 as glances are whenever I need to switch on to the next slide. So welcome for coming to this presentation about the OER platform Open Learn Create and how our team at the Open University are using it to support open curriculum design. For the purposes of this presentation I've got a couple of definitions of OER and OEP. OER are freely accessible, openly licensed or public domain online resources which can be used for teaching, learning, assessment and research in their original form or reused, revised, remixed and redistributed. Some OER have digital badges or certificates which learners can share to demonstrate their participation. Open educational practices is all about sharing and developing best practice in education in an open and accessible manner. Open educational practices can be a way of widening access to education or to increasing the reach of educational resources or improving the quality of education. So I'm going to start off with a brief overview of Open Learn Create. Open Learn Create has been discussed in presentations at previous OER conferences so this is a summary of the platform for those of you who haven't previously encountered it and an update for those of you who have seen or used it. The Open University's Open Learn Create platform hosts OER from a range of providers including courses and resources created in partnership between external organisations and the OU. Open Learn Create is a platform where anyone can create and share OER with guidance and support provided by the OU and advice offered via mailbox responses. Open Learn Create was founded as an experimental OER platform alongside the Open University's Open Learn platform in 2006 with grant funding from the William and Hewlett Flora Foundation. At the time it was called Open Learn Lab Space. Later it was called Open Learn Works. It still shares its Moodle code base with Open Learn though there are some differences between the platforms regarding their purpose and audience and functionality. So Open Learn which is the picture on the left is the home of OU-free learning and has recently become entirely Moodle. It was a combination of Moodle and Drupal and it's now in the cloud. It has English, Welsh and Ukrainian language packs installed. Open Learn Create hosts OU partnership project courses, pilot and experimental course spaces and courses by external organisations and individuals some of which they build themselves while others ask us to help them build their offerings. It has 24 language packs installed though not all are currently used. The default content type on Open Learn Create is courses. It also has descriptors of materials, articles, guides, handbooks and competitions as you can see here from this picture. And when the opening educational practices in Scotland project began in 2014 the Open Learn Create platform was envisaged as a home for OUPS collaboration and OER. So the OUPS project funded a redesign and further development in 2016 when the platform became Open Learn Create. OUPS worked with third sector organisations during 2014 to 2017 to develop OER which is hosted on Open Learn Create such as Parkinson's UK, Dyslexia Scotland and Education Scotland. To this day the OUPS collection of Open Educational Resources is available on the platform and you can see some of them here on this slide and that's the URL at the bottom if you wanted to go to it although I suggest you just go to the platform and look for it in collections. The platform remains open for anyone to create a draft OER and there is course creation guidance on the site in the Get Started section about using the Moodle tools available to external users. There's also a learner and course creator support mailbox which is monitored on weekdays. There are more about that later. Since the OUPS project finished the OUPS has continued to host, maintain and sometimes further develop Open Learn Create alongside Open Learn which obviously because it's the home of OUPS free learning gets a lot of development funds and production costs paid for. This work is spearheaded by the OUPS corporate and commercial team who are based in learner and discovery services at the OU. LDS also has teams managing module production for the OUPS students and I know some people here are involved in that. Open Learn course production, broadcast materials production plus micro-credential and short course production. So it's quite a large department. Some of the Open Learn Create developments led by the corporate and commercial team have included making the courses mobile responsive, adding custom header footer functionality which you can see there on the right hand side two different collections with custom headers and footers and moving Open Learn Create to the cloud in November 2022. That was a fairly big thing to do and it was quite exciting as well. So this is a little bit a section about how our team uses Open Learn Create for open and closed projects. The Open University's corporate and commercial team are increasingly using Open Learn Create in partnership with internal and external clients to develop learning products and curriculum to support learner requirements. The corporate team consists of the following roles and specialisms. Project managers, senior project managers, senior producer open education projects, that's me sorry I didn't introduce myself earlier. Digital development editors, production editor, a project coordinator who's an absolute star or they're all stars really. Digital production assistants, interactive media developer, assistant interactive media developer, graphic media designers and art workers. So quite a wide range of skills and roles and the specialisms we cover are quite extensive. They're listed in that blue box there. I don't know if I'll read it all out to you. Some of our external clients have no previous experience of creating online learning materials. Most of them have no idea about OER although in scoping and requirements gathering discussions often what they describe as a purpose of their potential online course offerings includes a desire to share some resources openly. Whenever possible and appropriate we encourage open licensing and sharing. Most of the external clients come to us via the OU's business development unit that's the the one on the right or via the OU center for the study of global development that's the website on the left. Our approach is to discuss the client's ideas with them and tease out information about the purpose of the learning resources they want to create plus who they think the prospective users of those resources will be and the potential openness of the resources. So always encouraging do you want to make this open you know these are the good things about making it open. So these early discussions usually include a demonstration of existing resources both on open learn and on open learn create and what the platform functionality actually enables and this often helps them review their initial ideas and start to think