 I'm Scott Wilson. I'm a service manager at Oswatch, the service for open source software and that's based at IT services in the University of Oxford. We're an independent non-advocacy organisation. We provide information about open source to organisations, education, public sector. We don't tell people it's the best thing you've got to do this. What we do is provide advice about how do you effectively use open source for your organisation? How do you make an intelligent choice if not to engage open source? The first thing is, do you know what free software and open source actually is? Cable mentioned something about this in his talk. It's about freedoms. These are the original four freedoms of free software. Free means freedom in the software in this context rather than money. The first thing is, see it's written by programmers, it starts at zero rather than one. The freedom to run software for any purpose. So this means that when you write a software and release it as free software, that means you can't say you can use this software apart from if you're a terrorist. Or you can use this software as long as you don't do horrible things with it. So we actually tried to write a software licence taking the rise out of Google that said this software shall not be used for evil. So one of its clauses. And then that had to be struck out by the open source initiative. That's not actually free software because that violates freedom zero. And so I think it was HP. I think that had to get a lawyer to get it. Actually we might have to use software for evil at some point. So in that case we can't do this. Except it turns to this licence. Does the freedom to study and adapt? Yeah, adapting software for your needs. If you can't change a programme, it's not free software. And that's still really interesting on these points about the community. So that you should be able to redistribute that software to help others. And you should have, before you improve it and release those improvements, to get everyone to benefit. Then you can have the social aspects of free software. Now you also have the open source definition, which basically recasks many of those freedoms into kind of more business friendly or legal friendly terms. But in fact it's the same kind of thing. No discrimin against, discrimin against endeavour, no discrimin against legal groups, distribution of licences, licence specific products. All kinds of things around protecting the integrity of software, as something that can be shared, built upon, reused and redistributed. But there's another aspect that people don't often get around about open source, open development. Some software that releases open source, as you can get the source code, you can redistribute, you can modify it, but you can't necessarily contribute back to the original project and make an influence upon it, because the project is managed by one company, one organisation. So for example, Android is open source, but it's developed by Google. You don't get to be a committer on Google's Android product. Other projects in open source have an open development model, which means that there is a software community that makes decisions about that software, that sets of contributions, a sort of narrative project, processes where people can become actively engaged in designing the software and changing the direction. So all the software, for example, is by the software foundation, which includes things like open office. Anyone can, if they have the skills, contribute to the project and eventually determine its future. There's a major secret in open development and closed development with open source software. Why is that development for education? There's two reasons, really, that are common reasons for all public sector, as well as education sector. One is sustained value, and there is meeting user needs. The state value of using costs, avoiding lock-in, getting access to the best solutions for the purpose they contend with, and the other is amplifying investment made in software. So in terms of reducing costs, we know the model research on this. Open sources usually have a lower total cost of ownership, not always, but usually, in most cases. And that's driven not by removing the cost of licensing software, but usually by increasing the choice of suppliers who can engage to deliver solutions. For example, if you're going out to get a company management system, and you've got some like Drupal, you probably have a choice of, say, half a dozen small companies within, like, 10 miles of where you are that can do the customisation, posting, or other things like that. You can reduce the cost of services associated by it. So, for example, in some recent government, essentially UK government procurement, they managed costs, say, around 90%. So that's not the same as a 10%. That's saved of 90%, as you say, the Department of Petitions internet declined from 150,000 a year to 11,000 a year, or something like that. So there are massive costs in it. They often come from how you can bundle services from the software. Void you walk here. Anybody have a logo there, WebCT? That was a bit of a wake-up call. We've got WebCT and we're quite taken aback when suddenly it was acquired. It's a bit of a passive product in a couple of years, but look. A lot of institutions have not thought about things like exit strategy or content migration or standards or other sorts of things. You're stuck if that happens. Now, both close source and open source software have the same potential issue, which is sustainability. You invest in a product to deliver a certain solution for your organisation. How do you know it's going to be there in two years' time? Is it reliable, still supported, still usable? Close source, you basically have to take it on trust. It seems like a good company. With open source, in many cases, you can inspect the actual sustainability of the solution and the people involved in it. Are they getting... What will happen if contributions are going down over time? How many developers are involved in writing a product? Can I just go? There are stats. Fantastic. Oh, it's got one developer. That doesn't sound good. So you can assess sustainability much more easily with open source. Two minutes. Right. If you're not considering open source, you've possibly locked yourselves out of the best solutions to the problem. You may not actually be able to get access to the things that you really need for your organisation. Now, the other thing is if the sectors are involved in investing in software, you can take care of that investment to amplify because you get contributions from lots of people around the world who may be sharing the same problem and want to contribute. Problem is that where the happening investments in software