 So a very warm welcome to this year's pre-conference workshop at OER by Domain's 21. We are so excited to welcome a wonderful team of presenters, Leo, Vera and Fabio, to share a tale of two OEPs and if you're in the audience live with us today then please find your clap emoji now because I'd like to invite you to give a very warm, if virtual welcome to our presenters as they kick off this pre-conference workshop. I hope you're in the mood to ask lots of questions and engage and get this hour-long session underway with a warm clap around the audience. So Leo and Vera, a warm welcome and over to you. Thank you very much. Thanks everyone for joining us for a tale of two OEPs. Today our focus is on looking at open educational practices from a policy viewpoint and so we tend to talk quite a bit about policy in the open education community and today we're going to go a bit deeper into what really is that, what's that all about, what use might that be to us and the idea is also very much to get your views and kind of have a very interactive kind of session. So let's get underway. I know I can. So yeah, just talk for a long time about this because there's because I could go on about it forever and we don't want that. But we know that in the open education movement historically it's been quite focused on the open educational resources, we are specifically, and meanwhile in the open education I guess scholarly literature in the last few years there's been I would say a significant turn towards a discussion of a kind of a concept of OEP of open educational practices. And to me that's really interesting because the initial introduction of open educational practices as a term seemed to be quite focused on the idea that you don't just have OER that just kind of magically come into existence and then people learn with them, but actually all of these processes of making them, of adapting them, of learning from them, of all the practices around educational resources open or otherwise are actually practices that are undertaken by people. And so that was already I think that was an important kind of insight and then there was a kind of a next level of kind of OEP literature that was saying actually you could have practices that are open that are not actually really all that much about open educational resources as well. And this is kind of where you get into the territory of like well what does it mean anyway to say that something is open and a resource can be open because we're talking about having an open license maybe, open access to it, but an open practice implies maybe something could be open in all kinds of different senses and the boundaries of what are open practices versus what are closed practices suddenly become much murkier kind of terrain that it's quite hard to figure out where the boundary lies. And so for this reason I think because open educational practices are still a bit of an emerging discussion then they have not tended I think to be the focus of policies very much. So one of the things that we've been doing over the last I guess year and a half, two years, Ahavira and I and Fabio as well, we've been working a bit with the OER world map project and one of the things that we've done there has been to produce a kind of a kind of child site of the world map which is called the OE Policy Hub and that's where we're looking at the collection of data that the map already had and the further data that we've been able to gather since we've been working with it which has been a sort of significant increase on the kinds of policies that are out there. And so we also like to share a bit of that info with you today and we'll come on to that in a bit. But so first of all what we would like to do is have a look at some of your thoughts via the exciting meter, the mentee. And the link thank you. So that is the direct link it's in the chat it should take you to the same place but otherwise you can also just go on mentee.com and put in 26331717 and I'm just going to have slides and over. Leo, can I just double check on the sound? Leo, I think you're slightly dropping in and out. Can I just double check that everybody can hear Leo okay? Maybe you can give us a thumbs up. It's sort of we can hear you but it's slightly dropping out in and out. Sorry about that. I do seem to have some kind of sort of slightly bad connection going on but oh my best to remain connected. No worries Leo we can hear you and I'm sure Sara will be able to come and join in as well as needed. Yeah, in gift of a Thank you. All right well thank you all for your responses love to see we've got lovely to see we've got people from a range of different places here and I think that that means also a range of different perspectives on these issues which is which is always good. So I'm just going to move on and this isn't this is not a test this is just really like a fun kind of quiz in a way I hope. Which world region do you think has the most open education policies? Somebody's getting in front with North America straight away. Europe is gaining Europe is strong. Just give it a try. It doesn't it doesn't it really you know it's just just to see what what what people think and okay we're staying we're staying pretty two-toned on this question so I'll move on move on here is actually what we have found in our research based on the policies collected by the OER world map and the policy hub is that North America is definitely the leading kind of home of open education policies. Europe is pretty close behind and as we can see other world regions as far as we can tell and we have tried to find out so there there may well be some more policies lurking in these other regions of the world but this isn't you know for sure the absolutely definitive data set but this