of the practical and cost implications of what they have in mind. Although OER are free and open to use they are not free to produce so you know you kind of have to have that discussion how much does this get actually cost to create. Once the initial details of the learning resources project are scoped and a budget agreed a learning design workshop is held to capture more of the detail and identify roles and responsibilities of everyone who will be involved in creating the resources and the nominated corporate and commercial project manager will draft a production schedule and I will say that we use people from other sections of our department for the learning design workshops because although we can run them ourselves it's often best to go to the people who are doing it an awful lot of the time for other courses. Sometimes the content is authored by OU academics in close collaboration with the client or the content is authored by the client with guidance materials provided by our team to assist them. In a similar way to the OU module production process which some of you may be familiar with a first draft of content arrives from the author. A digital development editor in our team provides a structural edit and pedagogical advice working with the authors to improve the content continuing the work started at the learning design workshop. The aim is always to create engaging learning resources which will have a positive impact for learners and that diagram on the right is probably quite hard to read it because it's so so much detail but it's basically the sort of the flow of what happens review handover video audio graphic and interactive structural first edit second edit content tagging and final review and that's how it tends to happen in the team. In the meantime we create a course space on open learn create where the team and the client can add content and activities. Sometimes the course space is used during the first and second draft stages to show the client how specific parts of the course might work to inform their thinking and give them a first glimpse of what the course might look like because often they have four sorts of expectations about what they think might look like and then when they see it they say oh that might not be so right or no that activity is not going to work or whatever. Members of the team are assigned to help build the OER on open learn create depending on um oh did I skip a slide yes I did sorry um depending on the needs of the client and the content requirements and the structure of the course this slide shows some screens relating to building a quiz Moodle quiz in this case for the scots language and culture course we worked on with the OU in Scotland so now we'll go back to that slide um clients are given the reviewer role for their draft course so they can view the course during the course building process as learners will see it so on the left hand side you see the learner view and on the right hand side is actually what um those who are editing the course would be able to see and this is content that happens to be built using OU structured content which is XML I'm not going to go into the details of OU XML now um sometimes the client asks for their OER to be piloted with a small group of learners before it's made live um okay when the course is close to publication it goes through a quality assurance process with another editor on the team working through the content to check navigation and test that all the activities work is expected this includes a thorough test of any quizzes using a test account which has the reviewer role so the learner experience of the course is checked um so we're not just doing it with people who've been piloting it we're actually doing it with our own test account to see and usually alongside um having in another browser open with our normal editing account so we can actually see what's going on and adjust things as we go it's really useful to do it that way and we've trained quite a few of the people in the team to do that now so it's not just me doing it as it used to be during the final quality assurance checks if required the digital badge statement of participation or custom moodle certificate is set up by the senior producer or senior project manager as part of the activity and course completion setting configuration process I mean the the platform offers all three things we used to just use statement of participation and then we got digital badges as well and more recently we've started using custom moodle certificates which you can see the the one on the right hand side for FIFA and then the one that says second chance those are both actually custom moodle certificates rather than statement of participation and as you can see a variety of different badge designs good communication and collaboration are essential practices throughout course production this has several benefits the quality of learning content and activities is improved significantly from the first draft both the client and the production team learn from each other and they build stronger working relationships it's really important it's also likely the course will be built and published on time any problems during production will be picked up and addressed quickly before they cause major difficulties and responding to client needs quickly and swiftly has helped us to investigate activate and get to know previously unused open and create functionality such as group enrollment custom moodle certificates and assignment so it's actually stretched us which has been really important when i came to this platform nine years ago i was a complete moodle novice i've learned a lot in that time sometimes further it developments to the open and create platform functionality are identified designed and developed which also benefits other OER projects using the platform and you'll see an example of that shortly so now i'm going to talk about some open and closed combinations of courses examples of our work that we've we've done on the platform with various clients in the last few years since the ops project finished in 2017 there's been an increase in the number of projects using open learn create for both OER and closed cohort projects in the following typical combinations OER only i.e completely open to anyone to study and access at any time for example tessa resources the scots language and culture course i mentioned earlier also another collection of courses called tpd at scale but there's various others as well um open version of a closed cohort course also hosted on the platform for example the FIFA courses which i'll come to in a moment um reversions locally contextualized versions of open learn courses for global development projects for example the skills for prosperity kenya courses and tide courses and then non OER all rights reserved closed cohort courses for client specific groups for example the Daphne NHS diabetes training which i won't be talking about today because they're not OER