development is projects in education, they've often been very close to a single consortium or single institution, not getting any buy-in from wider community and not being sustained. Now, the other aspect that we've talked about was meeting user needs, which is just the inherent flexibility of open source. You can contribute, you can extend. And as with OER, you can extend without having to ask permission to do it. You can change things because you have the right to change this. And a key requirement, a key characteristic of the open development approach is that they collaborate to share the costs of your niche requirements. I mean, there are a lot of products out there that compete with neuro or e-prints. I want to mention a bit about cloud because often we talk about open source. Can't you just put everything in the cloud? Well, actually, the cloud is kind of orthogonal to open source. There are cloud services that are built out of open source software. So a lot of the services that you get from Google, Twitter, Facebook, GitHub, GovUK, of course, they're even, are actually built from open source software. In other cases, it's like to deploy your open source software to the Microsoft, the MDAFO, or the ULCC for example, and it sells the open source product, so it owns that LX and it doesn't take a dashboard. You can actually get the code that runs the whole service and replicates the whole service. So it's an awful lot of concept. And I think I'm out of time. So I'll rush through and just say I've got two recommendations. One is it's important to let the playing field for open source and also for local smaller medium sized companies in procurements of software services and that needs both a policy and a concept. There have been policies put in place saying you will consider open source effectively with open source solutions but it doesn't really work if the people on the ground do in procurement have no idea how to evaluate it either. That's been a major problem in certainly the government. And also, where development, new solutions and services are funded use open development practices no matter what the licence is going to be because otherwise you're not going to amplify it'll never go anywhere. So those are my two big recommendations. Thank you very much, Scott. This is the aspect of Open that has actually gotten quite a lot of publicity recently anyway with the publication of the Shakespeare Review here in the UK but also the declaration of the Obama Administration or of Obama himself to in principle open up what data the federal government has as open data. So why do that in three basic kind of categories of reasons that I repurposed from the Open Knowledge Foundation. So one reason you might want to do that is for transparency reasons. At the end of the day it is a responsibility or a government governs in the name of its people so the people have a right to see what is actually being done with the information that is gathered as part of that process. It's a part of your democratic rights. There's also the aspect of releasing social and commercial value that is bound up in an awful lot of information that has to be gathered anyway for a variety of reasons. And then finally information and engagement of citizens generally with the workings of government I think is an important aspect as well. So what does that mean in concrete terms or in concrete examples. So for example one of the things that Westminster has done with the data.gov.uk site is publishing the coins the combined online information system. That's basically above the expenditure if I remember correctly £25,000 and that whole data set effectively sees where these particular line items are being spent on. Now like I said the basic impetus for that is just to be able to show what happens with our tax pounds. But there's other reasons why as a data set owner you might want to actually do that. Good old fashioned selfish ones. Such as improving data quality because at the end of the day if you publish this data you'll have more people with the motivation to have a look at what's actually what the data actually looks like and spot errors in it if there are any. Motivates desirable behaviour arguably that's one of the reasons certainly why the government is doing it but that I think is a bit debatable because that could be a double-edged sword. On the one hand you want people to do the right thing and to be able to show that they are doing the right thing. On the other hand of course using open data as a kind of almost like a disciplining matter is dubious. I think we need to be careful but it is an aspect and it needs debate and finally it can save money. This is also what I know has been found by a number of local councils is that often it can be cheaper to just take a lot of data that is subject to freedom of information requests and publish it in a structured way rather than try to deal with every single individual FOI request which can be quite expensive. Releasing social and commercial value a controversial but I think illustrative example of that is the ordinance survey data particularly the postcode lists although that is not strictly speaking theirs. The impetus behind it is that the ordinance survey government organisation has all of this fantastic geographical data if we open it up people can build apps on it, apps and new services on it such as crime data, fix my pothole all those kinds of good things which is true and that is starting to happen now. But what is often I think skipped over is how it adds value to existing things that people are doing. So very concrete example I'm building an analytics platform as part of that I need to find out where people are from. I've got post codes but that's as far as it goes. Now building something that will kind of let me group it or calculate distances all of those kinds of things is not trivial but if you actually look at the open data that the ordinance survey is now publishing that's actually quite trivial it's a download and a few hours of work and you're done. So basically it is allowing me to do something that wouldn't otherwise be possible and there's an awful lot of value of that sort of time in open data. Participation and engagement empowering individuals and organisations with information again just to take my own personal experience. One of the things that I've done recently was participating in the Scottish Government's learner journey data jam which published a number of data sets. I think for the first time from both the government as well as from the SQA which allowed us to or everyone in that data jam to basically come up with solutions that made it a lot easier for learners to figure out where they were in terms of their learning path and where they could go next. Choices