 All right, here we are again in the OE Week Live Studio. I'm your host, Alan Levine, and I'm messing up all the technology because that's what technology does, but I really wanna thank anybody for being here and watching this. We're gonna do something that I wasn't sure would work, but I'm going to bring in some folks, some colleagues who are in a Discord meeting space for the OER 23 conference. And so there's a lot of synchronicity between Open Education Global and OER 23, and it's one of my favorite conferences. And I set this up, hopefully, that a few folks there can talk about the conference that's coming up in Inverness Scotland in about a month and just about what OER 23 is all about. So anybody there in Discord, can you at least let me know if this works? Hi, Alan, this is Lorna here. You signed a letter clear to us. Oh, good, Lorna. Thank you so much. Hi, Alan. I can hear you perfectly. Thank you, Paula. Yeah. And me too, Alan. Okay. So you're the spokespeople now for OER 23. What should people know about this conference? If I can jump in there. I think probably the main thing to know about the OER conference is it has been, one of us has been running for, oh, it's about 10 years now. And it originally started out as a very UK OER focused conference. All have been facilitated in the conference for maybe about six, seven years now. And since then it has really grown in focus to encompass really all aspects of open education practice. And it's also really welcomed participants from all over the world as well. But it's still quite a small and welcoming conference as well. It won't be overwhelmed at the OER conference, but it's really friendly. And speaking as a Highlander myself, which I know Sheila is as well, we can absolutely guarantee a warm welcome for everyone coming to the conference and visiting the Highlands and in Venice for the first time. I know. And I'll have to say it's been a conference I've been, I went in 2014, I think, but the connections made there and just the, I remember, I saw like, I'm just like trying to sell the conference, but really the feeling in the sense of community among ALT and the OERXX conferences has always made it one of my favorite ones to either follow or be part of. Yeah, I think just to add to that, Alan, I think the size of the conference is really, really quite unique in some ways. But it's big enough that there are people there to meet and you can make connections, but it's also small enough that you get a chance to speak to the people you want to speak to. Sometimes you can go to a session or listen to someone giving a keynote and you really want to have a conversation with them. And even if they stick around in the conference, you never really get that opportunity. But I think with OER, you can do that and you don't need to feel scared about going and speaking to a keynote because everyone wants to have a conversation. And I think that's why the bonds around the conference are so strong. And I think even when it went, when all conferences, when it had to go online, I think almost that, in some ways, like that first year when it went online, forgive me, I can't even remember when that was. It's all just a blur now. I think that some of the connections were still there as well. But yes, it's a really welcoming zone. And I said, really welcoming and friendly. And of course, open conference. Right. Can you also talk about the connection with GoGN, which is kind of pretty much either co-hosting or this conference. And that's a powerful network of folks that we like to tap into. Yeah, I'm not really, I'm not a member of GoGN, but I know that they have, I think it's been great for that network because I think for a lot of the researchers in their network, it gives them maybe their first or second experience of going and presenting a conference. I think they have a very strong network anyway, but again, it's that chance to be together and talk about their research. And the first day of the conference, I think they almost have their own little mini-conference within that. But again, I think it's great to see that from someone who's not involved in that side of things. It's great to see that research coming through into kind of the wider conference as well. So it's great to have those research and practice links as well because they can't be too distinct. There needs to be that, you know, interrelationship between what people are doing in the research side and what people are doing and people like Lord and Pilate who are involved more than I am really in kind of the open community in actually putting this into practice within institutions. I have to let you know, I have Rob Farrow waiting in the wings to talk after. We talk about you and I- I can tell you all. Yes, I can tell you all. I know he can, but I wanted to hear about you. And while we had one, Vid, I will mangle his name from Edinburgh who came on our show yesterday, I believe, and talked about his research. Well, that's great. I don't know him personally, but I think it's great to again, just to give people the opportunity to talk about their research. It's so, so important for everyone, you know, because you can get so immersed in what you're doing and just talking within your kind of direct contacts that you just, sometimes you just like everyone, you just need to look up and get some other opinions and share what you're doing with other people. Right, and- Yeah, the- Good. Because Nina's a researcher at the School of Informatics here at the University of Edinburgh who is doing some research around sharing, teaching materials for one of the courses he's involved in. Yeah, thank you. And welcome to Paula Cardoso who I see popped into this and probably not sure what's going on, but our audio from Discord is going into a conversation, a live show that we're having on the internet right now. And I just was hoping to get some people involved with the OER 23 conference to, you know, share the excitement and their hopes for the