from anyone, and I'm not paying anyone to work with us. So it's a very grassroots, homegrown effort, and it's probably the most rewarding and amazing thing I've worked on in my career so far. And hopefully that will continue on as the MOOC participants continue to pay it forward, creating these resources for the adult basic educators. So in terms of the focus, what the people in the MOOC will be designing, the focus is on the college and career readiness standards here in the United States. So the subject matter is English language arts and literature as well as math. Again, it's an adult basic education audience. So if you kind of think of the equivalent, it would be like the equivalent of K-12 materials, so from grade one through 12. We're targeting short bites of OER, so what that means, time on task for the learner would be approximately 15 to 30 minutes, and the idea would be these are like lesson plans that the adult educator would download, the materials would be there, the guidance in terms of how to use the lesson will be presented to them, and then away they go. In terms of logistics for the course, I think that may have gotten cut off on our slide. The MOOC is a 12-week MOOC. We are asking people to devote two to three hours a week to get a meaningful experience out of it, and clearly, like every MOOC, we know we're going to have a huge amount of attrition. People will come in, poke around, and get what they like out of it and leave, but we're really hoping to get, you know, maybe never know targets, but we're really hoping that from this first iteration we can get maybe 60 quality OER, OER resources that we can then contribute to the OER Commons and put it up there as kind of the first installment of adult education resources. And just before I kind of conclude my thoughts, I did want to make mention of this. When I talked to Mina about participating today, and I really want to thank you for the opportunity to do this, she mentioned in her email that it was unique and interesting is the focus and the attention on adult ed, and unfortunately, it really is the forgotten education segment. It's really globally. It's a huge problem, obviously. The numbers I'm pulling here are from UNESCO and OECD, as well as the U.S. Census Bureau, but it's just a shame that there are millions and millions of folks globally, as well as in the United States who either cannot read at a very basic level or have not progressed to the point of having any type of credentials, which obviously are needed when you go to college or to expand your career. And so that's our focus. That's why we picked this as our mission. And I think hopefully JR has been populating the chat room for me. I have a hard time talking and posting at the same time. But if you are interested in what we're doing, as I mentioned, take a peek at our website. Take a look over at canvas.net. And as we progress, if you hop over to OER Commons when this concludes, hopefully you'll see some well-vetted resources for people to be able to use and adapt elsewhere. Did you want me to take any questions now or did you want me to wait till the end? Okay, James has a question. This terrific idea. In what way is the class content focused on adult basic education? Oh, that's a great question. So the MOOC itself is an instructional design MOOC. So our focus really is kind of a pay it forward deal within the MOOC. So the people who will be enrolling in the MOOC are adult educators. They might be instructional designers. They might be people who are just interested in this in general. And they will actually be then creating the adult educational resources for instructors as well as learners. And so the content within the MOOC is not necessarily adult basic education content. The project-based course, the project of the course is where the adult basic education focus comes from. And I see some folks typing. So as maybe some questions are coming in, I could maybe mention a few other things. The approach we're taking from an instructional design standpoint, as I said, it's a 12-week experience. And so we're going through a basic instructional design cycle, kind of the analysis phase, going through to looking at the learners, the adult learner population, as well as what the career in college and the standards are. JR, who I mentioned is, thank you again, JR for populating things in the chat room. He's actually done a wonderful module on OER and Creative Commons licensing and giving the MOOC participants an understanding of this whole world that unfortunately a lot of folks are not aware of. And from there, then, students in the MOOC will then have the opportunity to do a written design plan, do a prototype of their learning materials, which will go through a round of formative evaluation, and then finally they'll present their materials to be published on OER Commons. And James, yeah, so the licenses at the end, everything that will go on OER Commons will be Creative Commons license. They do have a little bit of flexibility. We are hoping everyone will just do a CC buy, but certainly they have the ability within OER Commons to restrict it to non-commercial or whatever it may be, but the encouragement is CC buy. Okay, well thank you so much. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak today. Okay, see we have another question from Alexa. That's a great question. Alexa is asking for the finished product. What does the technology, could it be used? It's wide open. The way we've structured it, the thing that you will be posting within OER Commons is basically a Google Docs and you have the ability then to embed or to link to other resources that you've created. So if you want to use some other authoring platform for more robust development, that's fine as long as then we're able to link from that within OER Commons. So the world is open in terms of what you choose to use as your development platform for the resource. Okay, so let's move on to Thomas. Again, he's here to talk about the Opportunity Education Project, which is focusing on easy access and equal opportunity in education. So Thomas, would you like to take over? Yes, thank you. I'm Thomas Pilsam from Germany and I'm quite happy to have the opportunity to introduce our project or at least a part of the project here. Can everyone hear me okay? Seems to be okay. Good. The Opportunity Education Project was inspired by teachers and pupils we were in touch with developing technical solutions in order to better their open source LMSs like Model and other things. And we are software developers so we're looking at not what we can produce and code, but what actually the end user, the learner or the teacher is requiring. We don't believe in these one size fits all already out of the box kind of learning technology simply because it doesn't work. Everyone of us learns in a different way and so the technology should support this. And one of the aspects we have in this is that especially where I'm from in Germany there's this Moodles for instance LMS which is quite popular. It's popular simply because this is what the federal government supports with server facilities and updates and administration things like this. So what teachers where asking for is an opportunity to swap content from an LMS to an LMS rather than rebuilding open source courses with a PDF from here a PowerPoint from there simply because it is taking too much time or also to be honest they don't simply know sometimes how to operate the systems. So what was required is how to free content from a Moodle or from an OpenOrlat or from any other LMS and have it swapped through a content hub to another LMS without retyping just flicking a button clicking a few things and have a course which is made in Moodle run in an OpenOrlat platform for instance. And the end result should be that people from anywhere with any type of LMS can work the same course at the same time of course it is always native in their platform but they can use a course which is created in Moodle in Australia or in the US and they can use it and take it just into their Unite, OpenOrlat or even a Canvas or whatever the LMS might be and run it there. So that is the requirement that is what we are developing in the moment and we have one piece of technology we are using for it just for those that are interested in technology we are using the Experience API it is also called XAPI for market users probably it is more popular under the name TinCan which was the original project name during development but the official name of the technology is Experience API simply because the Experience API is the perfect means to transport and store data not only learning data data in general and with learning data we can push from left to right we can also push content from left to right and for this technology a lot of people know SCORM quite often it is said XAPI will be the successor of SCORM it is probably not it allows for a lot more things to be done it is mobile it is on a platform all these kind of things which are with SCORM the hindrance and in order to make SCORM content basically fit for the 21st century layers and wrappers are used which are powered by the XAPI and in the same way we use this we use this in order to swap complete content pieces from a native model to a complete different open OLED or customized platform so that teachers can just pick and choose in their language this is a good physics or biologic or mathematics course rather than taking the time to do this and reinvent the wheel myself and just pull this course in make it available to the students collect with my native functionalities of my LMS or the learning records I need for assessments done with it so the idea is with this practically to do something what we do already in one project and we picked that project in particular to support teachers which create learning courses through museum guides these are 7 EU countries 8 schools from 7 EU countries that work in museums to bring museums into school to get people more interested into art but also to get traditional subjects from school into a museum thinking of Leonardo da Vinci you can think of him as an artist but you can think of him also as a physicist as a chemist there are plenty of things and in order to make this out of this Erasmus Europe sponsored project more global we thought ok we don't just produce one platform where these 8 school benefit we create in addition to this stand alone versions of that so that other schools which think this is a good deductible concept can just adopt it install a model and just jump in borrow content from this program or supply content to that program that would work on a model basis actually quite simple that's not that difficult to do this to push content from moodle to moodle but we have a very diverse world not everyone is using moodle and in order to make this then happen to or with an exchange through a content hub with any LMS that is what we are currently working on that is part of our global projects opportunity in education and that is where we actually looking for participation anyone who is interested in either contributing to the development or running a pilot project to connect to pilot project that use the central content hub the more the merrier the more different the LMS are the better simply because we still have to fine tune we know many of them but we don't know all and we don't know all the customizations people may have done to their installs so that we can cater for these things the more people contribute and the more people get dug in into this kind of technology like into uses we are very open for this we are starting with pilot projects from March this year all the way