available to them courses that are offered in nearby colleges learning resources that are opposite or appropriate for that particular course. In other words it enabled them to take that government data as raw data and make it much more concrete and use it to structure their own lives. That's just it for me for now just as a starting point but there's much more in the pack to discuss. A question from Robert what do you recommend as far as the license on the data put in the public domain putting a license on it keeping it on all rights reserved? Usually what I think is increasingly the case is closing the line because trying to disentangle different restrictions when you start with these data is very difficult indeed so usually it's easier if you just do closing the line. In past there have been cases where quite little or something where it comes to an audience-like attribution have been useful in large data sets but then once you start to niche it up and you present results that could have three or four steps of different mixes finding out who actually should be attributed and how it becomes a real basically more trouble than it's work but first if there's not much you note in the source data it's very painful and attributed so as long as you can find it by holding the thing I'm glad to hear you say that that's the same recommendation that we make that people use the CC0 protocol to just put it in the public domain Hi there can everyone hear me okay? I do apparently have quite quite voice so I will try and talk loud so you can hear me better I'm here to talk about as you can see the UKER program which was led by Jisk in the Higher Education Academy on behalf of Hefke now we called it the UKER program because we were kind of hoping Wales and Scotland and Northern Ireland would like to join in but they didn't I don't actually know any of the politics behind that but I'm here to convince you that you might have made a mistake and you might actually want to rethink this kind of activity now you've heard from Cable you've heard from Scott you've heard from Wilbert if you're not convinced by the ethical or the philosophical or the business case for open education resources you're probably never going to be so I'm not going to try and say any further on that what I'm going to talk about is what everybody in higher education policy seems to be talking about at the moment I should confess I'm a secret policy wonk and the big noise is the student experience is the learner experience and I would like to argue that investing in UK OER style open education is probably one of the best things you can do for the learner experience for the student experience I've long argued that the student experience is linked completely and intrinsically to the academic and support staff that they have contact with and to the resources that they have access to the resource argument open education resources is actually very easy cables me that that doesn't mean that he doesn't that he didn't do it really well just because it's easy but it actually is quite a sensible argument to make more access to resources students getting lots and lots of different choices of types of resources types of learning in process types of learning process that they can employ to meet their educational needs that's pretty much nailed on and related work has released thousands and thousands I think we're on about 16, 17,000 separate educational resources released at the moment but despite the fact that we stopped actually funding all these projects they love it so much they just keep doing it anyway we can't stop them using the hashtag we can't stop them talking about this stuff I think we were kind of charged with bringing about something of a cultural revolution it's not it actually wasn't just a matter of piling up lots and lots of resources it was a changing hearts and minds changing culture and to do that we worked directly with academic staff I think that's actually unique in the world pretty much all the rest of the open education resources stuff I know about it's been grant funds large pots of money directly to institutions or dedicated units within institutions we didn't do that we worked primarily with academic staff and support staff that are working with students day in and day out they didn't necessarily build new resources to release they release the resources actually they were using with their students and we did this as you can see from the slide in a variety of way there is piles of links on this slide by the way that comes in outputs that you can read later there's lots of stuff that came out of this a lot of stuff is worth reading but we started off and this was something else also I think unique to this program we started off actually looking directly at the academics what kind of a benefit could they get from releasing open education resources actually was it going to be something else that they had to do and we said okay just actually go away and try this stuff try it in different configurations, different approaches and tell us there's a spectacular wealth of experience in the evaluation and synthesis final report we saw people realizing benefits that we wouldn't have dreamed of and we got overwhelming feedback that this was a positive thing for academics to be involved in it actually brought them into contact with activity in their subject area across the world it brought them into contact often with other academics in the same institution that they'd not talked to it forged links and networks it brought people together it made people more confident about their resources the quality of their resources and it actually gave them access to the expertise of to the expertise of others to enhance the quality of their resources it was an immensely transformative experience at phase 2 we started looking at users how can we encourage discovery and use we came across something quite interesting finding I think that Alice and Little John and Lou McGill noted especially that communities of practice are in some cases an incredibly good way of sharing the source and building awareness around the sources but they can be off-putting to people that are actually outside of those communities and there is a chance that people might end up just talking to the same people all the time and not actually expanding the communities so that was something we learnt from that experience and we can talk now to people that are setting up these communities in all parts about actually expanding the communities and bringing more people in the third phase this was 2010 2011 so we're right in the middle of kind of austerity and competition and all the new pressures that are being placed on institutions we wanted to set out how open education resources was not just a