 I'm going to move over to Debbie and Debbie is going to introduce herself and talk to us a little bit further about the venue and what we can expect from April. Thanks Debbie. Hello everybody. I'll just switch my video in very quickly to say hello. Can I just ask, could you give me some... Because if you can hear me okay. Oh, there's a green tick. Oh, another green tick. I love these green ticks. I'll switch my video off now but I just wanted to wave and say hello. Okay, so I'm hoping you can all still hear me. Thanks Theresa and thanks Alistair. I really enjoyed that. Okay, so as Theresa said my name is Debbie Bath and I'm the project manager for the OER Wales Company. I've been working in HE for about 18 years now and I've done a whole load of things and I've been working in history and admissions and faculty and other central departments. And I've sort of been a secret open editor right from the word go when I was little because my dad was actually one of the first cohorts of the University. You know the ethos of the University has kind of stuck with me really. I also studied with them and I am not so long back. So yes, a bit of an open education girl at heart. So I'm just going to go on and tell you a bit more about if I can get the slides to go on. Oh, thank you. There's somebody doing that for me. Thank you Theresa. Okay, I don't know why this had a bit of a fright. There you go. So we're in this part of Open Education Week. With apologies for double counting on the solicitors had some lovely slides and I think I've got more or less the same of him on a couple of slides but I shall withdraw those quickly. And obviously to do my own personal view I've kind of just done this very quick slide on here just to say the kind of different hats that I'm wearing. Obviously my project is the OER Wales Cymru project which is sort of hosting the OER-15 along with the ALT. And I attended OER-14 last year and helped to help write Clive Mulholland's keynote a handover speech from my colleague. And then I became a member of the ALT SIG, which Alistair was talking about earlier. And my job description with the OER-15 was right at the bottom. In fact it was on the back page which said help to organise OER-15. So anyway, but yes I cannot get away with it. I'm also lucky enough that some of my abstracts were accepted so I will be presenting at OER-15 as well. And that's a little shot with my lovely friends that brought me some cakes for my birthday last year. So yes cake is definitely a secret to open education. It's just moving on. We have some great people working with us on the committee and this is one of the posters that this team have designed. And that's actually a quick summary of the flavour of OER-15. And if I just click on to the next slide. Personal viewers I thought I'm just going to very quickly go through lots of the different aspects that as I see it in terms of a quick the organisation of the conference and the kind of various networking activities that are going on. A little bit about what I'm presenting on. And I've put the bottom pages now I'm going to keep that one right to the end because that's a bit of a secret set of OER-15 goodies. So just to kind of feel interested in. I am a bit of a self-confessed bad addict. Okay so in terms of the conference itself as Alistair said there are lots and lots of We have seven I counted them specially and they're from all over the world really. We've got some really really good guys helping us out on the committee. We've got the six themes that Alistair mentioned. We will be doing 111 and there are four keynotes. Obviously Alistair has mentioned the keynotes that and so for Cable Green, Josie Fraser, we also have Sheila McNeill and we also have Tim Weller in a sort of buy one get one free because he does as well as doing our keynotes for us, blessing. So there are parallel sessions and you can see the flavour of all the different sessions on the programme and I will put up some links right at the end of the slide so that you can actually see. And obviously it's been quite a mammoth to recognise all the different sessions and moving people around so that I'm not asking them to be in sort of two or three places at once which I did at one point. That's been a real learning curve for me. And obviously I've only put lightning talks on there. It seems to have dropped off somewhere but we have some lightning talks going on. Lightning, yes, I think I might have spelt that wrong actually. We also have some short paper talks going on and some workshops. I think we have two panels as well. Ah, somebody says they can't hear me. I'm hoping everyone... Tim, can you just join the room? If you could just come up to the top of the left hand side. Go to tools and audio in the text chat but unfortunately my text chat isn't coming through. So tools, audio and then audio setup with us. Just run that through and that will check the audio settings for you. We're getting a few new people and this of course is because the session was for some people after starting at one o'clock. So if you're just arriving, check your audio setup. I deliberately haven't put them on the screen there for you because they're under wraps at the minute. But just as a sneaky preview, that one that's on there, the OER14 is a presenter badge that I had last year for doing the OER14. I'm very proud of that because that was one of the first badges that I achieved. In fact, you