through the end of 2016 and looking and looking then to release the technology as open source to the market and to anyone who actually cares by December this year January next year any questions to this is this an EU project? no this is not an EU project the project came about actually with a call for participation from the German government but as efficient as we Germans are with something so slow we are especially when it is policy makers and decision makers we made that suggestion to the German school authorities and the German government and they were all like well we have a lot of issues with this to fit somehow in our civil servants schedule so we said okay fine at the time when you are thinking we just start this so we have collaboration with Austrian universities Dutch universities we are in the Middle East we have a base which we are simply because we said that this approach after we introduced it to many people was taken on very friendly by many people we said good that is something we actually going out to say we change a bit of the way technology works for e-learning and learning in general in order also then to promote open educational resources and present this as a project for the export 2020 in Dubai so it is in the moment a private initiative from our company with a lot of people supporting it as sponsors or as participants in pilot projects but it is not an EU or public or any way funded project at this stage German government funding presumably at some point there is a bit of a Christmas wishlist kind of thing we are not really sure we want German government funding at this point simply because if it is federal government then they just put the label on it with it is kindly sponsored by Ministry Ex or that and then to get funds is really hard and going through the different federal states and all the different rules is another problem also it slows us down so in the moment we are looking more into how to support and how to really bring lifelong learning on the road and how to get lifelong learning documented electronically and certified and verifiably documented and there is a lot of business interested in these kind of things and we basically go out and try to encourage businesses to say listen the better the kids come from school the more qualified students come from universities the better work material you have for your work force so it is you in the end of the day beside the actual learner who benefit the most simply because it saves you a lot of money so invest some of that money into this development so this is in the moment the approach we are taking it is not a business model as such in the end of the day we are just inventing a few things and try to see how many people we can encourage to join in the way technology is used in e-learning yeah thank you it does make sense to get a bit more about the idea of what we do probably a visit to that website opportunity education is a good idea because the central content for this LMS thing is just one small piece of what this project is about great thank you very much Thomas again we will have more opportunity for questions at the end of the meeting we also wanted to let you know that if you are interested in learning more about the project Thomas and his company are one of the sponsors of our conference this year in Poland and they will be having a presentation there about this project and of course then you will have the opportunity to socialize with him and learn more about it so please if you are coming to Poland and we hope you are that you will have the opportunity to join his session and meet him in person so thank you very much to both Jennifer and Thomas for your really really interesting project we wanted to talk with all of you a little more about the 10 year anniversary of the Cape Town Declaration so as most of you know 10 years ago almost in September of 2007 this declaration was written by some of the foremost thinkers in open education at the time who got together in Cape Town and put out a declaration of what open education is, what it should be and what we were supporting in a new way of approaching and thinking about education and how education should be constructed so this meeting was sponsored by the Shuttleworth Foundation and the Open Society Foundation and we are working with those two organizations to plan the global celebration of the Cape Town Declaration next year and although we haven't made a big announcement about it yet I can let you know that our conference the Open Education Global Conference will take place in Cape Town in 2017 in March which is why we really want to make sure we have an extra strong celebration of the Cape Town Declaration that can be done in Cape Town at our conference a year from now so we wanted to ask you guys to first solicit your ideas this is the very beginning of the planning period for the celebration of the Cape Town Declaration so we really wanted to hear from you what do you think we should do to mark the Cape Town Declaration 10 year anniversary at the same time we should mention that it is the 5 year anniversary of the Paris Declaration and Davor who is on this call has let us know that in celebration of that the second meeting of the global community around OER and Open Education policy maker level will happen in Slovenia sometime in either 2017 or 2018 and they are also at the very beginning of this so through the 10 year celebration of the Cape Town Declaration and the 5 year celebration of the Paris Declaration followed by the second World Congress on OER that will take place in Slovenia we have this fantastic opportunity in the next year to really focus on Open Education at all levels entrepreneurs, administrators, educators how should we do this how can we kick this off with the celebration of the Cape Town Declaration so welcome your ideas please