good idea in its health of it kind of very obviously is I think it could also help institutions build closer links with local employers it could help institutions do outreach work it could help them collaborate with each other and that part of the program I think actually was a massive success that we got all of this stuff happening we started making an impact at institutional level and we started to see institutions like the University of Leeds we've met UC Falmouth et cetera actually putting open education resource into their strategies not having a separate OER strategy but say linking this stuff into their core learning and teaching strategies becoming an expectation if you're making learning materials you would probably want to put an open licence on you probably want to use open materials to make them you probably want to release them online and the community that we built up even after the end of these funded projects it kept happening kept existing they're actually running a conference they ran one this year no funding what's the weather from the program they're running one next year as well it has become this movement it has become something that we as funders as policy makers are no longer leading actually we're supporting it we're saying ok this is something that is continuing to happen how can we support this so for a total of I think around £14 million of investment over three years which is the equivalent of 1.6 centres for excellence learning and teaching or a small percentage of one Hewlett foundation grant we have achieved all this if you want to go and read one document about this I recommend this one at the bottom there currently called the HEFC OER review which is a slightly misleading title because it covers all the work done in England about open education resources over the last three years it was written by Lou McGill, Allison, little John with support from a load of people all around the program many of them are in this room so that concludes what I wanted to say so thank you very much for your attention I think I've got a question mark here about them being the elephant in the room and I think in terms of open educational resources as Cable alluded to in his presentation this morning I think they are because I think they completely exemplify some of the issues around the interpretation of open and what that actually means in terms of open as in free and gratis so I'm just going to take you through a bit of things about MOOC now I really like this image it was done by Julia Forsythe a recent JISC webinar on MOOCs and I think it really captures some of the issues and the confusion and the chaos around MOOCs I think it summarises it really well can I just do a quick survey I'm taking everyone in the room is familiar with the word MOOCs and many of you have done a MOOC oh yeah okay we're in the converted so I'm you know there's a lot of people do I'm not really going to talk well signed up not completed a MOOC yeah exactly yeah so you know I'm not going to go through the history of MOOCs because there's a lot around being done about that but there's a really good article by Audrey Waters at Hack Education talking about 2012 the year of the MOOC and it really sums up the history of MOOCs so if you are interested in finding out a bit more I really recommend that this is just a timeline you'll see on your tables there are some copies of a recent paper from our colleagues Lee Yan and Steven Powell a publication called MOOCs and Open Education and the implications for higher education and again this kind of resonates with some of what Cable was talking about in his presentation about disruptive education and they were looking at the potential for MOOCs to be truly disruptive in higher education but there's a really nice timeline in the paper which just kind of shows the relationship between MOOCs and the whole open education movement so I think they did come I don't think we would have MOOCs we certainly wouldn't have the name MOOC I don't think if it hadn't been for the whole open education and open movement in general so really from the turn of the century we have seen this more interest and impact and people being involved in the open education community and of course then sort of 2011 and last year I think there's been a bit of a skewering of what's been happening in terms of opening maybe what we consider in this room as open education and when we've had some input from commercial organisations as well with them the advent of seed funding and venture capitalists now there's a lot of myths around MOOCs which I'm sure you're aware of as well I love this quote this is about MOOCs the single most important experiment in the higher education maybe it is maybe it isn't but you know who knows oh sorry and just because David's in the room we can't do a presentation without the MOOC poster but I think this kind of 1950s B movie kind of like the evil venture capitalists are going to get as an education really kind of sums up some of the tensions between open education and the freest and most open sense and you know what's actually happening with MOOCs and these are just some other quotes that I really like these are from Sebastian Thrum an interview he did with the Economist last December in 50 years time there will only be 10 universities left in the world well I don't think China agree with that or the rest of the breaks I think they're building universities at quite a high rate and I don't think they're going to get rid of them all yet but they're opening new opportunities for the agile and threatening doom for the laggard and the mediocre none of us want to be that but this one the cost of courses can be spread over a huge number of students well I'm not sure if that's a myth but I think that's been a goal we've all been inspiring to for a long long time and again as Cable and the other speakers have said today that's something that open can actually maybe and we've started getting some evidence that open can actually start doing that for us there will be wholesale bankruptcies over the next decade among standard universities well I think we could actually see quite a shift in the university landscape even here in the UK I don't think it's going to be through MOOC so I think there are other factors that might have more of an impact on that and this is one of my again one of my favourites when I talk about it we have to drop in different lecturing or teaching to concentrate on something else such as brilliantly set and marked examinations I don't know how you brilliantly mark an examinations I don't really know but I think that's kind of a strange thing and obviously watching videos and doing multiple choice quizzes another thing coming on to this the myth and the doom and gloom was the essay