can blame OER14 because I am now definitely a badge addict as most of my friends will tell you. The other little badge on there is a Mozilla Open Badges Advocate and I'm very proud to get that for some of the work that I've done on creating Open Digital. Talking to people about them, I tend to bore everybody about badges. But if you're attending OER15 and if you are presenting, you'll be hopefully able to apply for a digital badge. So an Open Digital Badges Advocate. Now then, I did begin in that I am working on a project, the OER Wales Camry Project, which is a national project on behalf of all of the universities in Wales. And it's the declaration of intent that was signed in September 2013. And this declaration of intent really, the way for Wales to become an open education nation. And it was quite a coup to get all of the vice in agreement about the way forward for Wales and I'm very proud to be part of it. And I've been a project manager since January 2014. And as part of the project deliverables, actually there is, as you can see, this is what I was talking about, about the little strap line that was on my job description. OER15 is at the bottom of the deliverable from my project. So in terms of what the project's trying to achieve, it's trying to promote the use of open educational resources across Wales, and also to embed a practice across the HE sector. That's the kind of the official sort of aim of the project. I like to think that it's wider, because in my eyes, the wider you can get things, the better it will be. And I've tried to kind of take that stance throughout everything that I've done with the project. So as you can see from there, there are four main deliverables. The first one is the portal. The second one is a SMOOC. Now that's a short, massive open online course. I'm sure everybody knows that, but I just to let you know. And the whole idea is a student survival guide SMOOC, which is more of a guide to help students prepare for university. I'll take that later. I'm trying to keep it short, because obviously, I wasn't sure how much to talk about the project, but I think it's quite useful to give a bit of what's happening in Wales and why this conference is so important to us. The project deliverable that I haven't mentioned is the Champions Network. We will have a champion, at least one champion, from every university in Wales, and anybody that's in the network, actually. And the idea of being that they would help to embed educational practice within their own institute to form, I suppose, a community of practice, really. So that's another thing. I'll just show you the OER Wales Cymru website. Again, I will put all the links at the end of this talk. And from this particular project website, you can get access to the portal, which is a showcase of all the open online courses that we are in Wales. And it's literally, there is at least one from every university in Wales, and it puts them all in one place. It's more a way, really, to showcase what we're doing, because there's a lot of good work going on. And in terms of resources, if I move right, this is just a screenshot of our one of the resources, which is each of those little individual blocks, represents one of the OERs that is actually being showcased on the website. So I will put all the links at the end of this talk thanks for popping the links. So please go and have a look at the OER showcase. It's sweating tears, pulling it together. I've enjoyed it. I've had an absolute blast this year on the project, and I'm very proud of it. I should give you a quick slide. This is what I talked about with the SMOOC, the short, massive open online course for the Students Survival Guide. The interesting thing about this is that we've directly with students as co-pands. As part of the course, we've also implemented open digital badges, a badge for participation and for completion. But the interesting thing is a badge for the course aspect of it. I think that's got great possibilities going forward for our employees to be demonstrating these additional skills that these students have been able to hone in on while they've been working with some really good students who've really helped them. It's been hard to pull together, really enjoyable, and it's proven quite positive in terms of how helpful the students think that badges will be. Initially, they appreciate the possibilities and what could be done with the badges, but once the penny did drop, they are quite keen on it now. We're on our second pilot of the SMOOC. It's just a quick photograph of some of the students that came to one of my focus groups. They all thought it was a really good idea with some of the quotes on there. I did have a sound clip for you, but it's not playing at the minute. They basically said that they thought had they had something, then it would have helped them when they started university. The moment is we're piloting it with a Welsh medium. What I should have said earlier is that the SMOOC is also available through the medium of Welsh. Going back to some of the comments that Alistair made earlier on in terms of languages, and it's got a really neat switch. It's really clever. A colleague of mine from University of South Wales has helped us set up, and that's Richard Ollman, and he actually will be running a workshop at OER 15 to explain the background. It's run on a Moodle-based platform, and it's a really nice trick, as it