 Thank you. Well, hello, everybody, and welcome to our Open Ed Week session on collaborative strategic planning with OE Global and CCCOER. We're so glad that you decided to join us and spend some time with us. To let you know, over the last several years, CCCOER and OE Global, who is our parent organization, have been working on strategic planning. The pandemic, in the case of CCCOER was a little bit of a disruption during our strategic planning, but we'll tell you a little bit more about what the upside of that was. With OE Global, it was really an opportunity to do a deep dive into strategic planning with members and executive boards, etc. So, we are celebrating 10 years of Open Education Week this week, which is really exciting and it's just so wonderful to see what everyone is doing. And how it has grown over the years. In fact, I went back onto my old laptop and I found the presentation that CCCOER did in 2012. Just a quick, really super quick shout out to Donna Slaughter from Scottsdale Community College, Judy Baker from Foothill, Tom Caswell, who was running the open course library program in Washington State at the time, and Corey Bergeron, who is an instructional designer in Ohio, and they presented back in 2012. So hats off to those folks who've helped us grow this and you can see the numbers here over 70,000 participants throughout the years, and 79, 192 countries. So really impressive. So we want to talk about the planning process, what came out of it, and how we can collaborate together on doing this strategic planning to make Open Education a success. You've heard a lot from me. I'm Una Daley, the director of the Community College Consortium, and I'll turn it over to my partners in crime here to introduce themselves. You go ahead, Judith. Thank you, Paul. Sorry about that pause. Hello, I'm Judith Sybesta, and I serve as the CCCOER Executive Council President. And my day job is as the executive director of the Digital Higher Education Consortium of Texas. And I'd like to mention that I live and work in Austin, Texas, where the Tongkawa lived and the Comanche and Apache moved through. I honor their contributions to this land. Thank you, Paul. Go ahead. That's nice. And I guess, hi, everyone. Welcome. I'm Paul Stacey. I'm the executive director of Open Education Global, and it's our delight really to host Open Education Week every year. I'm based in Vancouver and I live on the unceded lands of the Squamish Coast Salish and Slaveltooth nations, and I'm very thankful for them, allowing me to be here. Thank you, Judith and Paul. And I should say that I'm in Northern California. I'm in the San Francisco Bay Area, and we reside on the lands of the Aloni people who still live, work here. And so pleased to be able to enjoy the lovely area we live in. So Paul, do you want to talk about Open Education Global? Sure. I'll just do it really fast because this isn't so much about strategic planning, but more just a kind of snapshot of the work that OE Global does, or that's what we call it, OE Global for short. We basically act as a membership organization that brings together the global open education community, and we have lots of members all around the world as you can see there and a blend. It's mostly higher education, but we're increasingly moving into K-12 as well. We definitely have a global focus, but we also acknowledge that open education is different in different parts of the world. And so we have what we call nodes, which in some cases are regional, like CCCOER, looking at support for community colleges, primarily in the US and Canada. But we also have a node of open education practitioners in Latin America, and we also have one actually for the Francophone community for not so much a region, but a language. In addition to OE Week, we give out annual awards of excellence for open education and that's something we are delighted to do. And we do an annual conference for open education practitioners around the world, and that conference is happening in person, in not France, in May, it'll have a virtual component to of course. Great. Thank you Paul. And CCCOER, which is part of Open Education Global, founded back in 2007. So we've been working with colleges across North America since that time. And I always say, you know, our mission really hasn't changed in 15 years, almost 15 years. It's all about improving student equity and success. So many things have changed around us, the platforms, the availability of content, the policies, the national and statewide policies to support this work. So we, we really love to see the progress that's been made and all of the wonderful work that all of you out there do. Yeah, back to you Paul on motivation. Yeah, so this is kind of how open education global got really kind of the motivation to get engaged in doing strategic planning. We, you know, the pandemic and COVID was obviously a major disruption to everyone. And as the executive director I thought well actually you know it's a really great time to think about doing a strategic plan because we can kind of look at what's being disrupted right now and think about what what that might look we know what that might result in and how we can anticipate some of the changes that the pandemic precipitates. And so we decided to embark on this, we wanted to do it in a way that would involve our whole board of directors all of our staff our members in the global community. And we really took it as an opportunity to reexamine what who we are what we do the context of open education and how that's evolved and changed. And in particular look at the successes in the field and consider how we might help them further. And ask the kind of executive director one of the things I've been trying to do is think of strategic planning less as a sort of once every three year kind of thing that you do and more of a continuous activity that you continually engage in. So that's kind of where we were coming from when we jumped into the process of engaging everyone in a strategic planning process. Great. Thanks Paul and I think CCC we are would be the same and we definitely have made it a continuous process. Since we started back in 2019. In the fall of 2019 and didn't really deliver till last fall. So back to you Judith. But you know strategic planning processes necessarily will differ depending on the context in which they occur, but at its heart strategic planning is a systemic process through which an organization agrees on, and builds commitment among key stakeholders to priorities essential to that organization's mission. So I think it's back to you Paul to talk about. Well, so I think probably all of you have been in most of you perhaps have been engaged in strategic planning at some time or another. And often it's