conference. So if you feel like speaking, Paula, it'd be great to hear from you. You know, that awkward thing when you ask someone to like speak and they say, do I wanna unmute my mic? It's quite fine. Maybe, you know, if you can talk about the location at Inverness and kind of the special nature of University of the Highlands because they're kind of a unique institution. Can I actually jump in there, Alan? Again, I mean, I'm not, I work at the University of Edinburgh, not at the University of Highlands and Islands. So I'll say a tiny bit about that. Sheila might actually know more about UHI than I do because I know she works closely with some colleagues there. UHI began life as an amalgamation of colleges scattered right across the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. And that covers a huge area, a significant area that takes in some very remote communities in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. I'm originally from the islands in the Outer Hebrides and there's a campus in Stornoway, which is my hometown. And UHI came together and was awarded a university charter and it's a very distributed organisation. But one of the reasons why, one of the things I wanted to mention, one of the reasons why personally I'm really pleased at the conference is in Scotland again this year for only the second time. We hosted it here at the University of Edinburgh in 2016. However, this year marks 10 years of an initiative called the Open Scotland Initiative, which is a voluntary cross sector initiative that a group of us established about 10 years, well exactly 10 years ago, to try to convince the Scottish government of the benefits and affordances of open education and we are in particular, and really what we've been trying to do is to lobby the Scottish government to back the use of open licensing for publicly funded education resources. And we haven't had a great deal of success in terms of lobbying the government here in Scotland, but I think we have had a bit of impact at the institutional level and oddly enough, the Open Scotland Initiative has been quite influential out with our boarders certainly in, we wrote something called the Scottish Open Education Declaration, which was very influential in Morocco. So one of the things we'll be doing at the conference is we have a pre-conference workshop on the Tuesday to bring together hopefully colleagues from across different education sectors in Scotland to discuss 10 years of open education advocacy in Scotland and really where we go from here. And if there, you know, should we continue to try to lobby government? Should we focus our attention more on institutions? Is there still a need for this? What do we really want going forward? So if you happen to be an Inverness on the Tuesday before the conference, please do come and join us. And we'll also have a plenary, we'll be running the closing plenary at the conference, where again, we'll be talking about what it really is the way forward for open education in Scotland. And we'll have a panel session of colleagues from within Scotland, we'll have representatives of the Open Scotland Initiative, myself and Jo Wilson. We'll have Scott Conner from VHI. And we've also got a guest from the Netherlands who will be joining us to talk about how they have quite a different experience of supporting open education in the Netherlands. And also Marin herself, the CEO of ALT will be joining us because ALT have been very much instrumental in supporting openness in Scotland over the last decade. So we're delighted that Marin will be joining us too. So please do look out for more information about Open Scotland on its 10 year anniversary. That's fantastic. And like I've just honestly been in all of the coordination and the cross institutional support that appears to happen in Scotland, as well with the primary and secondary schools. I know a lot of your OER work supports teachers in the local schools. Sorry, I was just going to say, yeah, thanks for that great summary, Lorna as well. But yeah, I think the size of Scotland helps that people know each other. So it's kind of easier to make connections. But there still is quite a lot of work to be done. But I think Lorna's right. You know, the support that the Open Scotland has gathered in stores like Jo and Lorna, you know, in their tireless engagement and support of it has really helped people to engage with openness as well. So yeah, that's really exciting. But just maybe to say a little bit more about Inverness because I will have to go in it a little while as well. Inverness is a lovely town. And the campus at UHI is really, really beautiful as well. It's got the most amazing views over to the mountains. There's a lovely pond in the campus that there's lots of wildlife. And yeah, it's a nice place to be, whatever the weather is, you can look at the weather and the mountains inside. Or I've been at meetings at UHI where actually probably in April and May where the sun has been shining and we've been sitting outside and it's been beautiful. Inverness itself is a really nice size of a town. I'm not sure if it's got city status. Yeah, Lorna, you can maybe say in the chat but then maybe it's a small city actually. I'm not sure but it's a lovely size of a place and nice to go around. And there's the most fantastic bookshop called Leakey's Bookshop which if you are going to be there in person you must go and have a look at. In fact, I was speaking to Keith about this and I think they're maybe going to try and put that into the social program or give people directions to it because it's just the most fascinating cavern of wild and wonderful books. And I'm sure that will appeal to everyone that's at UHI. I'm sorry, I had the conference. Talking of wild and wonderful as well. If you're lucky you might get to see the dolphins in the muddy furth as well. The sea inlet that comes into Inverness, Inverness sits on the River Ness, the mouth of the River Ness on the muddy furth there. And there's a