the avalanche is coming from some colleagues in Pearson which again I'm going to just pick on David again but David Cernan if you haven't seen it did a very good critique of this essay which is worth having a look if you haven't but although we might be in education kind of thinking oh well these MOOCs I'm not really sure what they are going to do and they're not really open or whatever there still is a huge interest and I think headlines like this over 300,000 people signing up for six courses I was one of them and I'm sure there are many in the room that signed up for the Edinburgh courses as well there's a huge interest people want access to open education as a student and as a learner it was great I've been a MOOCaholic this year I'll completely confess that I'm signing up left, right and centre it's great I can sign up there's no fee, it's great so how do we balance these kind of tensions I saw this tweet the other day from George Roberts a colleague in Oxford Brookes University and I think that actually sums up some of the tensions that we have open learning provision is good for providers and participants but funding does remain a challenge especially for small providers but I think how we actually create content and how we share them it is very challenging and Cable gave some really nice examples of foundation funding in the US we don't have that here in the UK or in Europe to the same extent so how can we build on work of work and funding from JISC and from the academy etc how can we actually utilise that and again I think now in the last couple of weeks we've seen some of the myths and maybe the hype around MOOCs seems to be dying down there are certainly surveys coming out not just from provost in America but also in the UK the kind of the threat if you like of MOOCs seems to be receding where I'm not good to say that we can all go back to being dull and laggard because we weren't that before but I think people are realising that MOOCs aren't going to take over universities as we know them and as Martin Weller at the Open University put by succinctly in his blog last week we can all stop worrying about MOOCs now because I think quite what's actually happening is we're seeing that the MOOC providers the big MOOC providers like Coursera and Udacity what they're actually turning into are content and course providers so they're not an alternative to universities they're going to have to work within our traditional systems as well but going back to the Open Educational Resources I think there's some people in universities that are sitting back and going yes we knew that wouldn't happen because we don't do that we simply don't make our resources openly available we don't have to and if we think about things like future learn which again is quite interesting UK MOOC platform but it's not really talking about being a MOOC platform when we look at its terms of use and again Lorna wrote a very good blog post a couple of weeks ago about that I'm not going to read things out to you you can look at that and this was a reaction to a lot of conversation on Twitter about the terms of conditions it's really interesting that you have a number of UK universities a number of them who have really supported the Open Education movement including the Open University the University of Southampton people have had a lot of publicly funded resources and have released open educational content they're signing up to these terms and conditions so they are in some ways creating new content because we're getting back to this old argument that OERs aren't of a high enough quality to be used in everyday education which I think most of you in the room agree was another myth but you know although they are using Creative Commons licence they're not actually releasing really open educational OERs and you know why is that why are they doing that I think we need to ask some serious questions of our universities and I just want to leave you with this thought and this has been tweeted actually today I think in Scotland we can do that it's a small enough country that we could actually do something really quite different and we all can do things we can do it and again people have stolen half my presentation just to come earlier as well there's obviously the European platform they open up ed and for guidance again this is a link I got from cable there's open educational resources and collaborative content development really good guide that's been released primarily for case 12 schools in the US so I think you know we have a really good opportunity to do things we should be out licensing things openly I fully support what cable was saying that you know all publicly funded resources should be available openly and I always used to say when we started the GISC and the academy programme when I was talking about it to people I think the attitude we want it's a bit like having a puppy for Christmas you know an OER policy it's not just for the length of a funded programme it should be for life so let's try and do that here in Scotland today and I hope today will be the start of us trying to do that thank you any questions for Sheila or for David yes it's half the question and half the comment I'm Sue Rivian vice principal learning teacher at the University of Edinburgh so there are news that you can confirm it and what we see as an advantage is that we're keeping some control over these statements of knowledge is that we've been avoiding the degrading and the other thing we have to balance against the results being entirely open is the risk of the degradation that you can see if you read any newspaper article and look at the comment thread that follows it and I think one of the challenges in Scotland is to keep not just information available across the board but the highest quality of information available so for example looking at the impact of the philosophy to schools in Highlands who had students taking that and learning from it gives us a channel by which we could very quickly direct the highest quality of information and the interpretation of that information right through the Scottish Educational System we could take MOOCs or MOOCs of any kind we wanted from any university that we chose direct them through our systems into communities or into schools but at the same time has retained some certainty that we are not going to end up with creationism being added to a biology week with anything that we might feel apprehensible in our own society being imposed on our educational results I think there is a difference between the source and of course if somebody is really safe you rate the resources that are almost of course it may not go into grade if I put something on the internet on my models I think no one's going to change what's on there