were, because you could literally click on a button and say everything. We're able to use Welsh resources where we could find them and have used English resources where we haven't been able to find them. I can just see there are some questions popping in on the chat window. Yes, it's a general getting started guide now. The basis of it was is that there are lots of these things already going on in universities, but they're slightly different from the focus that they've got, and I see a lot of these resources are out there, things like the student room and what have you, but what we wanted to do was try and put it all in one place, and basically create, there's lots of discussion forums to hopefully create an environment where they start university. One of the drivers for the project as well was that if we can get funding to run it further, then to have some students that have actually done the MOOC would act as mentors for the next iteration of the course so that you'd almost, then in terms of students as partners, mentoring and actually being able to provide advice at your level. There is another MOOC that's run in the University we found here on FutureLearn, which concentrates on other skills that students need, but this one is literally the life skills that students do to be aware of and to develop before they start university. Hopefully we will begin to see knock-on effects on retention and what have you. So yeah, that's what we're doing for that, so I hope that answers your question now. Right, just briefly, these are just a quick snapshot of these open digital budgets that students can obtain as a MOOC. As I said, they can get a participation one, it's actually completing the course and the little green one on the end is the student survival MOOC co-creator badge. It's one that I think has really got potential going forward and we have in our focus groups we've talked to students about possible different areas of potential for different versions of the MOOC for perhaps different cohorts of students to see how we could develop there. So yes, I think that's got legs really. Okay, just moving on again. This is a network that I talked about earlier. This is how we're hoping to embed open educational practice into Wales and the lovely mugshot to 49 now, which is great and hopefully a lot of our champions will be coming to the conference and we will be having our first face-to-face get-together although I have met some of them previously because we've run some workshops in open educational practice over the last year. I've probably met most of them now actually but they're a really good bunch of people and I'm sure anyone that's in the open education is by their nature so giving and so supportive that it's been a real, real asset to these guys on board. Okay, the next thing I just wanted to let you know if you want to have any more information about what I've done in the project. Obviously this is a bit of a whistle-stop too. There are some very quick videos which are available on YouTube and oh, look at that, I just put the wrong link there. I shall sort that out and link to the project video update. That's actually a link to the conference so I could lie, it's not meant to do that. I will definitely get it into the ether. There are these two. One gives you a brief overview of the project and what we've done in a bit more detail than I've given now and the other one is a bit more information on the students' survival smoke and it shows the areas where the smoke covers, things like what to bring with you when you arrive and what to do, what does a hall of residence look like and do I need to join all of the clubs and societies and what do I do about money and all that kind of thing. If you want a bit more information on that please have a look at those video links. I do apologise for what I've made. I'm going to do another version of them but I did want to get something done quickly that's earlier so I hope it does answer some questions for you. Okay, so coming to the end now this is obviously just the conference website link again and just to reiterate that it is at the Royal Museum of Music and Drama it's a really great venue really lovely keynote speech hall that we're doing it in which is the Conservatoire of Music and Drama it's brilliant, I really love it down there and we are having our Garlatino at the National Museum of Wales so I'm looking at that as well okay I'll just move on in terms of the references I said I've put these notes on there apart from making my mistake twice so that you can go and have a look at each of these and the other thing I should say as well is that I've put on the interest group because I'm part of the committee on that with Alistair as well we're going to hold one of our face-to-face interest group where people can come and find out more and so there'll be lots of opportunity to kind of network and meet people at OER 15 and then please do come and join us I think I've done that without breathing so I do apologise Thank you Thank you, thank you so much that was lovely I have to say I came across when the ELTS conference was in Warwick last year in the summer I thought we'll go around and see what's going on and you couldn't meet a nicer bunch of people so we're all very excited and even more excited now and some of the things that you're going to be doing as well as badges and the amount of expertise that you've got going on there Debbie