is based on what our current best estimate really of the of the data so I think that's quite that's quite interesting because obviously in Asia for example we're talking about a humongous region in terms of population in terms of institutions can countries and so surprisingly small there anyway we so that I think is quite interesting that we're not that surprising to see North America kind of in in the lead in terms of the policy scope so this is the kind of it what we mean by this is what is the policy really what what's the nature of the policy so one type one one scope here is a dedicated open education or OER policy which is what we quite often tend to imagine when we're talking about open education policy but there could well be these other kinds of policies educational policy with some kind of open education component similarly ICT or labour market policy have an open education component or more of a general openness policy with education component do you feel free to vote it's just for you to to guess around how the landscape looks so even if you don't know anything just give it a try just a drop-down menu in the meter so you're not getting the drop-down if you click on the words Theresa it will come out in as I was showing the next slide sorry I'm sorry if it's hard to read that's a not helpful sorry about that okay so in terms of the policy scope in terms of policies that we have collected dedicated open education policy is definitely the biggest group looks like over half of total with the remainder taken up with the other types of scope the educational policy with open education component is also pretty popular another thing that we thought would be maybe of interest to you is that we've taken a look at what are the kind of key policy elements by the different world region so in North America it's OER but even specific more specifically than OER it's mostly about open textbooks and then across the rest of the world we are also seeing OER as really the key policy the thing the policy is really mostly focused around the exception here is in South America where there is a bit more of a focus on OEP jointly with OER which is quite interesting but so this is kind of I guess not it's I don't know to me it wasn't a huge surprise especially in terms of the open textbook focus in North America. Yeah the comment from Jim is quite amazing like I still got to come to terms with textbook package well we understand but it also it's kind of it's quite easy that the way that they have a template and they all tend to replicate their policy gorgeous quite different from from Europe in Europe like ever you basically cannot the policies through templates it's quite weird but we can have a talk about it later. Yeah no I think that's a good point actually there is a bit of a policy yeah you know kind of sharing the existing policy and re-using it is quite I think quite popular. So here what I'm curious about is how popular are these open educational practices in your organization so just thinking about where you work even if that's reclaim hosting or or some kind of university maybe. What how much of this kind of practice do you think is great see sorry it was a scale of hopefully you could see when you're answering the question that there was a scale of one to five where five is there is a lot. Yeah great points from Lorna and Tracy about the ebook SOS I've also been following that whole debate and tweeting about that myself and and I think this is really you know the pandemic has been a moment where people I think have woken up and realized that the current kind of somewhat exploitative attitude of commercial textbook publishers has not only always been bad but actually has got worse in the situation where we all were kind of desperate they've actually deliberately kind of jacked up the prices even further and and that's that's been I think you know in obviously it's it's a bad thing but it also I think has really been a wake-up call for the sector I think UK. Yeah just just noting on the comment also from Christina it's not that we have like a policy on OIP but there are certain policies that we've been looking at they have a component of open educational practices rather than being focused on the R so this is something that we can kind of talk a little bit later on but it's like not the policy basis on the OIP but has some components of practices noted within the policy not just focused on the on the R just that's it. Okay so it's really interesting in terms of the the range of different kinds of practices here that that are that are you know all quite quite popular actually in people's organizations and moving along what about what kind of policy do we have what does your organization have but and so in this question I should point out does your organization have policy or support in place for these because one of the the angles that I'm taking on this question of policy as this is the kind of a big area of my current research is is really that if you put support in place for people to be able to do things then that actually is a policy even if it doesn't appear to be written as a as a document so so yeah even if there is not a web page that you point to say we have a policy on this but there is some funding some human time some infrastructure because I'm really sorry about the Theresa about the difficulty of answering these questions I'm not sure why that should be the case but I'll try and sort it out in the next time I do yes I like your response in the chat Christine lots of support from any of these so I think that that's I think that's the case it's often the case so open access to research publications I'm not surprised really to see that way out in the lead because I think that that's the the open movement