huge population of dolphins and four poisons there. Now come on, I think you're a little bit too modest. There's some magic in Scotland, right? Well, we obviously haven't mentioned anything yet. That's the reason to go there. But seriously, I think I was telling the group earlier about the podcast that Paul and I did with Tatiana Kolesnikova, who's the librarian in the Ukrainian. And I mean, they were awarded like a resilience award for the librarians, but like speaking about how they responded I felt like the whole country deserves a resilience award because it was just amazing to hear her describe what went on. And to me, like Scotland has that same kind of atmosphere. Like, you know, I think stop selling yourself short, okay? And go to Inverness. Everybody should go to Inverness for OER 23. See, I'm selling it for you. You're definitely. And honestly, if you, whatever way you travel it is just magnificent. The countryside that you go through, if you get the train from the central belt you go through Glencoe, you see everything, you know, every type of landscape that you could think about. It's not quite the actual Harry Potter line but it's very, very close to that. It's stunning countryside. If you fly into Inverness, then obviously you're going to get an amazing view of the countryside. And yeah, I mean, Scotland is and the North of Scotland it's one of the last wildernesses in the world. But if you've got a chance to stay a couple of extra days then it's amazing range about that area. And actually I'm really looking forward to going up there myself. If you have the time, it's really worth trying to visit Urquhart Castle, which is at the head of Loch Ness. And there are various ways to get you can actually go there by boat, which is stunning. But I mean, Scotland is not short of castles. You will see many of them en route. But Urquhart Castle really is a spectacular location. So it's really worth making the effort to visit there. If you have a chance. OK, there is a castle in Inverness, but it's maybe not quite quite as stunning as Urquhart Castle. You will get to see a castle in here. Yeah, you kind of step over them. So there's a status in castles on getting it. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. OK, so we definitely saw it on Inverness. Anything because I know I've kept you folks waiting. Paula, do you want to add anything about, like, what you're looking forward to at the conference? I'm very excited because this is one of the best conferences that I love during the year. And I also am in love with Scotland. So I've been there, back-tacking and also we play Android Solutions. And I'm really, really happy to come back for the country itself and for the conference. I think this is one of the opportunity, the best opportunities during the year to listen to great experiences and great practices. So it's in my list of best conferences as a student, I would say, because I love to learn from other people. And this year I'm coming with two heads. So I'm happy because we are bringing also some experiences from from Italy, but I'm also happy, as I said before, that Tatiana will have her spot there too. And it's always good to support her and facilitate her work and her colleagues' work, because it's a privilege, like you said, Alan. Yes. I'm really happy about that, too. And I can't thank you enough, Paula, for making that happen. It was, I am honest, that was that was quite moving. But it's not me, it's all Tatiana. And those who listen to Mira, Mira is great. Mira, Mira Bajzuk, she's from Ukraine, too. She lives in the Netherlands. Her parents, her sister are still in Ukraine. So imagine the level of involvement she has. And at the same time, she's so great in facilitating in between two languages. Come on. OK, OK, well, I want to thank you all for sticking around after your meeting and putting up with my technology fumbles. But I think we've convinced all the audience to go there, right? I hope so. Yes. Definitely. And, you know, if you can't in the slight chance that you can't come, there is the online version as well. Absolutely. You know, you can always come remotely and watch everything on social media as we go around multiple castles. It's like conference sessions. Castle bagging. Yeah, yeah. All right. So again, thank you very much for joining us from this. Thanks very much for having us, Alan. It's lovely to talk to everyone. OK, bye. Bye, bye. OK, well, that sort of worked, but now I want to bring on. I've kept Rob waiting in the wings. And then I gave him a false start. And I won't talk about my technical flops here, but welcome back, Rob. And so hello. So introduce yourself and give us a little spin on GoGN, too. OK, yes. So I'm Rob Farrow, and I'm a senior research fellow at the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University in the UK. I've been working in the open education space for about, I guess, just over 10 years. Funnily enough, I would be in that Discord meeting normally because I'm on the committee for OER23, so I didn't go because I was doing this. Now, I see I could have just gone to that one and done it all in one foul swoop. There you go. Anyway, so one of my roles is one of the coordination team for GoGM, which is the Global OER Graduate Network. So in addition to co-sharing the OER23 conference, which we also did for OER22, we've got back into our face-to-face workshops. So one of the things we do with GoGM is we have a bunch of online activity throughout the year. But then alongside one or two of the bigger kind of OER conferences, we run workshops for doctoral students, where we get people together, help them do a bit of networking, give them a chance to present and get some feedback, but also just kind of get to know people who are in a similar position to them with their studies. And sometimes some people who are a bit further on and can maybe offer a bit of support from that point of view. And it's been quite interesting. We took over the running the network and