because I use open voices people could take it else planned put the other context et cetera and that's always the areas but it doesn't change the original resource the original resource is still there so I say a carefully curated collection of local education resources are not going to the grade items helps the only issue we can is if you put something online let people make copies and then make copies but that is something that might also be a benefit somebody might take it now that you did have an animation a more content Gable do you want to respond? Yeah it's a real concern and when I was a community strategist in Washington we had this very same discussion how we shouldn't this is a big call from the faculty we shouldn't open up our content because other people will modify and change it into things that we don't support and don't recommend and don't endorse there's a quality control issue there we went through a bit of a cultural shift and it took some time it took a lot of discussion but the tagline that we ended up with after the year of discussion was we need to move from not being invented here to proudly borrowed from there and the reason we came up with that was we said even though we don't like to admit it there are more smart people outside of our institutions than there are inside of our institutions we think we know we've got great faculty and we know that we've got great quality control but there are going to be bugs and errors in what we produce and if we open it up other people will be able to modify because there was still the concern of what if somebody does something bad what they have to create is a too much analogy course part of it is addressed by what David said and that is that the curated version of my course I control if people know that they want cable grades, biology, when one course they can come to cable grades website and there it is or the university of wherever I work so part of it is that is the plan and they will come to you because you've got to break this is really and I invite my open source colleague to chime in on this this is one of the difficult ideas about open to understand until you do it so with open source for example what's the phrase many eyes many eyes make that's a code and the same thing is true in education that's a difficult shift because I can tell you when I was trained as a doctoral student the advice that my community gave me was don't share your content don't share your research never share your data because it's a career killer but also because somebody might do something wrong with your materials that's in the editing process faculty and in an open world when you can share what people can make it's difficult to overcome that but that's a shift, a cultural shift that needs to be made it's a career, a complete license if you release something in an open license you you render a copy of your rights but there is actually one group of rights in English and Scottish at least but you cannot surrender for your moral rights because if the law says if somebody does something that protects your content then you have the right for people to say okay, no, I won't do that you will serve your moral rights and even under the most liberal or imperfect consciousness you cannot wait until it's broken to keep that level it's called a non-enboresment clause so if someone took your course they had a CC license on it and they did something you don't want your university's name associated with it you can actually invoke this non-enboresment clause and say do not give me attribution you can still do whatever you want with materials but don't link it back to me and legally they have to comply with that so I'm certain some of the issues so hopefully we can discuss in more detail this afternoon about what the benefits and the threats and the drawbacks are regarding this so hopefully we'll be able to have an opportunity to discuss them at some length this afternoon so our last two speakers are Turu Hul from the Nordic Open Education Alliance and also chair of Sena IEEE workshop for learning technologies so first of all, over to Turu I have to admit that I have a MOOC slide in the presentation as well so let's see if I come to that that's hope so this alliance is a pretty new invention I mean we came about it this year and we have kind of all the Nordic countries with us with a little bit of a question mark about Iceland we think we have them on board but they are not very clever to answer the mails but there are some other interesting areas as well you have the Taro islands for instance they are there and you have the Åland which is regions within the Nordic countries that are with us and we have Scotland down there and you are welcome to participate in this because it's a very open very loose alliance trying to do a number of things well we are focusing on the Nordic countries and there might be some exchange between the Nordic countries and Scotland that has been in the history and why not now why do we focus on the Nordic countries because it's a perfect ground for openness for sharing we have done that quite a lot if you wonder if there is rain here you can either go to the window or you can go to yr.no which is the weather service that's very popular based on open data that's Norwegian service that's quite a few people use so there is a tradition for being open so we have open as in open data we have open as in open access we haven't really come to open where we are yet so that's something we have to address so we have issued a position paper that was in the information pack that came here and what else we used the Paris declaration as a kind of starting point and we are also very aware of the opening up education initiative of the European Union it's going to be launched in September and there are quite a few initiatives and even some money coming out of that and that is clearly forces outside of the Nordic region that work in the direction of OER which we are not really taking up in the Nordic countries and we want to do something about that so we what the primary goal is to develop education why is not open OER part of that discussion yet well in most of the Nordic countries or all of them we have free education so the kind of the need to kind of innovate through use of OER isn't that great so we have to find other reasons why we should do that we should say ok there are lots and lots to gain by collaborating more I mean it's been kind of settled a number of times now we also have the kind of global development aspect I mean the Norwegian missionaries they went to Africa and tried to sell whatever they wanted to sell but I mean to be kind to people to be something we are very fun though so why don't we kind of engage in developing education on a global scale and