 Alright, so thank you very much. Welcome everyone. My name is Michiel de Jong. I'm the open education coordinator of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands with our characteristic cone-shaped library building that you can see in the back here. Today, I'll be discussing with you our institutional open educational resources policy and how this is a basis for how we intend to do a systemic change of how open education can be adopted within our university and we hope, I hope to be this can serve as an example of how other universities and schools would be able to adapt our way of working as well. So a little bit of context. The Delft University of Technology was founded in 1842. It's the largest Dutch engineering university with 26,000 students and 3600 academic staff. It's ranked 75th in the overall Times Higher Education Rural University rankings of last year and we're considered a pioneer in the development of OpenCourseWare, which we started in 2007 and our OpenCourseWare website has now more than 250 courses with lots of course materials and for those of you who are open education global veterans, you might remember that Delft was the host of the 2018 OE Global Conference and one of the hosts of the 2020 digital conference. So with that in mind, I wanted to to show you how the Delft University of Technology had the executive board sign a new policy document for how to deal with using and publishing teaching materials, so teaching and learning resources, which was signed late last year, which was called the TU Delft Open Educational Resources Policy. There's a QR code linked over there where the Open Educational Resources Policy is published. So if you're interested in seeing how an institutional, what an institutional policy for OER looks like, feel free to scan the QR code now and otherwise it's also part of the OEG Connect page for this presentation. So what does this Open Educational Resources Policy entail? Well, it defines all the university stakeholders that are involved in our teaching, so defining who has some stake in developing education in general and could benefit from moving towards more open models. It also provides a strong advice for publishing resources as open education resources. So anyone on campus publishing educational material, we strongly advise them to publish it as OER with a CC buy license or equivalent, for example, in the case of open source software, there's a comparable licensing method to the Creative Commons licensing types. And it establishes the need for an infrastructure to support students and teachers in this process because you can imagine that it is one thing to have a policy and an ambition to make all of your teaching and learning resources open. It's the second to be able to host all of that and this policy is also an ambition to start to develop that and make available to our staff and students. So what does why is this policy implementation important to us? Well, it is a formal way of engaging all of our on-campus stakeholders. Like I was mentioning, we already have a lot of materials for online courses, but this OER policy is very specifically designed to engage our stakeholders on campus. So with embedding the policy itself, you can think of directors of education, directors of study, coordinators of the different Bachelor and Master programs at our university, the heads of faculty, education and student affairs, our library, our extension school for continuing education, which is responsible for all of our open online courses and our graduate school. Apart from that, there's of course also stakeholders who actually work on using and producing open educational resources and performing open education activities, which is our faculty staff for education and student affairs, our teachers, students and again our library. So this OER policy helps us to approach them and to help them get started on applying open education. But systemic change does not happen by signing policies. So I guess anyone who's been around in the field for a while would recognize these kinds of these kinds of things. So open education is not a theme within our faculty. Our teaching staff is overworked. My first priority is teaching my class and not publishing open educational resources. There are no good quality resources for my course in the open space. Or if I publish my lecture notes, someone might misuse or steal them. If I let students make OER, the quality will probably be insufficient. This is if I if we would go to our faculties and explain, well, we're going to go open. Let's go. Then we will be I would say almost left out of the room because they feel like these are practical problems that they're dealing with, which are in no way in line with a policy of just throwing everything in the open space. So what we need to do is to see how can we implement open education within a larger scheme within our university. So what we've done to accompany this open educational resources policy is implemented within is implement an open education project within our open science program. So the TU Delft open science program is a very broad program, which entails also open access, open publishing, fair data, fair software, citizen science and open hardware and a number of cross-cutting themes about rewards and recognition, collaboration with third parties, skills development and ethics. And open education has become one of the main projects within this program because we as the TU Delft see that open science is or education is a vital part of open science. So that gives us another way in into our faculties. And then the next the next step we go to is to go into our faculties as part of this open science program with this policy and start working on open education community building. So there's a few things to that that we've been working on. So first of all it's effective sharing of existing good practices. So at first when you enter a room with a director of education and you talk to them about open education, the first thing they say, well why is it interesting? Okay, it sounds interesting. Can you give me some good examples? So then the first thing we need to do is collect good examples from their faculties. So if you