done and like you bring everyone together into a location and over a two or three day period of time you hammer out a new strategic plan but clearly in the pandemic that wasn't possible so it became necessary to develop or an invent in a sense a new way of doing strategic planning and this is a short outline of the process that we use was done completely virtually. And we broke the whole planning process up into seven steps. And each step was given kind of two weeks of time for a board members and staff to engage in each step involved the video, which I shot to provide some of the context for that step. And then we had questions to think about a hands on activity, not so much writing as much as creating graphics and visual representations that were outputs for each step. And then those outputs were posted virtually into a discussion area on our OEG connect space, where all of the participants could kind of see each other's work and then comment on it engage in discussion on it and use that as a means of building consensus and congruence between what everyone was posting. I should say just quickly about the steps, which again were a bit different than how perhaps traditional strategic planning processes are done in that usually kind of start with your vision and your mission and all that kind of stuff. So we actually started with what are the goals of open education, what's the purpose of open education and one of the things I've experienced in my long, long years here in the open education space is that is actually not a lot of agreement among open education practitioners on just what it is that we're trying to accomplish. What is it that we think are the goals of open education so we actually started with that and it was very interesting to start with that, particularly in a global context. But you can see the other steps. We talked about open education as being an ecosystem that's kind of layered on top of the education ecosystem. So we looked at the roles what is the role of open education global itself and who is open education global actually who are the people, the staff, the board our members and our collaborators and partners, and are they the right ones or do we want more do we want different ones. What are the activities we do and this is really tricky because you know you have activities that we as I said earlier we've done every year. So you continue to do those activities as part of your new strategic plan, are you adding new ones are you stopping ones that's all part of the discussion. I mean lastly the last two things are kind of related we looked at what's the sustainability how does only global sustain itself and continue its operations going forward in time. And how do we measure the impact or success, or even meaning of what we do what are the metrics associated with it. I would say these seven steps generate a lot of input and at the end we had, we formed a working committee of two staff to board members and two external people to actually take all of that input and condense it and consolidated into a draft strategic plan, which we then shared out to our community of members and the global community for feedback and additions, and, and then posted the final strategic plan to our website, where it in a delightful open education fashion got translated into French and Spanish by our community so there's an English version of French version of Spanish version on our website which we which we love us we try to embrace more of the diversity of a multi legal I'm, oh, okay, I forgot to put these in. So this is a little this sort of shows you some of the outputs this is like in step one, the goals and purpose of open education and how people think about it. And one of the, one of the things that happens with strategic planning is that you not everyone agrees right at the start and this immediately happens so then. So this is an image in the top left that imagines open education as a flywheel which, which once you spin it, you know takes a lot of effort to get it spinning but then once it's spinning, it kind of sustains itself with less effort but you can see some of the goals around affordability inclusion accessibility and adaptation so on. This is actually from someone in Japan, this is how they viewed it. And another person to kind of look at it as a pie. You know where where open education schools and purposes are sort of like each of this, each of the segments or pieces of a pie are a different goal and purpose of open education. And then one at the right kind of put learners at the center, and, and focused on that collaboration the stewardship the sharing kinds of things that are a part of open education and looking at creating full human potential as one of the goals of open education so part of the challenge always is, you know, how do you take these different perspectives and then consolidate them into a shared strategic plan. Delightfully, I thank you. And I completely agree with Paul on that, bringing all of these wonderful ideas together can be can be challenging but I think it's it's so worthwhile to take that time. So CCC we are, you know, was developing a strategic plan as well and started actually just a little bit before the pandemic so in the fall of 2019. And working with our executive council for CCC we are, we have some very experienced administrators, and they suggested that we use the SOAR framework rather than the typical SWAT framework, because it was so much more positive it's about opportunities, aspirations as opposed to threats and weaknesses. And so we worked through that in imagining a shared vision, and then designing what the initiatives were and is what we call pillars, and then taking action. So we, we actually met at Open Ed 2019 we had a big member meeting over breakfast and we brainstormed around vision and mission statements. And in addition to that, throughout the fall and the early winter we were doing surveys with members, staff, and then we interviewed external stakeholders in Open Ed and I think Judith is going to talk a little bit more about who we actually interviewed, but from people kind of all over the spectrum of education. And what really emerged was this, this was an early vision, and we captured sort of the words, the main words that kept reappearing and big thanks to Sue Taschen who who did this coding of the responses that we got from our various members and stakeholders. So diverse, accessible, celebrate, inclusive, equity, diversity, regional leaders, and those came up over and over again. And Judith is going to talk a little bit about the iteration. Yeah, you know we use the term iteration because as Paul said you want this to be a continuous process, and it shouldn't just end with the creation of a final draft of a