that we can so really looking forward to that those of you who joined us at one you won't have heard Alistair giving his into OER 15 so I'm going to just slide back to Alistair because Alistair I believe you've offered to run us through again a question from earlier if that's okay Alistair, yes this question from earlier let's just pick that up it just went in to the text chat do you offer any sponsorships for PhD researchers willing to Debbie I think that's coming in in the direction okay thanks Terese yes thanks Dimitri we do have a very part of my side to help people come to the conversation it's an issue at the moment technically we will have closed the applications for it but if you are thinking of coming in email I can see whether or not we could look at it for you we don't really we don't have help with travel but we can help in some cases with the cost of the attendance of the conference so if you want to email me I can certainly look at that for you and all my details should be on the slide just drop me an email I hope that helps, as I said we did have this fund set up but obviously we don't do only have limited resources but if you can email I can advise you further is that okay? thanks Debbie for picking that up lovely, okay looks like there's an email winning it's way to you even the link some people will have joined us at 12.30 because we had a little bit of a confusion over start times I don't want to leave you I don't want to leave without just again in treating you to take a look at the OER SIG on the Alps website and to join us if you can either come along to the conference or join the SIG and keep up with the mailing and keep in touch with us so if you are thinking that actually because it comes to half past one that you might have to move on please bear us in mind and take a look at the Twitter feed hashtag OER 15 where there's been some interesting conversation going on in there as well and lots of the links that Debbie shared with us as well earlier are findable through Twitter on that hashtag just turn the slides back then Alistair for you so that we can have a second if that's okay presentation presentation thank you okay well I'm this rather worried looking man staring out so much to do at OER 15 I'm not normally a neurotic person but the prospect of getting the best out of the conference set my mind going I just thought before I launch into my personal view of the conference I'm going to press the hand symbols to indicate if you're intending to attend the conference at the moment press the little if you're intending to attend the conference you're probably interested in it but maybe not intending to come and I probably should have used the Greek tick button rather than the hand so this is personal view Debbie's given you hers from her perspective based in Wales and very practical organization of the conference I'm a little bit more distant from so I think I'm probably possibly closer to a punter maybe my name is Alistair Clark I've worked in adult education mainly but I've also worked in schools I've been higher ed I've got an interest in education as well I'm a senior research fellow at the National Institute for Adult Continuing Education I've done some work on a master's teaching I teach French on a Monday night and I'm famous for my typos and you'll see one of them at least as we go through okay it's probably dreadfully corny but I've made a habit of forthcoming open education events from the thought of my open canoe so once again these thoughts come after a delightful paddle along the Dermont Valley in Derbyshire by the way the boats are called open canoes to distinguish them from kayaks with decks they're amazing they can be paddled or polled by one or two people they can be joined up with another boat to make a catamaran with things like sails I'll avoid any further attempt to make or even there's some direct parallel with open education resources for them to assert that could and OERs go in the category of a good thing that category of a good thing is and I'm particularly that we've managed to maintain the momentum of these conferences with support from the Association for Learning Technology with an awful lot of energy that has come from the voluntary committee members when I first got involved with the OER conferences I was rather dismayed to discuss something that was called the OER community I really did feel that the notion that we are or even open education was a cozy subsection of educators and trainers seemed to me like that was an admission of defeat why I like the title this year mainstreaming open education to be honest I admit having been initially run by the open education discussions it all seemed a bit unnecessary to quote battle the case of the bleeding obvious publicly funded content should be available however the more I talk to institutions and individuals I realize that it is a very obvious and normal part of professional life for some but for others foreign language and the debate continue to roll the whole thing is patchily understood what these events can offer us is understanding of the nuts and bolts of locating licensing adapting and sharing content to give our learners the best possible experience but probably even more important than that practical level is the discussion we have about the value of opening up learning the that come from a shared educational experience as opposed to a competitive one and I really