you can't do that we are the traditional mobile you have to use for instance open education so what we want to do is to guide governments institutions and organizations and find a way to target the message it hits the right spot on the right level so in doing that we have to go through some analysis of the barriers and enablers and if you look upon the position paper there are some starting point there and at the end we want to come up with good practices and policy implementations that we could provide to for instance rectors, headmasters at all levels of the educational system so they could really have policies to implement so it's easy to bring it to the boards and commit to open education so there are some other things that's special about the Nordic countries we have very small languages and then you have it's very small up there so it's kind of representative we have Nordic, Swedish, Danish so then we have something Finnish which is completely strange and we have Födja and even some other languages as well and then of course we have English so since we have to work with the Finns we have to speak English because that's our common language so then you can be part of this conversation but nevertheless we have to really understand what language and culture means when we are talking about open education resources because there is talking I mean there's been talking about resources that travel well which that is not that easy it's not only about resources that travel well it's resources that has to be kind of re-purposed for the cultural and language kind of aspects that you are dealing with it's not just a matter of translation it's a matter of adaptation and re-purposing and that kind of discussion is important and it's not that easy actually when you are just transforming it or transferring rather an English resource from one part of the UK to the other part I mean there are different cultures here as I have learned but my point so no I'm learning there this way or this way so what we want to do is to really go both ways I guess so just took a couple of lessons the national digital learning arena which is kind of the action in NDLA in Norway they have released a lot of resources for almost all upper secondary schools and they have done that as a public enterprise I mean they are owned by the the countries and they have met a lot of resistance by the publishers they are even being brought to the human rights court because it was a violation of human rights that the public money is spent on this so this is just an example of a lesson or a case that could be studied even if it is in school system it's a lot to learn here also for higher education so my point here is we should look beyond our own kind of sector in order to find good examples and good cases for learning so that's one then the MOOC slide MOOC is I mean it's an enabler for discussion so the Norwegian government just announced that they were going to make a government report on MOOCs coming up next spring with the first report end of the year and of course this we should use in order to kind of put the OER agenda on the national agenda and so we need to find the energy where it is and now it's MOOC so you will find more information on this URL the Nordic OER.org this is a project that's got some pocket money from the Nordic Council of Ministries just to organise some activities the Nordic Open Education Alliance is broader is a lucid thing but we have a project that could be the vehicle for building this alliance so this is a good URL to try to follow at least from this autumn when we are picking up some speed so Tuck that's in the weekend for Tuck and I guess you should be our last speaker is Paul Richardson who has come from just as in Wales and he's got to tell us a little bit about some of the initiatives going on so thanks Lawner I'm Paul Richardson I normally work for the Gist Regional Sports Centre in Wales I put half a hand up when Cable asked earlier if anybody was here from the government because I'm currently on a contract with the Welsh Government to advise them on questions very much related to what the other presenters have been talking about this morning so I'm here really too and I'm really grateful for the invitation really to participate in a conversation about what the implications are for government of these new developments and for government in terms of a small government a devolved government a government which is also partly dominated by a larger government as the UK government is here and also maybe a participant in other more global initiatives as well so we're kind of working our way towards through some of these questions and my work really emerged from this written statement from a man called Leighton Andrews who was at the time Minister for Education and Skills in Wales from dating back in February when he set up a working group to investigate these issues of the kind of great and good in Welsh higher education and in associated services and sorry I hope you can read this from the back this was the kind of group these were its terms of reference and they basically relate to threats and opportunities of changes in the the kind of online landscape the landscape of online learning and somewhere hidden in behind those terms of references are really explicit references elsewhere in the document to OERs and MOOCs so this is the Welsh government wondering what it should do about these massive changes if anything and just so just so as you know who the people involved are on the group they're named here and David Cernohans just joined the group recently as a kind of jisk special advisor and I'm there as a kind of a professional advisor as well but you can see there's principles in universities senior managers in other universities a principle of a higher education college so there's a degree of cross sectoral interest although the remit of the working group is actually around the area of higher education specifically which raises some interesting questions for us and I think just so as you get a feel for what going on in Wales the number of HCI's sort of diminishes at the rate of about to a year and I don't think it's well it's not because the scale of the business is decreasing it's simply because of mergers so we're currently down to this small and elect cluster just to give you an idea of the scale and the scope of the sectoral although of course there's some HCI provided by further ed colleges as well so there's still quite a lot of small institutions and they're looking at ways maybe of partnering up Bangor and Aberyst with the currently running a joint online masters program and this is kind of it's not a MOOC because it's not massive well the question is how big does something have to be before you start calling