strategic plan but that kind of feedback should be going on and on. And we will continue to be seeking feedback from stakeholders like these, but we really are so grateful for both the internal and the external stakeholders that provided feedback on various drafts of this plan. These included the CCC OER strategic operations and planning committee, which was comprised of amazing individuals like Lisa young suit as Jean who had mentioned Jean run in Michael Mills, Liz Yada who is here in the webinar and myself and But there also was consultation of external OER experts I'd like to mention these just names of these luminaries in the field we were so grateful to have their feedback and support these included Angela de Barger from the Hewlett Foundation cable green from creative Commons, Mary Burgess BC campus, Ryan Erickson and the class of the Michaelson 20 mm foundation, Nicole Allen of spark, Nicole think binder of open stacks, and Raji john johnny of the quantum polytechnic university. And then we also consulted with open education global staff Paul Stacy and his team provided feedback, and the general CCC OER executive council provided feedback on a number of drafts and a number of occasions. But I cannot underestimate I'm sorry I cannot overestimate the importance of the general CCC OER membership for the feedback that they provided on a number of occasions, and they were the group of individuals that we went to at the end of this process to get their final feedback on the strategic plan. Anna. Yeah, thank you Judith and I would just reiterate what Judith said. This went out in our annual survey and it was brought up at our quarterly meetings, and that helped us with revising the strategic plan going forward. All right, this looks like back to me so. So this is what the open education global strategic plan main page looks like. And you'll see that we called this strategic there's a couple things of interest here one is the title for the strategic plan open for public good actually references one of the goals that emerged out of our deliberations around what are the goals and purpose of open education and so one of those is that open and open education is all about generating a public good. And, and the other thing that's perhaps worth noting is that the strategic plan is a really long one from 2021 to 2030, which is not typically what you see for a strategic plan. We deliberately did that to align our strategic plan with the UNESCO sustainable development goals, which, which for those of you that have been involved with that are the aim is to resolve the sustainable development goals that UNESCO has mapped out by 2030 and we thought, going to be great of our strategic plan, kind of aligned with that and tried to achieve a similar goal. Yeah. So, in terms of outcomes. I mean, clearly what happened is, for each of the seven steps we generated a whole set of outcomes. So we did in the strategic plan define what what open education global sees as the open education goals and the purpose of open education. And we did develop some representations that look at how education is an ecosystem and how openness fits into that. And we, we, we spell out in the strategic plan what our specific roles are, and who we are, and what the activities are that we're doing now, and some new strategic activities are that we plan to do going forward. And each of these kind of seven steps generated a whole set of outputs which have been consolidated into the strategic plan and and if we go forward to the next slide. Yeah, so here's the, so the suite of goals that we eventually collectively agreed on were around around open education being socially just around open education being a public good around open education being inclusive and open education being accessible affordable and adaptable and open education being collaborative facilitated by community and stewards and then finally around open education having impact maximizing education participation around the world, that kind of thing and we basically tried to represent it in this particular diagram. I'll actually say a few more words on these next couple of slides or one slide I guess. This is how we ended up talking about open education which is perhaps different from how many of you think about open education. But in the in on the right, it's sort of representation of education asset ecosystem where we have the main actors, learners, educators and administrators and government. And then on the left of that diagram or the three main activities that are part of what education entails teaching and learning research and then a public community service component. You see we've kind of in the middle of that overlaid those open education goals, and then kind of like a spider web of connections, because one of the roles that became clear and our strategic line process for open education global is that we play a function of connecting participants to these things across the ecosystem so we're a bit of a connector, if you will. Another thing that became a really important topic of conversation is just that when we talk when we use that word open education, we're not just talking about open education resources. We really are talking about how open education maps into the whole open education into the whole education ecosystem, teaching and learning yes and things at the top left represents some of the ways that happens, but also research with open access systems, open data, open science, and then increasingly especially with open pedagogy, the way in which open education contributes to the public, whether that's helping improve Wikipedia articles and helping attain sustainable development goals, but there is a distinct public community service component to open education that we feel is really important to talk about. Oh, and then lastly, of course with this strategic plan you want to focus. And so we defined for our organization, these three strategic areas of focus we're really focusing on field building building the whole field of open education, enabling knowledge exchange by connecting people to each other and facilitating that whole. Here's what I do. Here's the best practice that I have and here's something that you might want to try yourself. And then this last piece around value co creation is actually a concept that has been developed by Menervik and Norman. We actually use some strategic planning books that are more that are quite contemporary books that look at how to do strategic planning for a networked world. So in a digital context, and this is a real strong component of a lot of what they talked about which is moving away from kind of supply chain models of providing products and services to actually creating value together. And that really resonated