do think today conference that we're going to have in the capital of Wales is going to give us a great chance to get to the bottom of that as well we've said something about the relationship between the association for learning technology the OER conference and the special interest group sort of sits in between it's a group that anybody can join and you've already been encouraged to come and join us and I'll encourage you again at the end but I think the importance of the OER CIG the special interest group is that it operates 12 months a year 24-7 it can feed ideas into the annual conferences and take some of the discussions forward beyond them right I think about time I got back to the detail of the conference I've been asked to give my personal view of the content of the conference of course I will be missing things out I can't possibly do justice to everything and if there's something that you're really looking forward to that you don't see here please put it into the chat window or share it on Twitter or share it in any of the discussion groups I have to start with the chairs very lucky to have Martin Weller a much respected author in the area of open education and he is professor of educational technology at the Open University and he's director of the OER research I've certainly quoted him many times in materials that I've produced about OER so I've never actually heard him speak before so I'm very much looking forward to that he's joined by local I think we should say Hayden Blackie who is from the University of South Wales he heads up the centre for creative learning and teaching he comes with a rich life experience not only in academia but also in the church and private industry I think these two guys are going to be really helpful in placing presentations and the content of the conference in a real life context okay so one of our keynote speakers is Cable Green Cable is the director of global learning for creative commons and I'm sure many of you have actually come across him I've got my own little Cable Green story which I tell against myself I run a very modest blog with only a handful of followers and last year I contacted some of my networks and asked them to share the open resources that they found most useful I've published them on my blog and then all of a sudden there's a comment at the bottom come from Cable Green he's somehow found putting us right about one or two of the items in the list and saying these are not truly open resources he was very polite but very firm I'm looking forward to he is a great advocate he's an evangelist for open education I'm looking forward to hearing what he has to say oops and I'm also working in the schools and she's really had an impact in Leicester she works for Leicester City Council and took charge of the technology strand of the building schools for the future program across the city and in that she has really bigged up on the digital literacy and the importance of opening up within that she's made a name for herself in Leicester I used to work in Leicester so I know that but she's also made a name for herself national she's delightfully provocative and I've disagreed with her in previous debates but she's happy to listen to the other point of view and at the end of the day her heart is in making learning better for all the learners she's and she sees open education as being an enabler in that direction the I've just captured this from the website you can actually see that the conference has got these six themes impact research open education across language and culture learners in other communities open ed practice open courses and that which is but you know I like to make my own sense of the world so those are the notes that over the last few days strewn over my office floor and the next few examples are I drawn out as being the things I want to take away from the conference of course this is personal but it may inspire through the program and see if there are things that will mean something to you so first of all open ed SIG we had a very popular webinar just before Christmas which was created commons for dummies in actual fact there clearly is a hunger a lot of people desperate to do the right thing but not quite sure what the right thing is so Theo Kershel with paper number 678 is going to run a workshop specifically about toolkits America Guy with paper 681 is going to introduce us to this new open education handbook I haven't looked at either yet I look forward to that because I'm a busy guy there's a lot more in my life than open education and if there's anything that makes it easy for me to get answers and to appoint colleagues towards answers then that's a good thing for us all I started in a canoe so it's not surprising that open waters closed tributaries was a title that appealed to me Paper 77 by Krista Appleton this promises to be a very interactive workshop and Krista is going to pick the relationship between formal and informal learning I think if there's one thing that open education does is it actually breaks down those barriers by giving access to all sorts of materials to learners but how does that actually work well I shall be there a front seat for Krista's presentation there but I'm also going to go from Catherine Cronin to another informal learning but a different approach Catherine will speak at the alt conference in Warwick I know that her approach to education is much more than an