um and then some externally produced open courses which involve us briefly at the publication stage because of the publication approval and some notable examples include ones by the motor neuron disease association green aquaculture intensification in europe perth and kinroth countryside trust which have just put up a lovely little resource about birds etc which i quite enjoyed going through and checking for them um so the OER only example is tessa um tessa it was the first the project first had presence on open learn create from 2015 it's the project's actually quite a bit older than that um and when it's OER for teachers in english swahili arabic and french were published for african countries um since the initial materials supporting teachers were published several OER courses have also been designed and developed for tessa users in collaboration with the OU's international development office which is now at center for the study of global development they changed name last year so they've been working on it and leading its development in several several years that particular project and it gave me a great joy at the end of last year my colleagues were all laughing at me because i was excited in the week before christmas to actually be making this live but at the end of 2022 our team built a tessa portal on open learn create to replace the old tessa.net website which had been built in drupal using the custom header and footer functionality which had been funded by the fifa guardians safeguarding and sport project so now i'm going to move on to fifa and this is an example of open versions of closed cohort courses and fifa. yeah um fifa guardians has been an interesting project which ultimately provided the much needed custom header and footer functionality for the platform it has literally been a game changer for open learn create from which several other OER and closed projects have now benefited. fifa didn't want the open learn create standard header and footer and navigation they wanted something with the fifa brand and custom navigation for their fifa learner and open learner versions of the fifa guardians safeguarding and sport courses and they paid for this development work as part of the project which was such a bonus i was really pleased about that so this is just showing you the the functionality that a colleague and i have to basically set up custom headers and footers this is a custom header and then that's a custom footer for fifa. in january 2021 we were able to launch the first of the suite of five courses in english french and spanish in open learn create with their own specially designed custom headers navigation and footers. the final courses in the suite were released earlier this year so that's just showing you the certificate i mentioned earlier this year and then the homepage of that collection has got a video on it that's not playable this is just an image of the video but if i move on to the next slide this shows you these courses though not strictly OER in licensed terms they're all rights reserved have open and closed versions and these are the open versions the closed cohort versions have enrollment keys and are for people who are doing the fifa learners diploma program they're only about 250 of of those people the open learner versions are for anyone around the world to study so they have forums and so the forums and written assignments have been stripped out from the fifa learner versions to enable them to be perpetually open courses with no fixed study time start or end date but everything else is identical to what the fifa learner versions of the courses have for the learners to use so all the content is the same it's just they don't have the additional support things like the assignment thing and the forums etc and they operate very nicely as standalone courses all five courses in the suite were authored by an OU academic working with fifa and they were translated into french and spanish this means there are six versions of each of the five courses 30 courses all together 15 of them are open for anyone to study the courses have digital badges and custom moodle certificates using specially designed fifa safeguarding and sport certificate background templates which i showed you earlier the courses have a football theme throughout well obviously it's fifa so generic all sport OER versions for safeguarding sport in sport are being created in a collaboration between the OU UNICEF and fifa as openly available training for safeguarding and sport is very important so that will be coming soon in a completely separate collection which will be you know branded as UNICEF etc and that's really exciting that there will be some generic versions of these courses you know sports any sport versions and then our team repurposes OER from open learn we tailor existing courses for local context this usually means changing some scenarios and activities in the courses to localised examples and replacing some images to make them contextually relevant one example of successfully reusing open learn OER on open learn create is the skills for prosperity Kenya project which featured in a presentation yesterday and at OER 22 our team worked with the project team to build a portal on open learn create using the custom header and footer function to provide training programs for Kenyan public university staff who are responsible for digital education um and the main course on both programs A and B was based on taking your teaching online which is the one on the left though it was retitled open education and it was rewritten for the context it was contextualised for Kenya with the help of some OU academic staff who had written the original course both programs A and B used closed cohort versions of the courses with fixed start and end dates an OER version available for anyone to enroll in role on is now available in the online education strand the skills for prosperity Kenya and project legacy legacy course basically so if you look at not that you can see it very easily on here but the navigation shows online education and that's where the legacy course is hosted the OU in Scotland have several courses hosted in a collection on open learn create the most recent which they talked about yesterday at this conference they've created themselves with a bit of guidance from us thanks for the shout out yesterday David the course is for the open learning champions to help them make good use of open learn courses with their groups our team are just beginning a partnership project in collaboration with the OU in Scotland and North Lanarkshire Council this will involve curating open learn courses into a bespoke collection on open learn create for professional development of the council's education and families department staff so you know we are continuing to work with the OU in Scotland long after the OUPS project finished which is really lovely our team also creates new OER including bespoke interactive activities hosted on open