for us in the open education field because that's essentially what we do. We co create value together. So this is a third area of focus for us as an organization going forward. Great. Thank you for that overview. And Judah back to you. Thank you. So after our really two year iterative process, we finally landed on this vision statement and this mission statement. The vision of CCC OER being equitable access for all learners to high quality education through open educational resources and open education pedagogy to support their success. We really wanted the focus here to be on the learners. And so then we also came up with the mission of CCC OER to engage a diverse network of leaders and practitioners in advocating for open education to promote equitable and inclusive instruction and learning. And if you think back to when Una mentioned early in the strategic planning process, when we had done a survey and see Tashji and was so great to code the results of those surveys and the words that she that Una mentioned that came up are reflected here. I do believe diverse, accessible, inclusive, celebrating equity, diversity, regional leaders. Now, those may not all be explicit here, but they come out really later in our goals. But let me turn it over back over to Una to talk a little bit about the pillars that support this vision and this mission. Okay, thanks to. So, we had five pillars that emerged out of this work. Very quickly go through so advocating for open educational pedagogies or practices to empower contributions from diverse learners and educators who have been traditionally underrepresented. So that was a very strong one that came out and I have to say, that was not in the original. The original surveys, but there became just so much deeper understanding of who wasn't being represented. Not only in our educational systems but in open education. And so this was one of those things that I think we're all very proud of, because it was something that it through this kind of deep process we came to advancing awareness and through professional development and the appropriate recognition of the labor involved. Collaborating with academic and government leaders on sustainable policies and protection of student rights. Develop evidence based metrics to measure impact. And this is actually evidence based metrics from for our community to adapt to their institutions. Because that is something that very strongly comes up. And finally, developing an efficient organizational culture and I think I also this one was kind of focused on all of the programs that we work on in addition to our network. There's quite a few national programs and statewide programs that we work on to support our members and also to enlarge the community and who can participate. So, you know, in mapping between these two systems they're very compatible I think open education global CCC we are and the pillars fit in under those brought that broad. Paul, if you prefer big tent or umbrella of those big three strategic initiatives. There was a set of if you go to the strategic plan for OE global you'll see there's a stewardship section, and I thought that mapped very well into the pillars. So you see systemic change policies and practices promoting that advocacy and awareness and you see that over in the CCC OER pillars you see the collaboration, you see the community building, and you see the leadership and mentoring, as we have in ours as well. So, just, I think a very synergistic fit. And would you like to add anything Paul or Judith. Thank you, Paul. No, I'm good. All right. Great. So lessons learned back to Paul. Right, so I suppose that there's a few thoughts for me. I would say that disruption ended up being a good time for us rethink strategy and kind of anticipate the next disruption. One of the things that we've ended up doing is kind of looking at not just status quo, a strategic plan that works in the status quo context but in the context of what might be some changes that are coming our way that we need to anticipate. And we did spend quite a lot of time talking about the underlying principles of open, which, which I think is well worth doing, and, and make sure in that make sure, make sure, making sure that there's some, some common belief around what the old those underlying principles are, as well as the goals and purpose that that was a big area of work for us to get clear on right from the start. I want to reemphasize that certainly in our strategic planning it became evident that open education is much more than just open education resources. And that entails then thinking about what's our capacity as an organization to embrace all of those forms of openness that go beyond teaching and learning to research and community service. But, but really to acknowledge that if we as a single organization can't do it, then perhaps we need to collaborate and partner with others that, in a sense, share the same principles of open in our engaged in supporting open in other ways within the education sector. And then we definitely have this, this wonderful notion of like, yes, open education global serves this purpose of kind of acting as a big tent, if you will, like when I suggested for open education globally, but then strategically we also are very much focused on how do we enable open education facilitate and foster open education in more local settings so there's sort of an only global plus only local focus. I think we used a good friend of mine Matt pinch as a kind of facilitator to help us with the strategic planning and one thing he kept probing it is what will you stop doing. Which is often a really hard question in strategic planning exercises because if you believe what you're currently doing is really effective you don't really want to give up on anything. But nonetheless, sometimes you have to stop doing things in order to make room for doing new things. And lastly, I mentioned already, the strategic planning, we think is a continuous process and Luna and Liz on this webcast will attest to the fact that we've continued to engage in more strategic planning work, even after having published the strategic plan itself. So in my thinking, I often think of strategic planning as sort of a form of professional of ongoing professional and organizational development that just is a kind of evergreening process. Thank you for that Paul and I, you know, I couldn't agree more with you that it is a form of professional and organizational development. I know for some of the folks on the CCC we are exact Council of course are quite experienced their high level administrators they've done this many times. And they've mentored those of us who are less familiar with that and of course we have people who who don't normally do