that has kind of it's of course there's still debates there's still kind of some more complexity there than than this blanket statement I'm about to make is going to really account for but but that's kind of the one argument in the in the open world as far as higher education institutions are concerned and I think that's because it's all about research and institutions and academics in general can see that they want their research out there they don't want it to be hard to read it because that's that this is important for institutional and an personal academic career kind of prestige and and you know you want you even on a on a more you know it's not only about kind of your career success but just you know you do all this research and then why should it be difficult to read it I think that that is that that's an argument that a lot of people I think have accepted and there's of course all kinds of mandates around in place around providing various forms of open access now interesting to see the OER list with this in place for having the most policy or support open science practices including open data I expected a lot for but so we are is looking like more well better supported then for example open or unbundled courses the engaging in open professional development practices I think that's that's one that I'm not surprised that there isn't more support although it's definitely we need to consider you know how that that can be improved and and quite quite disappointing but I'm not that surprised to see you're putting recognising staff for contribution or innovation in open or digital teaching to see that coming in last I think that's one of the the areas where improving this would would be a big help right we have reached the end of mentee yeah we're gonna share the presentation with you all and so you can also have the press that would put in there thanks series I think that's a great point about the the influence of the pandemic and that's actually something that I've been been writing about recently is that considering this question of what's been where's the openness in terms of the kind of pandemic response in higher education and because for a lot of people I think they were expecting to see or hoping to see a big turn to OER and I don't think it's happened as quickly as we would wish it to because I still think that there all the barriers to people understanding the things that they need to understand about OER and start doing things with it are still have still been there during the pandemic but people have had even less time to really think all of that stuff through and they've just been focused on the how do I how do I do stuff online that I used to do in a room and that's that's been such a big a big focus staff but yeah this idea of getting more support for getting your own CPD through kind of open open CPD I think is a this is a good argument to make so so just going back to this this slide I think that what we could say despite the fact that we have identified quite a number of policies at different levels and from all around the world is that open education policies are still somewhat thin on the ground that the policies that do exist tend to be focused mostly on OER and and that currently the kind of the the sort of high level exhortation to do more in this space coming from for example from UNESCO with the 2019 recommendation on OER it's still quite OER focused and and that's that's been that has been kind of the the focus of UNESCO's work on this topic ever since the kind of forum on open course where met in I think in 2002 and came up with the phrase open educational resources and and you know so it's it's that's very much the space that they've been focused on I think that they are addressing a bit more the idea of the practices that surround and support the doing of OER and the use of OER but still the language is a lot about about the OER but what about this this question then that that OEP if we're concerned about that if that we're concerned about the fact that it includes practices that relate to OER but also a wider range of things that are not really OER for me that's quite an interesting point because those kind of ideas don't seem to be making their way into policy and this part is more of an open at some open questions that we'd love to hear comments by by microphone or by chat about whether where do we think we should put open educational practices in terms of getting them into policies should they be should there be institutional policies on this should there be should we look to incorporate these things embed these things into our wider policies and strategies around digital learning or general education strategies and what kind of practices if we are going to talk about putting practices into policy which practices so these are these are these are I'm throwing down the gauntlet to you to discuss any of those yeah if anyone wants to speak just just raise the hand to say me we can hand over the mic I think no one of the things that we've been looking and actually when we were like kind of reviewing the policy registry that they were at some point someone came with the brilliant idea to have a template for open educational policies so but policy it's way more complex and policy making it is that it's actually it's a complex process and it needs to be participatory and it needs to be inclusive otherwise it's just a piece of paper and this is a discussion that people's kind of simplified a discussion oh like oh well but we had we have a template we can share the template around well there is another group and this is something that part of the work that we did it was Lorna and Catherine Cronin participated last year when we were talking about kind of co-creation of open education