interest sorry much more than just an interest in materials she really does have the open culture within which education takes place I'm just seeing that Theo's turned up nice to see you Theo your ears must have been burning right community educators finding the light bulb moments I'm not a very modest person to say that a big part of the event from my point of view will be the paper that I present on the Wednesday afternoon's paper 776 I mainly work in the adult community learning field it's an area where open education has had less of an impact over the last few years of the sectors and this is something we need to change and the conference is one way of raising awareness awareness amongst other educators in other sectors but also in giving the profile for education amongst community educators currently coming towards the end of a small action research project with 12 part-time adult tutors we have the meeting, the final meeting in a week's time and I'm very much hoping that the the bribe of offering people cake to come will be successful some of them have been quite busy and not been able to engage fully in the project but I'm hoping that they'll finish this off okay, policy is really you can see my typos here Paul's name wrong, sorry Paul it's the second S that shouldn't be there already that's the one we need to get rid of yeah this whole thing either sits in an environment of policy commitment or an environment of the absence and when policy is absent as I'm finding to my great concern practitioners just very often feel that open ed may not be for them and they certainly even if they think it is for them they don't know what they're allowed to do and how they should behave the policy is key, Lorna's got some great stories I think from the work in Scotland and I think there's a real message to be shared from Scotland Paul has been studying policy across Europe and he's again I think he's able to give us a really good picture of the impact or the existence of policies and the impact of policies so I look forward to both of those clicking they're on too far really you couldn't really go to a country like Wales with its own proud language without that language actually playing an important part within the conference and I think that's actually been an encouragement for other practitioners using less frequently used languages on the international stage to come along so we have a Dutch walk around London as an open education resource that is going to be showcased and we have some stories from Poland a country which really did embrace open ed in a big way a few years back and I look forward to improving my own Welsh conference still with the language theme Theresa who's our chair for today is going to be offering a session on the use of video as an open educational resource in language teaching very powerful, very important and I shall certainly be stealing some ideas if not some clips from her for my own language teaching now this guy Euron he invited me just over two years ago to a bar camp in Bremen rainy September weekend in an empty university campus we just had one room and there were about 30 people who turned up and I said this is just about all the people in the whole of Germany who know what an open educational resource is and we're that might be a bit of an exaggeration but it certainly was a very small beginning it's grown and through his work and the work of others they've had some very large events in Berlin with several hundred people turning up and I think Euron would admit that Germany was a country which probably came rather later than others to the party but they've got a story to tell about how they've got where they are now okay I love these maps don't you with all these pins in saying where everybody's going to come from and that's just one of the rich parts of any international conference will be people coming from other continents as well as other parts of Europe and from all over the UK and I look forward to meeting some of these red, green and yellow pins and learning of the practice use of how we are throughout the world so that's going to be an important part of it all for me after it's all happened I won't go canoeing I'll go through a walk all settled because these events always leave your head spinning with all sorts of ideas and thoughts and then I shall come back and post some messages to the open education special interest group this has been a personal view of the conference it would be great to see some of you coming along or at least following the action of the conference via Twitter and through the open education group and the discussions there I think you've heard enough from me so thank you very much for listening thank you Alistair to both Alistair and Debbie there are a lot more about what's happening than I did before that's probably largely my own fault for not spending more time looking at the websites but it's so helpful to talk through to you by people especially people who have a really personal insight if you can connect with because somehow it just gets us there more quickly and gets us more aware of what's going on and infuses us to join in and thank you both very much for two very informative and also exciting presentations for April when hopefully the weather is going to be just as beautiful as it is today in Moreca no idea how it the sun is shining we'll have a nice sunny way also when we arrive in April it will be lovely