strategic planning. So it has been a wonderful opportunity for all of those people who've been participating. So, our lessons learned are a little bit more on the humor side, but important all the same so you know a pandemic can delay strategic planning but as Paul mentions disruptions happen and this won't be the last one. Delay, yes we had to delay and this was part of was that we had an executive council change within that two year period so the folks who did all that original really foundational work that was led by Lisa and Sue, and Jean and Mike. Some of those people had to move off. And so we had to wait to finalize it. And I think one of the things that's most has been most deep full. Sorry, meaningful and deep is that is that the equity and social justice really, really got more embedded and, and I think we've all felt very strongly about that but we were able to articulate it going forward. Next to you know and I'll follow on that and say that strategic planning can and probably should be influenced by the moment in which you're living. It will be a, you know, a document in process and in progress should be a living document, but it really will likely and should reflect the societal influences challenges pressures barriers that come to bear in that moment. But we've mentioned it before the importance we believe in engaging a variety of stakeholders both internal and external, but I also want to mention that it is important to provide multiple opportunities for your primary stakeholders. And, you know, I will say that what you're hearing here are strategic planning processes for two fairly large and complex organizations, one international, one national. I lead a statewide organization and in 2019 we went through a strategic planning process, but I'd like to emphasize that strategic planning can be helpful really at any level. It can all you know it can go down to the programmatic level where you have an initiative or program you're implementing. It's really good to create a strategic plan for that. And one of the first steps is to identify who this, your primary stakeholder is, and for us as I've mentioned that was CCC OER is membership, but it might be your faculty, it might be your staff, and it might be your students who took all of those into consideration and creating this, but ultimately for CCC OER and its organizational mission, the membership is the primary stakeholder but you want to be sure that you're getting that feedback and getting it numerous times. Thanks. Alright, thank you Judith and thank you Judith for all the work she has done on this and she came on board. Thank you. Alright, I'm not sure who's this one is. I got the pretty picture. I'll speak to it tonight. So, so one of the things that happened in our strategic planning process was that we did acknowledge that in accomplishing the goals and sort of strategies we lay out in the plan. So, think about how we do this work, not just ourselves, but in partnership with others. And so once we had published our strategic plan, one of the things I started to do is just outreach to other, let me call them sister organizations in the open education space to say, Hey, you have a strategic plan, we have a strategic plan. We seem to crosswalk them to see where the points of connection are between our strategic plans, and then maybe talk about how we might try to achieve those particular areas together, rather than a part. And so, I think this is an interesting part of strategic planning that is rarely done, which is like every organization does its own strategic plan but they don't try to connect them together. And so I became very interested in whether the strategic plans themselves can serve that purpose of connecting organizations together to do things collaboratively rather than apart. Because I think in the open education space, we can achieve so much more by joining forces, a lot more than we can autonomously. So I just wanted to kind of put that out there and say, if any of you have a strategic plan that you have developed that you think might be interesting to dovetail and connect with ours. I'd love to kind of work on that with you and discuss how we might collaborate on doing things together where there's points of connection. Yeah, so if you like me to just mention this, just speaking to what Paul said, we'd love to spend some time today because we have have some time left, letting you share your experience on ideas things like are you in the process of strategic planning or are you planning to in the future. What processes have you found effective might be effective or could be improved always those kind of learning to fell moments can be instructive as well. And what challenges have you experienced or do you anticipate experience with strategic planning and to this end and to what Paul said, we've created a spreadsheet that after this what right now you could but after this webinar, you could contribute to if you have a link to a strategic plan somewhere just drop the link to that spreadsheet in the chat, but we'd also welcome you right now if you'd like to to speak to your own experiences in the chat. You can, or I don't know or Liz if it's possible for them to to unmute themselves if they want to speak that way. Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. Please do. We just, in fact, we'll just stop sharing now. Yeah, please do. You should be able to unmute yourself. And share any thoughts you have about strategic planning. Well, thank you Ryan for speaking chatting up here. You at Kingsborough Community College just completed a draft of our open education strategic plan by participating in the Arlo leadership program. And we're so excited to hear that Ryan thank you so much. I have to say by the way on a personal note, I have a previous career, some of you know as a theater professor, and Ryan and I share that connection from the number of years ago so it's so gratifying to to see Ryan and not to me and connected when he became involved in CCC OER. So it's just really gratifying to hear from him. Yeah, and just very quickly in Ryan you can speak up if you can grab the mic but I just wanted to say our regional leaders of open education network is a professional development experience for those who are in OER and want to know we are leaders and as part of that program they develop a strategic plan. And in fact, it would be wonderful. You know sometime in the near future to have some of the folks who've gone through that program present their strategic plan. So thank you so much Ryan I don't know why it didn't occur to me. Thank you Karen. Karen Cajalosi is here wonderful. And thank you Karen for sharing the invitation to participate there is one more opportunity this year to participate in that