now open education policies without the focus on on the R on their resources and and this is something that I think it needs to be a discussion because well yeah well the UNESCO still is focusing in in to and kind of promoting OER policies we can see that the uptake of the of such policies it's quite low in comparison with other policies like open science and when you see the difference of language between the open science recommendations and the open educational resources policies recommendations from UNESCO there is a huge disbalance in regard of the practice of you read the recommendations from UNESCO about open science it's sort about the practice like transparency and replicating someone's studying and sharing the practices and sharing the methodologies and sharing the data well well instead well in the in in the OER recommendations it's all about the resource the quality of the resource the resources it's why do we have this to separate kind of discussions and it's still a mystery to me and Teresa can you open the mic for Teresa yeah thanks thanks very much both of you for for focusing our attention on on this gap and this issue I think it's really important I think the turning point in the pandemic came when we started to see open science being taken more seriously because of the benefit clearly to everybody involved we wouldn't have a vaccine had it not being really for open science and I think we really have to find those sort of wins or translate what we're doing in in those sort of terms when we think about open practice more widely because the science one is quite quick and easy to get when you're in a life-threatening condition but lives are being put at risk in terms of access to education throughout the pandemic but we're not seeing that it's invisible somehow we need to make that visible that you know there are young people who can't you don't have devices to access education and learning from home there are many many families who are really struggling with the current pandemic situation so I think there's an opportunity there but we need to get that focus on the importance of open practices in education to actually counter those sorts of huge equality gap that's just getting wider and wider yeah I absolutely agree with you and and digital poverty so having this obsession of designing like super with low bandwidth cannot use for example so it's kind of looking at things Christina that's actually I'm taking notes by the way so this is this is a very good point Teresa but but from this side I'm seeing that Christina is struggling to understand which sort of which OEPs could go into policy for example so Christina you want to talk to us sure yeah thank you which is why I asked the question earlier in the chat like what would it look like to have open educational practices in a policy and and I guess it depends on how one defines OEP which of course is very slippery I can see that there might be policies around open access open data and open science potentially I mean it's I don't know sometimes it's hard because what you've got is faculty academic freedom kinds of questions that might come up I don't know so the kinds of things I'm thinking about in OEP are perhaps involving students more in you know whether creating open educational resources or participating in helping to develop a course and course objectives and that kind of thing and and I guess one thing that comes to mind if you're involving students in let's say creating open educational resources is perhaps some kind of guidelines around student privacy student agency I don't know if you want to call it ownership of what they create or something like that like maybe that could go into a policy so yeah I guess I'm just struggling a little bit I think that's I think those are really good points with Dana I think that that's that we you want to sort of I think I think when we're talking about policy we also are not just really talking about things that are things that are required or that are sort of it's not it's not exactly just a kind of a on a level of regulation but it's also like the sort of it's sort of a declaration of intent for an organization on what kind what kinds of things they believe in and are prepared to support and that can unlock kind of unlock some of the institutional resources and money for and and so so so I think it's it's it's partly about clarifying some of those confusing areas around intellectual property that sometimes make people go I don't know whether I'm even allowed to do this that that can be a kind of I think a problem but it's also yeah as some Sammy is suggesting a sort of mission statement for OEP it could be it could be that you use it as a declaration of this is kind of what we what we believe open education is all about and I think in a way policy does that even if you don't intend it that way yeah maybe Lorna can just tell the group of some experiences that she has that because I think she's the best one to explain how some policies so how some practices can be mapped into quality Lorna yes you're no problem can I just check you can hear me okay we good and so yeah so in Edinburgh we have an OER policy so it is very much focused on open education resources however the policy exists in order to encourage practice so it's not a mandatory policy it doesn't tell you that you must do anything it's very much there to encourage open practice so it's there to encourage both staff and students to use and create open education resources in terms of students you actually produce quite a lot of student generated open education resources in the university and a lot of these are produced through coursework so quite often students will have coursework assignments the output of which is an open licensed