I think it was 2016, something like that. And there are still people who were kind of coming through and hadn't been that many people finishing their doctorates because the program hadn't been going for that long. Now though, there's quite a few people who we call alumni. And it's really good to see the conference schedules when you flick through them now for OER Global or the OERX conferences and that kind of thing. You see all these people who are GoGM affiliated researchers. And so yeah, it's been really kind of powerful to build that network and see it kind of, because it's not us telling people what to do, right? It's a sort of self-facilitating network in a lot of ways. And we just try to guide it and kind of give it a bit of shape. But people do their own thing. So it's really good to see the benefits of that network and the kind of power of the community when you get people working in that kind of open way. And I guess sometimes sharing things that they wouldn't necessarily share from a traditional point of view. Sorry, can you talk about what makes it so successful? Because that's quite a long run. And I don't even know if you can pinpoint it. That might be an unfair question. So I mean, there's sort of two levels to it, right? So at one level, there's kind of just doing research to a decent standard and sort of helping people to do that. And because in our team, we've been doing kind of high profile research projects. I mean, it even goes further back than my involvement in. So at the Open University, there was the Open Learning Network. This was like late 2010s, I think, when it started. And I just caught the tail end of it in like 2011. But then with OER Research Hub between sort of 2012 and 2015, we were engaging with a lot of the kind of sort of methodological issues that you get trying to understand, okay, if OER is this really flexible thing that can have all different kind of realizations, how do we actually evaluate that as if it's one thing called OER? How do we come up with tools and techniques to kind of reproduceable, to understand the impact of OER and that kind of thing? So we've been doing that sort of stuff, but also exploring what does it mean to be open in the research space? So sort of emphasizing transparency in our outputs, sharing our data, publishing open access, but also kind of the constellations within which you're working. So strong emphasis on collaboration with different groups and trying to understand what are the values around openness and around sharing in that way? And so one thing that I think is sort of distinctive about GoGN is openness is both the sort of topic of study, but it's also the approach. And it's an exploration of what it means to have that approach in that space without being dogmatic, right? So it's gonna look different in different countries. It looks different in the global South, you know? And so we try to use some of our own kind of profile to give voice to other people in the network as well. And that's a form of this kind of open sharing, I guess, as well. And so by modeling that to some extent, and maybe having a slightly more informal and approachable and accessible kind of way of talking about research than the traditional PhD, doctoral sort of supervision. I think it taps into a need that people have. And it's not just people doing PhDs. Other people who do bits of research and scholarship also are affiliated to the network and they kind of use our resources and all that sort of stuff. And then there's a lot of sharing, a lot of discussion and just kind of people saying like, even if this didn't work that well, I'm stuck with this and I've got no ideas and they'll be put me in touch with someone who does this kind of thing. And so all those things seem to work really well and making people, you know, or making allowing people to feel part of something bigger, that network effect is a really important part of it. So yeah, so last year we returned OER 22 to our first face-to-face workshop for, I guess, at least a couple of years. And that's, it's kind of interesting because like a lot of people, yeah, you can do it online, right? You can have these conversations online and it's fine and it's, to some extent, a technological miracle. We don't think about it that way. We'll have Zoom calls and stuff for the last two years, but it's still pretty amazing you can do that. But I think these kind of things work better for people who've been already onboarded face-to-face. When you're trying to bring new people in and it's only online, it doesn't seem to work quite as well in terms of feeling part of something and bonding with people. There's just something about sharing food and hanging out in the same place and making some memories together that seems to really sort of help that process. And I think there's something, it's the same sort of thing, people who started a new job in the pandemic and stuff like that. And you join a new institution or something and your entire experience of the people that you work with has been sort of mediated through this Microsoft Teams or something, different kind of experience. So I think it's good to get back to the face-to-face stuff. But one outcome that was sort of good from the pandemic was it made us think a bit more about the online. I think a bit more about how can we kind of do stuff online that does bring people in a bit more than just kind of, here's a webinar, and here's some stuff, here's some content. So yeah, it pushed us into a bit of an experimental space there as well. But yeah, overall GoGN is very popular, people love it. Yeah, and because I know it's your thing, are you doing research to sort of like track what the arc of what actually what the field has done in that span because that's some pretty rich material? Yeah, we are. So I think we're presenting some of this OER 23, but we did do some work looking at kind of what sort of subjects have people been looking at in their doctorates? How has it changed over