before and after analysis yeah so actually Davor thank you for bringing that up the Mozilla Foundation Mark Serman who was a shuttle worth solo at the time of the Cape Town Declaration was written and he was one of the main authors he is now the head of the Mozilla Foundation and they are going to commission a report along with shuttle worth and the Open Society Foundation to survey those who are at the Cape Town Declaration meeting 10 years ago and find out what they are doing now so a 10 year kind of retrospective on what people are doing what people have done in Open Education so what other kinds of analyses were you thinking of Davor or anyone else if you have ideas for the celebration for markers, for studies things that we should be doing that we want to get the planning started for now please go ahead throw them out brainstorm doesn't matter how crazy they are that's great so gathering of statistics on OER including policies, laws high level things global impact so that's interesting I know we have tried to many people have tried to assess the impact of Open Education on learners through doing a look at success rate in courses that incorporate OER for example but I don't think that's really been done on a global level that's really been done on an institution to institution level alright I'm going to propose that if you're interested in working on this to figuring out what the celebration should look like and what kinds of studies maybe we should do or events that we should hold in celebration of the declaration or what we should be doing about it at our conference next year please email us at feedback at oeconsortium.org we'll put together a committee to start looking at this if we're going to do things like what Davor is suggesting which I think we can all agree would be really helpful if we had some global statistics and great infographics to share about the impact of Open Education to mark the 10 year anniversary if we could do that it's going to take some planning and some work so we need people to help us figure that out in the next few months so please if you're interested in helping us with that get back to us at feedback at oeconsortium.org and we will put you on the committee okay so the next thing we wanted to quickly go over was the Open Education Awards for Excellence this is an opportunity for us to recognize those people in the Open Education community who are doing great things and we have a number of different categories that people can be nominated for individual categories we also have organizational categories so there's a leadership category there's educator categories for individuals and outstanding Open Education site an outstanding course an open MOOC open research creative innovation we're also willing to look at other categories so if we missed the category that you think is really important in Open Education that we should recognize get in touch with the committee and let us know this is the area on the website it's under projects on our website the Open Education Awards for Excellence if you know someone who you think would be an excellent candidate in the individual category or an organization or a website that should be nominated for special recognition please go to our website read over the criteria and submit your nomination it's pretty straightforward the information on there is quite basic to let us know what's happening and why you think they should be considered then our committee or our board of directors will take a look at that and make decisions these awards will be presented at our conference which I've mentioned a few times in Poland the early registration for that ends on February 10th so you've got a few more weeks to register if you want the early burn rate the website for that is conference at oeconsortium.org the deadline for the award for excellence in Open Education is January 29th so you have about another week and we'd love to see some global recognitions happening at our conference this year so finally we wanted to leave the last 15 minutes or so for your questions, comments discussion items, other things that you would like feedback on or that you have or that you would like us to know about what you're working on in Open Education you all have the opportunity to have a microphone so if you'd like to speak just let us know and make sure you're called on and if not we also have the chat window open so please, any questions, comments or discussion items so Davauer is saying you're pushing for applications Davauer are you looking for people to collaborate with you on a project I'm not sure what you mean by push for applications okay great so if you're interested in applying for European Commission grants on learning technologies technology for learning and skills application Davauer is interested in finding partners to work on that those applications with him so if you don't have Davauer's email address feel free to get in touch with us and we'll be happy to link you up I guess Una we should probably clarify that the European Commission grants will only give money to people in the European Union but I'm sure Davauer would be happy to have collaboration from people anywhere in the world to give ideas and to help out people who are interested in working on that with you alright does anybody else have comments questions or discussion items that they want to bring up again you're welcome to use the chat window or microphone whichever you're more comfortable with yes thanks Alexa we are recording the webinar and we will make the link available on our site where you sign up for to participate in the meeting today you'll find links to all of our past meetings the recordings from those and we'll put the recording for this meeting up there as well and on that note I think we'll stop the recording unless someone else wants to take the microphone