want a faculty to be engaged with open education, go look into the faculty itself and find people who are doing activities like this. These activities are typically all bottom-up initiatives. So teachers who are struggling with the course for some reason or have an interesting and innovative idea to engage their students and we want to find them and see if we can support them. These bottom-up initiatives are typically also externally funded by either the government or other funding agencies. And these bottom-up initiatives, these small projects that start up all across campus, need library support and also collaboration with education and student affairs. So that is one of the next things faculties require is the support with content production, content dissemination, the didactical approaches to working with open education. And like I mentioned, the bottom-up initiatives typically start with external funding, but once something like that is successful, we have to come back to our directors of education, to our program directors and explain to them how this is working, but how this needs to be sustainably embedded within the faculty itself. So then we need to move from an external to an internal financial support system. And there are some faculties who are interested in this and see this as a sustainable way of developing their education. This is also something that we really need to do in a much broader sense with our other faculties as well. So how do we try to get people running for open education? Well, yesterday I was in a session with open education champions and someone was saying, well, you need to identify opportunities where people want to innovate, where people want to develop their teaching. Well, I want to go one step further or add one step there. I think we should, that what we've been doing very successfully is also identify general pain points within education. And pain, because pain points are typically the places where people really need a solution and they are desperate to solve something. And the pain points that we define, that we define, we can really couple two open educational resources or open education solutions. So the ones that I put up on screen here are, for example, students are not buying textbooks. Very typical. We're lucky in the Netherlands that we are wealthy countries. So there's less issues with a large wealth gap of people being able to pay for textbook and not being able to pay for textbooks. But still, if someone uses a 120 euro textbook in there for their course and you're only using, let's say, two chapters of a 20-chapter textbook, you can be certain of one thing students are not going to buy it because they don't feel like it's worth the money. An alternative would be that there's no useful course literature, for example. When there's a very new program, we're working on a program called Quantum Information Science and Technology at the moment, which is really quite new and there's no existing literature. So then that is a way in. So, okay, you need to provide your students with something useful. So let's try to see if we can use open educational resources for that. Then there's, of course, a high cost for the use of copyrighted literature, which kind of ties in with the same issues. And then, of course, there's also the thing, we've heard this before, and this ties in with open pedagogy approaches as well. Students need to take ownership of their learning. Within the Netherlands, our four technical universities have defined what the engineer of the future should look like, and this is definitely something that is modeled towards engineering students taking more ownership of their learning process. And there finally, then there's the aspect of teachers not being recognized for their work. If we evaluate our teachers, we do it by the means of seeing how many students they teach, what the passing rate is, what kind of reviews students give their courses. We're not actually looking at the time investment they put into developing a course, what kind of sustainable resources they develop in order for a course to run for five years in a row, or without them being actually present, for example. So let's go to a few specific solutions that we developed for these issues. So with about the aspect of students not buying textbooks, we have an example of a group of teachers who were doing a computer science course, and they wanted to use a textbook, but the textbooks that they were using were not useful, and they wanted to add specific content to it and remove other content to it. So we introduced to them the concept of open textbooks. They did a search themselves and found this book Foundations of Computation by Carol Critchlow and David Eck, and we introduced the concept of open educational resources and Creative Commons licenses, and we stimulated them to try to make their own version of this book, and they worked on that, and they created the Delfts of Foundations of Computation a year later, which is more specifically targeted towards our Delft population, Delft student population, and also an open product based on something that was open already. So this is a very nice example of proper reuse. Stemming from the problem that there was no useful literature available, and not from the fact that we wanted to use an open textbook, but looking back, they're very happy that they did. Another very interesting example, I think, is how students need to take ownership of their learning. This is also from our computer science Bachelor program, where the computer science program has about 400 students on a yearly basis who need to have some interaction with our teachers, or with one another, or at least they need some feedback on how they're doing, but with 400 or 500 students on a small teaching population, that's very difficult to do. So what a couple of teachers of our computer science Bachelor program did, they developed a way of using Stack Overflow, and for all of you who are familiar with coding or programming, you might recognize Stack Overflow, but Stack Overflow is essentially a Q&A type platform where people can ask questions about programming or coding, and others can answer it. If you answer a lot of questions, or