time? So for instance, first of all, there's more of it, right? So there's more people doing research around open. I would say there's a shift, but MOOCs were really big in the kind of 2015, 2016 kind of time when we took over the administration of the network. MOOCs were very big then, and less so now or at least people are sort of less excited maybe about doing research on MOOCs. There's a lot of stuff's already been done and there's kind of a little bit less sort of buzz around it maybe at the moment. One big shift is from people looking at OER to looking more at the practices around OER as the focus of research. And in a way, I think that's a maturity thing. I think as people have become more sort of as OERs become a more familiar concept, people are kind of looking like, okay, what's the next thing then? And I think the OEP stuff is almost inexorcibly interesting because people use resources in so many different ways. And so there's quite a lot of stuff like that at the moment. I would say around sort of 2018, 2019, you get quite an interesting push towards sort of social justice issues and people making a very explicit connection between doing open research and having a social justice orientation or mandate that kind of informs what's going on. And some of our researchers have been kind of world leading on that arc of stuff. So at the moment, I mean, we've still got 150 or so members who are researchers in the network. So they're all doing different kinds of stuff and some of them are more institutionally focused and working directly with students. Some are more kind of blue sky, let's say and they're looking at wider social effects and that sort of stuff. So yeah, there's quite a lot of interesting work going on and I think another thing that's sort of interesting that's been happening in the last few years is we had our fellowship scheme. So we've supported nine kind of postdoctoral research projects where people have been sort of developing their work from their doctorates a bit further. And that's all really interesting and people are kind of developing stuff in so many different ways. Sometimes it's hard to see the patterns overall but I think this move towards practice is really the interesting one. And I don't think it will stop in a way because it's a very flexible category for people doing stuff. It doesn't even necessarily have to involve where we are arguably, you could be doing something that doesn't involve where we are at all and call it open practice. So that's a really interesting category and I think that will continue to be a focus for people. Well, good. And thank you. I said, just run, talk about Go-GN because well, I knew you're good but I know we would also want to talk about the work you're doing with Yankor plus that I was part of a panel on. And so can you give us the synopsis of that project? I can do, yeah. So Go-GN is one of my projects at the moment. Another one is the Yankor plus project. For anyone who doesn't know, the Yankor stands for European Network for Catalyzing Open Resources and Education. And we're funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus Plus program. It's not a research project, it's a knowledge alliance. So it's not trying to necessarily create new knowledge around OER but to actually have some sort of strategic impact on what people are doing, share practices, share experiences and try to accelerate the uptake of OER. And a big issue with this is awareness, right? It's still often the biggest barrier. A lot of people just not familiar with the idea of OER as a concept. So partly it's about doing that, not necessarily within education, although we are doing that but also trying to find those links to other sectors, especially business. This is partly any EU sort of strategic priority is to try to use OER to improve the quality and lower the cost of training and lifelong learning. So there's a sort of high level strategic sort of vector around it. The work that I personally lead in the project is around innovation and business models relating to OER. So on Tuesday, we had the network event relating to this work. And what was good about it, I thought, was firstly, just from a sort of purely individualistic point of view, is getting to a point with the work that we've been doing where it's actually ready to start presenting. And that's always quite a nice point with research-related stuff because you actually get to the point where after a lot of stuff happening with no real payoff, eventually, okay, here's the stuff that can now we can start sharing. And you start to get answers to some of the questions that you were posing to yourself. So one of the things there is this framework we've been developing for evaluating innovation with OER. And as you know, in the webinar, I kind of presented some of the ways in which we think that's gonna work. And then also the results of a survey which basically used the framework to try and collect data around these kind of data points around innovation. And obviously, I mean, I can talk about it for quite a long time, as you know. One of the things that was sort of, it's interesting to me around this is we don't really have necessarily a kind of established language for talking about how innovation works with OER. Why does that matter? Well, a lot of the sort of categories that come from research around innovation come from commercial and business kind of studies. And they're sort of focused on, how do people come up with a new idea or a new product or a new service that's innovative enough to catch on and then become a new kind of area. And that tends to be the focus. And so one of the things I think is interesting here is like the idea that a collaboration paradigm doesn't fit that well with those kind of ideas and concepts. And so, you know, looking at kind of can we apply those things to OER? Does it make sense? I think it hangs together well enough. It is a reflective framework after all. It's supposed to be there to think about