program. I'll just say it was, it was really, really beneficial Karen and the whole team were just magnificent and I think the, you know, on the closing day that the one of the big takeaways was that it just provided us the time that we very often don't have to really like think through those questions of where do we want to take our open education initiatives and how do we want to do it and just creating space for that time and those conversations with with the advocates of open was was really, really special. Thank you Ryan and Ryan, what role do you have at Kingsborough. I'm, I'm the director of the theater arts program, and I'm also the faculty coordinator of open education so this is my first year in that role. Oh wow. Oh well wonderful. So that that is your job is putting together a strategic plan. Yes, and thank you Liz for sharing Karen Cajalosi and the rest of the team, the leadership team and some of the students and a few participants had a webinar yesterday. Yes and Kathy Germano was actually at that webinar yesterday presenting on that program so. Thank you again Ryan and please we we we wanted to finish on purpose early so that we could hear from all of you out there. Maybe I'll jump in just to say a few things when I see Jonathan supposed to send me but just just to say that. When it comes to strategic planning, there are lots of books of course that you can reference that guide you through a strategic planning process, but I really want to highlight some of the ones that we use which which is a strategy for a networked world, which is by men are vacant Norman and and though that book is really interesting for the way in which it talks about how, how, how strategic planning in a networked world and the digital world is different than in the world of things. So they definitely focus on relationships among what they call co producers that that go beyond, go beyond borders, go beyond the regional borders of our world and so it's, it's, it's quite an interesting thing to think about strategy in a network world where, where you're not so much providing a kind of sequential value chain of goods and services but actually collaborating in a networked way, where people collaborate and co produce and generate value and so it's just kind of to rethink strategy from that perspective was really refreshing for us and, and I found those particular books that particular one but there's also others by men are vacant Norman that address the same topic quite rewarding. And then lastly I'll just say that there is a kind of book by rummelt called good strategy bad strategy that that does present some very good guiding principles around how to think about strategy. And that, that, that talk about what's called a kernel, having a kernel at the core of your strategy, but I really found some of these contemporary books about strategic planning really quite rewarding to use. Thank you, Paul, I know that somewhat addressed what Jonathan said even if you hadn't had a chance to read it before you. That's something she wanted to share as well. Yeah, Jonathan I think that's such a great point and it's a valid concern of faculty, I'm a former faculty member. The first time I actually engaged in and led strategic planning was as a department chair. And, you know, I learned a lot of somewhat hard lessons in that but what, what the strategic number one. If faculty members are a stakeholder, then they need to be a part of the process they need to be engaged with it they need to feel a part of it and have a stake in it. But you know as a leader as a department here then as a leader of an organization now and other strategic planning I've been engaged in. It helps me because it gives me guideposts milestones goals that I can look at point to use. When a department chair for instance for a faculty member came and said, Wow, I really love some money to do this and I would say, Okay, let's, where does that fit within our strategic plan. Help me understand how that helps further the goals of our organization and our mission. And if the faculty member couldn't articulate how it could do that it's something we might need to put aside, perhaps it wouldn't be a priority, or perhaps it's something that tells told us that we need to revisit that strategic plan. So Jonathan, I mean, it might be utopian but a way I think you can avoid that is to make it clear and to act on the strategic plan being a living breathing document that you're constantly going to re evaluating shifting and changing as you might need to. I probably don't want to make it too long of I mean, I do think that Paul I think that that's not too long you don't want to make it like a 20 year plan. And generally strategic planning usually say you don't want the mission, the vision, you don't want those top level aspects of the plan to change anytime soon, but the pillars, the pillars even but really the goals and strategies that you use to fulfill that mission that vision, those could change and they likely will. I don't know if that helps Jonathan but I always appreciate your smart questions. Oh, thank you. A perva you have a you have something. I have a question. Paul when you were describing just the seven different stages with which your team and stakeholders decided to do this process you said it took two weeks. I heard you allude to how this was really more of a two year long process because you had so many people involved it was very collaborative you were reaching out to other organizations. The Rebus Community the Rebus Foundation where I work, we're always doing strategic planning it feels, and I think one of the challenges that then I know I have and I'm curious if any of you would be able to give us advice on is how to go about doing the work that we all want to be doing in the midst of perhaps, maybe a shift in strategic goals or action sort of as you're doing the planning. What is guiding you to do the work is it the previous plan that you had or is it the new plan that could be very similar could be very different that you're building or co creating or collaborating with folks. That's a great question of perva. And I know Paul wants to respond to, I do have to say sometimes it's a judgment call. You do want to stay. You know, consistent with your overall vision and goals, but sometimes things shift underneath you. So, go ahead, Paul. I'll just say I've heard about so the two weeks that I referenced earlier was per step. So if you multiply that by seven you get 14 weeks. And in fact it took a little bit longer than that even because what we found was that it was really important to allow there to be time to do the actual independent thinking yourself, then share it with the rest of the people doing planning with you, and then engage in some