learn create a recent notable example is the open stem Africa bespoke interactive science applications that support science teaching in schools providing a virtual laboratory of interactives which simulate real science experiments these were built using web-based OU laboratory tools although they were designed to be hosted and used on the local school computers in Ghana these OER science experiments are available for anyone to use on open learn create now naturally running a platform like this has its challenges it's been going for a long time so there's a lot on it so so far i've shown you some of the latest open learn create platform functionality and some of the OER projects using the platform but there are challenges in running an open virtual learning platform and i would i'll talk about a number of these and the decisions we've made over the years to provide appropriate support and safeguards both for learners and course creators using open learn create or OER and closed cohort courses so when the article function was brought in during the OUPS project initially there was nothing to stop anyone from creating an article and publishing it without anyone checking that it was publishable this inevitably resulted in spam articles appearing on the site and i remember a previous OER conference somebody actually asking me about that what are you going to do to stop that well sure enough it happened so we soon brought in a publication authorization process and some guidance on the site FAQs explaining why articles would remain draft until they'd been checked so this one came in recently and i can confirm it was spam so at one stage we even had stuff people you know about bathrooms and mattresses and sinks and goodness knows what anyway all sorts of plagiarized content people just dropped into an article or tried to publish until two and a half years ago the same situation applied to courses which meant many incomplete courses were being published on the site which caused complaints to the mailbox from learners who could not complete courses because something hadn't been configured correctly or the quality was questionable we brought in the course authorization process which means when a course creator attempts to publish a course a notification is sent to the mailbox alerting us so we can check it and provide some basic feedback on what still needs to be configured or changed before it can be published this one is actually waiting for me to check and i know it's a bona fide course so it's not spam and first i was writing bespoke responses to each course creator but gradually i built up a document of categorized responses which i use whenever a document is submitted for publishing which saves me a lot of time this document is now being used to inform updates which will be made by our whole team to the course builder guide and FAQs on the site both of which have gradually evolved once the guide is updated the bespoke feedback responses will become less detailed and people will be directed to the course builder guide and FAQs as much as possible um we've recently carried out an audit of every course on the platform as a result we have put a lot of incomplete course spaces back to draft and in some cases contacted their creators many early courses on the platform have been archived or marked as old but kept live for the time being there are a lot more will soon be fully archived some early good quality collections of the OER on the platform are still being used such as the HEAP project resources and these will stay live so this is just a picture of the archive spreadsheet obviously up the audit spreadsheet i can't share all the details because that would be a gdpr problem when a person creates a course they are assigned the owner role by default so they can edit their course if they need more advanced permissions for configuring some activities and need to see the learner progress data for their course they are asked to complete and sign the data declaration form before we give them the course manager or teacher role for gdpr reasons a message to learners is switched on so learners will know when they enroll that a person external to the OU has enhanced permissions for the course and can see learner progress data the only data open and create holds about learners is their name email address OU computer username um OU personal identifier and the grades they've achieved in the courses they've enrolled on it does not get date of birth or location from the OU central registration database for a long time our mailbox was monitored by only a couple of people in the team me and a colleague when the pandemic began and everyone wanted to study or create online courses the mailbox was overwhelmed with messages from people so we had to find a more efficient way of monitoring and responding to messages swiftly we've taken the opportunity to train our team's digital production assistance in how to respond to the various types of inquiries requests and demands it previously had no contact with the learners and only selected direct contact with course authors of the courses they helped create they take it in turns to monitor the mailbox investigate issues respond to most messages delete the spam and forward complex inquiries to the senior project managers or me for attention we have monthly mailbox team meetings when we discuss how to deal with certain types of messages have a log for the unusual ones they've helped handle and use an MS teams chat forum where they ask each other for advice building up a small community of good practice often their course production expertise and knowledge of the platform has helped with resolving queries to the mailbox they've all become good at replying politely and helpfully to people and are curious to know more about the different ways people have set up OER on the platform and then very quickly because I know I'm running out of time for research purposes we have a stats and data dashboard of courses for each course if a person has the course manager role for their course they will be able to access these reports currently the reports are fairly basic moodle reports with no data visualization functionality we have done some improvements to some of them but have plans for new reports which also include data visualizations and in addition for some courses we use google and analytics visitor data for researching the the reach of the OER which have been published on the platform from the google analytics data we know the site has had over five million users since the start of 2020 our team at the OER is continuing to support open educational practices whenever we can as we work with others to publish high quality OER in an endeavor to widen opportunities for learners around the world to access education and sorry I don't think there's time for any questions but I guess there might be something in the chat I hope that was of interest and that's contact details if you need them thank you very much for listening