rather than sort of tick these boxes and it'll answer all your questions. But we also found some interesting stuff coming out of the case studies. And, you know, having actual data around business models is always good because it's consistently an issue around sustainability and financing for OER projects. And how do they make sure they can continue and that kind of thing. So looking for these sustainable business models, I think there's a real kind of interest there. I think, you know, we had a really good discussion with yourself and the other panelists as well around, you know, different perspectives on these kind of things. There was, sorry, there was one question. Sorry, because I think they're going, but LMU was asking like, is the Encore Survey still available? And I just noticed from the link that there's an H5P version of it. So I assume the survey's still up there or? So the survey closed on the 28th of February, but what we're going to do is when we release the framework, you'll have the framework with all the questions. You'll have the case studies to sort of show this is what it looks like when it's completed. Plus it'll be the original survey that we use to collect the data. But I'm more than happy to share a copy of the survey if anyone who wants it. You can do what you want with it. If you just dropped me a line, you can find my email on my Open University webpage. I'm more than happy to share it. So. OK, excellent. Thank you. So, yeah, the idea was it's a tool for people to use, really, the framework. So and also feedback would be good. So anyone wants to give me feedback on it. We're still in that stage where we start finalizing what's going on. But yeah, so I thought, you know, it was definitely progress for us. There's also more on-core events this month. There's one next week, the week after and the week after that. So we've got a little run of these things coming up. So we've got quality as a focus. We've got technology as a focus and we've got policy as a focus. And that's in the next three weeks. And you can find more information. It's on-coreproject.eu. So that's all really good. And you know what it's like when you're trying to sort of start a network. You know, it's taken a couple of years to really build awareness of what we're doing. And now we're getting to the point where it's really paying off. So it's quite exciting. That's really good. And so can you talk a little bit about the idea of a business model? Like, because, you know, that probably throws people off until you I think you try to get around to making it sustainable. I would imagine. Yeah. So, yeah, obviously this is another sort of spot where most of the sort of legacy knowledge comes from business studies kind of stuff, right? And kind of understanding cash flow and inputs and outputs and that kind of thing. And I don't think we could sort of say here is the perfect business model because, you know, everyone's circumstances vary, right? So there's no sort of universal. This solves the problem of sustainability. What we can do is, first of all, look at all the different types of business models that have been proposed around OER and MOOCs because there's quite a few that we should relate specifically to MOOCs. And so some of the work we did was to try to rationalize and synthesize all of the ones that currently exist into a sort of consistent typology. And so we have 14 types in our typology and they're mixed between what we call externally funded and internally funded. So does the funding come from a government grant or philanthropy and stuff like that? We'd call that externally funded. If your institution or your business or whatever is making money available to you, we call that internally funded. Then we have a category which is community funded where the community sort of either has a subscription kind of model or co-owns the infrastructure or in some way kind of the community is the kind of source of income. And then we have service models, which is maybe more like the MOOC kind of things or a university might charge for examination or something. So the content is free, but the services around it are not free. And so we call these business models in some ways they're more like revenue models, you might say it's where the money comes from because that's at least something that's consistent across all of them. There's a source of money. And one thing that's sort of interesting about this is what we did was cross-reference how people use OER. And so for this we use the SAMR or SAMEA framework where it's a framework of technology acceptance. So substitution, augmentation, modification, redefinition. And so you can map this onto OER and you can sort of say, well, okay you could be substituting OER or you could be doing something much more radical with it. And when you cross-reference that with the business models you see something quite interesting. So it's mostly institutional business models where the university or the college or whatever is making some money available. Substitution is the most common form there. Whereas if you look at the redefinition so when people are doing something more transformative with OER, the business models are more varied as well and they're more kind of unusual, let's say. So these things like platformization or community funded, decentralized kind of stuff they're also doing more interesting or not necessarily more interesting more creative things with OER as well as with their business models. That's kind of interesting. And you can also do various different ways of mixing up the data points and seeing the different patterns that come out of it. We've been encouraging people to look at their different stakeholders and think about what kind of value proposition are you making to these stakeholders in a kind of explicit way. And again, that is the language of kind of business studies. That is that kind of what's your value proposition? What's your kind of competitive angle on this? But I do think it's