it massive and are there things like MOOCs that we can start to work on and amongst the first bits of work I've been doing is really to kind of do a survey of what is the online provision in Wales and it's incomplete at the moment I'm still talking to people so I'm not presenting anything on that but it's really finding out what online courses are on offer be they massive or be they not massive, be they open or be they not open and of course I think one thing we've been finding out is degrees of openness or different kinds of openness perhaps and in Wales we have an initiative as well across all the universities called a Porth which is a blackboard server in Swansea which has a load of different courses on from different universities and some of them are freely available and open and others aren't and they're all in Welsh how open does that make them to users in general interesting questions but I thought I'd tell you how we're setting about this really and the aim is to give some advice to government in October so no pressure and where how does this advice become how are we informing ourselves before giving this advice and so these are the arrows that we're doing so we're talking to providers of course we're talking to people they're the main stakeholders who have an interest in this and we're doing the desk research we're reading the reports, we're reading the blogs we're trying to find out what's going on the rest of the planet and we're holding our own internal discussions so this is in a way we've got many of the same purposes that this meeting has but we're sort of setting about it in this fashion over a period of time in order to try and develop a kind of a position on this even if it's a position that we well whatever that position may be it may be a position to kind of it may be a tentative position I suppose is what I'm coming to and we set out we set out to do this consultation the Welsh Government released its kind of official consultation six rather rather general questions which I won't show you now which are very non-quantitative qualitative questions really designed to sort of start the dialogue going and my next job is to sort of get on the phone to people and find out what lies behind sorry this is just a blog post pointing to that and meanwhile I've been talking to people across sectorally we have a forum in Wales on learning technology which is across all the sectors sectors aren't evenly represented in that adult community learning work based learning higher ed and further ed are involved and I set up this rather dubious poll really but you can see here that I've sort of pointed to two rather extreme positions one might take as in MOOCs are going to save everything or MOOCs are just passing FAD they'll go away so some people took that position that's good but by far the majority we're kind of in this area here in the middle so it's an interesting development we need to learn and we may need to incorporate some of this into our overall practice so it's a much more kind of nuanced kind of perspective really on the on the question and when I got them to kind of talk about this these are the kinds of questions they were asking and these are the kinds of points they were making and just have a quick look so I think there's some quite interesting points here because I think that some people just want to use it for continuing professional development or want to find ways of collaborating with partnerships with partners and maybe make it sort of less than massive but make it open in some way so I think there's and others of course are interested in promoting their university or college by releasing materials online following the model that they believe the open university has perhaps used to do that and much discussion of things like open badges which I'm sure will emerge again during the course of today this is the Welsh Senedd in Cardiff and I just thought that I'd just show this to provoke a little bit of thought about devolution and what that kind of means now it means something slightly different for Scotland as it does for Wales but I think in both cases it means that we have a government that has specific responsibilities and powers which are well defined but hard to analyse in some respects some of the Welsh government's policies are designed to kind of compensate for the UK government's approach to provision of higher education in terms of fees etc so we're trying to modify and moderate the impact of fees and something similar is happening in Scotland but what implications does that have it has quite some interesting implications for costs so it gives the government a reason to minimise costs if it didn't already have a reason which it probably did it gives the government a reason to look at ways of giving itself giving the Welsh sector some clout helping supporting universities to partner up and those kinds of things but we're in a position now where we need to look at these developments in the role of what does a government do does a government it partly regulates partly it supports it supports partly by funding but there's a host of stuff underline that and of course in the past we've had situations where governments have looked at these kinds of scenarios where new technologies are coming online on stream and thinking we can invest in technology here we've set up a university and we've been there with that so we're looking at alternative models which are a bit more a bit more realistic and a bit more a bit more structured in the way that we're looking at this so we're looking to all of you really to think about where we get advice and guidance from we're looking to see what approach is taking in Scotland because we think there's some very interesting parallels with Scotland some important differences but some interesting parallels and this is really by way of starting a conversation so I hope that so Diolch yn fawr iawn am Llywed thanks a lot for listening Do we have a couple of quick questions for Paul or for Turi before we break for lunch or continue the conversation upstairs over lunch and just to pick up on the point that Cable made about the kind of education resources that are available to his sons in school at the moment and my daughter is going through Gaelic Stream Education which is now in primary school and the there are a number of there are a number of there are a number of there are a number of there are a number of there are a number of there are some resources but there are not many they struggled to find reading books for children for example in Gaelic and again there must be resources out there that could be translated and shared so I think that's a very pertinent issue to discuss and again hopefully that's something that we can look at this afternoon as well