discussion around that so that there could be a shared as ideally a kind of shared mutual understanding of what the response to that particular step would be. So it took us much more than two weeks. I'll say that for sure. And then the process of actually writing taking all of that input that people had generated and kind of consolidating it into a strategic plan. And that's actually a major undertaking in and of itself. So we, we definitely took the long, a couple of months actually to do that particular part and engaged a professional writer to help with that. So the strategic planning is a lengthy process I would say maybe not, maybe not two years long, but or could be two years long. You know, in our context, we didn't really have a previous strategic plan that we were trying to now, you know, improve or adjust or change so it was really an attempt to create one that would serve as a, as a kind of guiding set of activities and strategies that we would now pursue. I mean, I do get the whole bad rap part and that kind of waste of time far, but that's not how I know I experienced that in other organizations myself, but that, but that's not how we were approaching it, we're really trying to make it a useful tool. Sorry, Judith, back here. No, that's okay, Paul. I'm, you know, I'm just looking at Emily's great comment here about the concept of being strategic that word itself can be a loaded term that, you know, historically, the term strategy can have a lot of baggage and that baggage can be attached to the term civilization colonialization it for many it's a strategy or being strategic is a militaristic and a geopolitical term. So maybe it's, you know, maybe it's a moment when we might need to rethink that very term because we know that that terminology can have a lot of a lot of weight and maybe it could be the open education community community that could lead that. I like that a lot. Yeah, because I mean, I will share another thing. You know, when I was like creative commons, Sarah Pearson, I co wrote a book on the book called made with creative commons which looked at, you know, how do you generate revenue and support your organization when you're freely and openly sharing. And, you know, initially we were calling that business models. But when you, you know, when we talked to the 24 case studies that they actually pushed back pretty hard against that term which is very much a business model in this world term, a business model and even a strategic plan, kind of similar kind of phrasing from a kind of world that's a little different than open. And so, sometimes it is helpful to, to think about what's the proper vocabulary to use to create this work. And that's why, you know, for our plan, like one of our strategic areas like value co creation, that's probably not a phrase that's in anyone else's strategic plan. But we think about it as we're in the business, we're in the process, I can say business but we're in the world of creating value creating networks or systems and so that if you have that as a kind of strategic concept, even just a mental image of what that entails that that often is really helpful as something that guides our work going forward, even like open education week. This is like a great example where co creating value globally as a community together it isn't open education global delivering products and services it's like a community effort and a development of a global network of people engaged in this practice of open education that's what's generating value and so I think that those are sort of significant shifts in thinking though from how we traditionally approach strategic plans. Right. And I think folks have said, maybe we need some new terminology. And I love that idea of maybe there's another term that we can use for some of that work that we do. And that will make it. More popular more and more encouraging to come back and not just say, every six months we have to go visit that strategic plan and update. You know, what have we met what haven't we, but make it a living document in some way that that people want to come back to. And I will say that I was. When we started this strategic planning process I was surprised at how much our members and our executive council wanted to engage in this. We, we spent several meetings of our executive council just this fall, but we did in previous times as well. And people really wanted to engage of course we had some of some of our some of our faculty were from the English department, so they wanted to help us word Smith. You know, and tune up and we know that words are important because they do convey the meaning. And so it's good to be precise and so it's, I do think people appreciate engaging in this and so maybe it's a little bit of a sales job, changing that name. Yeah, go ahead Brigitte. Hi. So I have a school in a Russia Tanzania that I started a while back and we really went through an interesting process of strategic planning around coven also because it was a huge break you know I had to suddenly come back to America. It was a complete paradigm shift for me about what is what is the purpose of education. It's not to just convey knowledge to the people in front of me it's to like enable them to pass on what I have so that when the teacher is not there. So it was a paradigm shift about the purpose of education. We were also initially shut down of course and so all of our students we have a preschool K to 12 in your college and parenting class for both so all ages, all shut down completely moved it to what's that but most of me we're in an urban slum in basically so many of our families don't even have mobile access and it was, you know, we've really had to start over from scratch rethinking things and yeah I was mentioning in the chat. Simon cynics start with why and I translated some pieces of that into Swahili and we use that the gold circle framework, our teachers have a six hour meeting about coming up with a one liner for what do we do and how that makes us different. And yeah I think it's amazing I think we've all been through the bad kind of mission statement brainstorm where everyone throws out 10,000 words and we had been through it before. As well, but it was like first of all we were asking the question with a new urgency about why because it felt like everything it was like the sudden gust of hurricane wind and everything that wasn't essential to what we are was just blown away. And then, you know what was left what was the one thing left and then that was the thing you can start with and grow on and it was so transformative of our teachers said to me is a little 10 we've been born again from this, and they really were. So we love that and then as far as the global we are I'm just getting familiar