interesting and valid to reflect on these things and also the impact of it. So you're sort of saying, okay, here's what you're offering to people. What's the impact of what's coming out of that? And doing that for the different stakeholders and also thinking about who are the stakeholders that you're really prioritizing. And when you make a pitch to them what are you emphasizing? Is it the fact that this is a compatible sort of thing of what you're already doing? You can sort of start moving in the direction quite easily. Do you emphasize its radical nature? Or it all depends on the context but the little patterns that start to emerge are quite interesting. So hopefully people will find it valid and useful. What's the next stage after you work on the research part? How do you put it into practice? So this is just one bit of the work we've got going on. We've also been doing some desk research around some of the barriers and drivers for OER innovation as well. And so each of these things has a sort of deliverable output. So we'll be writing and publishing that stuff. For the framework itself, at one level we set it free, right? We just kind of put it out there and see if people want to use it and hopefully they will. We are set up in such a way that we have these case studies already there. So we will be looking to do some sort of scientific publications around that and that kind of thing. We're also going to be releasing the data openly. So that means anyone who then goes off to complete the framework for themselves, they've got a set of benchmarks that they can kind of compare themselves to and say, okay, here's another organization. They're doing a similar thing to me. They're a similar size. What are they doing? What does their business model look like? How does it compare to ours? Can we learn anything from them? And we haven't quite got a way yet to share people's data back. So if they wanted to, they could share the framework back with others. Not sure how that would happen yet, right? And obviously our project has an endpoint getting to the sort of sustainability issues ourselves, right? But in theory, there could be an online database where you kind of just put your stuff in and it shows you, here's the comparison with the other people who've provided data. And you can do some interesting stuff visually with that as well. I think it would be nice if we could get, you know, not necessarily more data, but just some sort of good examples of people using that framework. And maybe we can sort of share that back through our project blog and that kind of thing. Just to sort of say that this is out there for people to use. I would really like to get some more records from outside of higher education. You know, in a way, this is a catch 22, right? Because there's not that many people outside higher education using OER in the kind of obvious way. But in a way, they are the kind of interesting cases because that's where the biggest growth is possible because it is so sort of low activity at the moment. So that would be quite useful. The other thing to bear in mind is, so we've got these other work packages around quality and policy and technology. Each of those has their events. And in the summer, we move to a different model. So we have three, what we call integration events. And so the idea here is we start to merge these different interest areas and bring them together. And so we've got three of those. I think it's June, maybe June and July, where we'll be bringing bigger groups together and sort of looking across those different areas of interest, but also across different sectors and seeing, okay, where can we make some connections with people in the wider world? I think it's always quite hard with open education stuff is, you end up kind of talking, preaching to the choir a little bit, right? You go to an OER event, all the people there know about OER and they're pretty much up for it. Very cool. But how do you access those people who there's a lot of potential there if they only had an awareness of it? And so this is where with some of the ideas about the sort of value proposition and stuff like that come from because how do you pitch to that person very quickly, get them to see the idea of OER and what it could let them do? I've been using the Dungeons and Dragons thing recently, so you may be aware, I'm not really a Dungeons and Dragons player, right? I'm just sort of an adjacent kind of nerd. So I'm not interested in what happens in Dungeons and Dragons, even though I'm not playing it. And if anyone doesn't know, the game system was on an open license for like 20 years. And then the people who make Dungeons and Dragons, hang on, we should be making more money out of this. Let's copyright it. And so there was a massive outcry amongst the players of Dungeons and Dragons worldwide and they were forced to do a climb down and now it's on a CC by license. And so why does it matter? Well, in a way, it was a sort of an environment that facilitated creativity and innovation because people were creating their own kind of content, quests and characters and stories. They were able to say, this is for Dungeons and Dragons, right? And there was no copyright violation. So I've been trying to use this as a way to kind of get people to understand how it enables different behaviors and it kind of enables creativity and productivity and stuff like that, but I don't know. That's interesting. I'm looking now at the, I vaguely remember this, but they came up with an open game license. Yeah, yeah, that was the old one from like. Okay. That's what they had. I don't even really know what an open game license is, right? You make up your own license, right? Yeah. But in a way, it's kind of better in a way that it's a CC by now, because it's kind of in the fold, right? And it's got that creative commons kind of awareness attached to it now. So people who've heard of this kind of stuff, it got a little bit of coverage in the press. There's a way there