if you are very active in this platform, then that helps your reputation within the platform. So you become a higher regarded computer programmer by doing a lot of work in Stack Overflow. These computer science teachers use this platform to stimulate students to ask questions within this platform, answer each other's questions about the courses within this platform, and thereby by answering all these questions, work on their reputation within Stack Overflow. So within the course they were doing, they were building a reputation, it was worth something outside of their course, even outside of their teaching, and in principle this was very nice, but of course after two years we needed to evaluate how many students were actually engaged in this, and as it turned out, the teachers were doing less and less work on actually answering questions themselves. Students were all asking and answering each other's questions. So with our first year course, as you can see on the left, about half of the, all of the questions that were asked on this Stack Overflow platform were answered by other first year students. Another 30% was answered by second and third year students, and the teachers only had to answer a little less than 20% of the questions. With second and third year students, it becomes a little, a little less, a little more effort from the teachers, but of course there are less students there, and there's also less expert students who know how to answer difficult questions, of course. Thank you. One more example, and then I'll round off then. So finally an example of students as partners. There was a project on nanobiology, which also lacked quality resource that were specifically focused on the subject field of nanobiology. Teachers were using biology textbooks, but they essentially didn't speak the language of the physicists. So physics students had a lot of trouble understanding biology textbooks. So what we wanted to do is try to see if there's alternative resources available, but the problem was that these resources were typically all commercial. So for example, from Springer or Wiley textbook, I've blurred these pictures because they're actually commercial pictures. There were there were open pictures available, like these Creative Commons license, but our teachers said, well, if this is the stuff I have to work with, give me that Springer textbook because this looks like crap. So that was a problem because we needed to stimulate them to try to transition to open resources. So what we did, we said, what about if you work with design and nanobiology students on developing something that everyone agrees on? So what we did, we hired students from architecture faculty who are very skilled with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, and we had them redesign these pictures in a typical nanobiology house style, so to say. So what we've been doing now, we've been hiring students and coupling them to their to their teachers, so nanobiology students who have followed this course of evolution and development and we asked them to work with design students on designing these new types of pictures that we can use as alternatives to commercial resources. This has been such a huge success that these students have gone on to develop tons and tons of different pictures of which you see a selection right here. And this is all going to be published as open educational resources in our repository in at least this year. We're meant to publish, we're meaning to publish all of these pictures this year, so we're really providing an alternative to commercial resources by working together with students on developing commercial resources, open resources. So that's for examples of how we're trying to get people to engage with open education. And I think the lessons learned are that we have identified the number of very successful activities, so having students as partners for making open educational resources as you saw just now and with our open textbook program, we really used a personal approach. So every every author who is interested in writing a textbook we help them personally through every step of the way. The writing a textbook is very difficult. An author doesn't want to be a publisher. They don't want to be an editor. They don't want to be a designer. They want to be an author. So we really need to have a personal approach to help them through all of those other steps. And we've also learned a number of other valuable lessons that a library can really be a driving force in pushing open education forward, but collaboration is really needed. A library isn't typically not a place for didactical expertise, for example, or for complicated ICT tooling, for example. So you need to have large collaborations between different university services and also with faculties. Also very important, the narrative should fit the audience. Open education to students is very interesting as well as to teachers, but for different reasons. Students want to save money. Students want to be able to access learning resources easily. Teachers would like some recognition. Teachers would like to make their lives as teachers more easy. Faculty are interested in having having less to invest on educational resources, for example. And then also internal and external funding is also imperative to start this up. You can't do it by using good means. You need funding as well. So what I want you to take away from the story is, first, identify opportunities and pain points where education is struggling. Our policy is turning out to be a very powerful enabler, but teaching is really driven by teachers and not policy makers. So talk to your teachers, ask what they need in order to help you enact policy. Funding is the key to starting up. And also, very important, do not underestimate the resourcefulness of students. That's all I wanted to say. Thank you very much. If you want to learn more about the actual coming together of the Open Educational Resources Policy, there's a presentation going to be on the conference epic next week. That's in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Yeah. Yes. You can, if you want to read the Open Educational Resources Policy, you can go to OEG Connect.