with all your work because part of what this strategic plan did for us was to focus on online education and reaching people outside of schools, because when they don't come to school, the resilience question is not just can they access the education because they can we all know that the question is will they, and what will be their experience with it and then if we can get the answer to that question to be yes they will and they want to then the question becomes well why aren't we reaching the millions of students that can't attend school and college in the world as it is, and motivating them to learn on their own with the OER and how are we, maybe our partnerships with the schools have been. We've been overly reliant on that the only movement has been overly reliant on going through schools, which ends up taking away from that purpose of equity and inclusion that's also seeing a moment of increased energy right now, because we're still relying on the schools as the gatekeepers. So I was wondering if any of you had comments about that. I did apply to the RLE program by the way and I don't mean this is any criticism at all but I couldn't get in because they said, since the organization is in Africa and I haven't incorporated yet in the US so hopefully I'll incorporate in the US and be able to be able to join that program it sounds like you guys are doing really neat things and hope to collaborate and it's really exciting to hear what you guys are learning. Thank you, Brigitte. Wow. Oh, and I should mention. So, yeah, I've launched an online bilingual OER site in English and Swahili and so we're targeting all the age groups. And we're hoping that this can be useful well beyond our school through Kenya and other areas that speaks Swahili as well as one thing I'm focused on is how to connect the scholars around the OER across the world. So can we get a pen pal program centered around reading OER together and also maybe looking at public domain books, novels, things that are going to get kids excited in a different way than a math textbook. Yeah, well thank you so much for sharing that I'd love if you could put a link to your website. We just launched this I'd love any feedback but still a work in progress for sure. Oh, great. Yeah, and I, I think you, you said a lot there I don't know if, as you know, it is all about the students and the learners but we do tend to work through the institutions. So I don't know if Judith or our Paul would like to respond to Brigitte, we're getting close to the end but I think we can run over a few minutes. Go ahead Judith. Well, Brigitte I don't know if maybe it was you that brought this up in another session I was in but I have heard it before in another session this week. The concept of this, you know, can we, can we expand open education beyond academia academia itself causes some barriers and gates to open educational resources doesn't it, even though that's not what our intention is is it that it just it kind of goes against the intention of open doesn't it, but go ahead Paul so it's great point. So really quickly we did put a survey link in the chat window so we really appreciate you taking a few moments to answer the two or three questions, letting us know how this work for you. Go ahead Paul. I'll just say a few quick remarks, I mean the situation just describing it's like complex, but I'll say from my own experience, a few things. In some ways, open education is a systemic change, and it's really hard to change the existing system. And, and earlier in my career, like in 2000, I had the good fortune to help create a new university from scratch. Being given permission to not try to change an existing university but just create a brand new one from scratch like how would you really think that. And so I spent four years doing that and it was just really remarkable about how much innovation can emerge out of that and how quickly you can kind of think about transforming a system, or an institution from what it traditionally is into something new. And, and I often think about organizations like yours is having an opportunity to kind of think about doing education differently, you don't have to follow the model of the traditional system and in some ways that's an awesome opportunity for open innovation to really show how it can be done in a different way. And, and yet, you know we face all kinds of barriers, trying to make that a reality and, and certainly in my own example that I just talked about, you know, the government changed and they decided to merge that university that new university but then existing one. And in that process of merging them, essentially all the innovation was killed. And so I just wanted to say that because I think that sometimes the challenges we sometimes face and the hurdles we face around our getting old education have traction or existing institutions can be quite frustrating, quite frustrating. And lastly, I'll say that then the idea that open education should reach out beyond traditional academia, I am all for I actually in our strategic planning process we looked at. Should we focus on students, educators, administrators or government. And should we also think about what we called informal learning where it's outside traditional academia, where perhaps open education has even greater potential than it currently does within formal education. And I had a lot of interest in that personally, but the rest of the team didn't want to do that because we have such traction currently within the traditional education system and we can only do so much. I do think that informal learning opens up just tremendous potential for open education to play a really, really important role in our world in our society so I think that's potentially major change agent coming our way. It's quite exciting to see if it will happen. I've noticed it's sort of ironic that we reached the most marginalized we're trying to reach the most marginalized students with the highest level interventions. Sub Saharan Africa, almost all of this is going through the government through that highest level which is really the furthest from the people who are the most. I know, I know, I get it. Yeah, well thank you so much for sharing some conversation. Thank you for your comments that was very inspiring and motivating. Yeah, thank you so much, Brigitte and for all of you for coming and sharing your thoughts and just being here with us, and a big thanks to Judith and Paul and Liz who made all of this possible. And so we will be hosting this so that other folks who weren't able to attend in person can also enjoy this afterwards. So, take care have a wonderful rest of your OE week I hope that you have many more fun sessions that you can join or present at. Thank you. One.