to start trying to understand, okay, it's an open license, you know? Well, I love bringing in a good analogy like that. If I could just steer back one second because there was in the chat, hang on, there's a comment here, just from another one from Adelaide Mew about non-commercial license. Yeah, how non-commercial licenses affect sustainability at Thornywood? Yeah, this is an interesting one, right? Obviously, if you put a non-commercial clause on a license, you make it less open, you make it less possible to do things with it and you basically add some barriers to what people can and can't do with it. And that can be appropriate in some situations. I'm not speaking against it at that level, but that is a consequence of it. I was talking with someone recently, he was saying that they wanted to put their doctoral thesis into an institutional repository and the university would only let them do it if it was had a non-commercial license attached to it. That's kind of interesting, right? Because you would think universities want people to access the research and use it. I suspect, although I have no way to know this, I suspect that they have a policy which is intended to prevent anyone else commercially exploiting research done at that institution. And so you get into the kind of realms of, okay, they're sort of supporting openness, but they're doing it with a kind of closed position at one level because they still think it's for us to benefit from, it's our intellectual property. Whether or not a university should really consider dissertation to be their IP is another question. Obviously you can't really create business models around non-commercial content, right? So in a way that just doesn't exist for someone who's trying to make a sustainable model. But also some of the sort of commercial benefits can be rather opaque and hidden because it might be that you don't really have an income as such, you might have a whole thing where it's really about raising awareness for something else, right? And you do benefit from that. Does that mean you can't, you can use the non-commercial stuff just to raise your profile but then actually charge for something else somewhere else? You know, it's the kind of thing you'd have to go to court to work out. But what I would say is that the non-commercial clause is basically a kind of a break on innovation potentially and it's a break on people finding sustainable avenues. When we publish stuff, we always use CCBuy and in a way, I mean, I think people perhaps overestimate the extent to which what they've done is commercially valuable or capable of exploitation. Well, and it's also the idea of viewing licenses as a thing that will protect rather than enable. Exactly, yeah. So I never encourage anyone to put a non-commercial clause on it unless that's the only way in which they feel comfortable in which case, yeah, cool, that's fine. Personally, I find CCBuy is the sweet spot because I don't mind people using my stuff but I kind of like getting acknowledged for having done something. So we tend to do that rather than CC0 although we put data on CC0 usually because it's a bit more practical. That makes sense. But we didn't necessarily ask people when we did the survey, we didn't ask people what licenses are you using? I guess we were thinking there might be consumers who have OER but not producers, for instance. But that may be something we could have asked and see if there's a connection there between, for instance, people who felt that their needs, that their aspirations for the project were being met were they using the non-commercial license or not? Not an interesting question to ask, we didn't ask it but we could potentially put it in the framework still when we publish it as a question. Have you thought about the open licenses that are involved and have you got any reason not to use CC5 or something like that? That's right. I want to, sorry, before we get to the end, I'm gonna scare back to GoGM because we have a question from Maria Angelica who's actually one of our interns. And she was asking within GoGM if there are any participants from Latin America and is it limited to English only because she's actually interested in doing some Latin American research. So you should definitely join GoGM. We have other Latin American members. We actually had a contingent in Mexico in January. I forget the name of the conference but we found some new members there. We did some mentoring program last year for focus specifically on Latin American scholars. A big part of what we do is to try to offer some balance to the kind of hegemony of the global north and kind of Anglo spheres around this stuff. So we're definitely interested as much as possible in amplifying voices that are less heard and less prominent in the discourse. GoGM's free to join. It's a good community. I recommend for anyone. We do have resources in other languages. We've got so many members in different places that we can translate stuff. It sometimes takes us a little while, but we have the facility to do that. And indeed, if you did join Maria, you would be maybe helpful to translate some of those things for the rest of the network. And I'm trying to give you a job straight away. But this is kind of how it works, right? It's a network where we all sort of help each other and we try to make things happen like that. So yeah, we're always looking for more members and we're always interested in hearing from people. So have a look at the website. It's easy to join there as a form and just go from there. Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Rob, for joining the show, putting up with some of my technology flopping around, but that's what happens when we go live. And it's always great to talk to you. And I encourage people to participate and follow both Rob's work with GoGM and with the Encore Plus Network. Thanks for having me. Good to see you. All right, I'm gonna play our little outro music and then we're off for a couple hours.