resource students continue to own the copyright of any content that they create as part of their education but we encourage them to share them under open license and we see this in all different kinds of formats sometimes it's about students creating dedicated open education resources as part of the coursework sometimes it might be about creating Wikipedia entries for example so there's a lot of practice there we don't really talk about open education practice much in the university at the policy level but it's kind of there implicitly across a lot of our other services sorry did somebody want to come in there I don't know what happened with the presentation it disappeared and so what I was just going to finish off by saying was we have a whole range of policies obviously but a lot of them have within them some concept of sharing and openness being a good thing that goes right back to the institutions like mission statement and vision which is about sharing our knowledge and making the world a better place so that's really what underpins everything that goes on within the university so you know we have our open data repository we have our open access mandates we have the OER policy we also try and share a lot of the the content that we create for MOOCs and open online courses courses so really that the OER policy is there in order to influence practice but we don't necessarily refer to it as an open practice policy because I think it is very hard to write practice into policy but I think you can write policies in such a way that they encourage practice yeah and I agree with with Lorena absolutely and the thing is like you don't kind of describe the practice but you're encouraged and also where the way the things that we can see that it's the policies are missing it's the rewarding around for example career progression with open with open practices yeah normally you get the mandate in which you get punished if you do not put your publication up into the open access repository so you cannot play with career progression although this is kind of the only element of like practice to get quite noticeable maps into open policies or policies about openness if I can just jump there's one other in terms of like rewarding open practice in terms of the creation of open education resources we do actually have that written in as I forget the right term it's like a measure of excellence for career progression for teaching staff so the university's framework for for career progression was updated I think about about 18 months ago and as part of that one of the pieces of evidence of excellence was actually creating education resources that could be used out with the university such as open education resources so that was actually a really positive step for the university to take sort of say well if you are actually creating open education resources you can use that as evidence if you're going forward for promotion whether anyone has actually used that in a promotion case I don't know of course we have the pandemic has come in since then and there's been sort of recruitment and promotion freezes of all kinds so like I don't know if that's been put into practice but it is interesting that that is now there in amongst our promotion criteria yeah and these are actually quite unique and I think Leona and I spent December because we love to spend December doing random things reading around 300 policies and actually that of course one of the best models in the world is Edinburgh and because you touch so many issues around the policy that it's even though we call it policy and normally and we have this kind of no discussion but we have this conversation with Tannis Morgan a few months ago but what in in in in in North America they call it like like actually strategy so it's kind of either it's this policy or strategic level it needs to include things that make people willing to do things in the open landscape so data, citizen science, open science, sharing methodologies, sharing resources, sharing teaching resources, sharing even your recording recorded lectures but they need to have an impact on your career otherwise it's just kind of taking advantage of the goodwill of people producing things that won't take you anywhere. Leo could you like to recall the conversation that is going on in the chat for the recording of this talk? I think that we have mostly been sort of having a chat as a commentary on what's been on the audio conversation so yeah just sort of some feedback regarding what Lorna was saying about Edinburgh I said sharing and openness as a good thing as the as the kind of core to the policy statements was a pretty good example of the kind of mission statement I'm referring to so not necessarily it doesn't necessarily need to I think be something that necessarily goes hugely deeper than that so much as just kind of I guess setting out as a stall as an organisation on you know what do we think about these things and I think linking it to this isn't what I said in the chat this is now just I'm expanding on it sorry but you know linking it really to the question of like what what are we as a as an educational institution what are we here for and you know maybe this isn't maybe this all isn't as radical as sometimes those of us that advocate these things are kind of and end up feeling because this is actually just trying to reconnect our organisations with with pre-existing earlier missions that they have you know claimed to have been brought into existence for does that make sense and we're really happy that we could have this conversation before the conference because we will be kind of looking into during the conference and how how how people describe the kind of strategic level of work and which practices could be rewarded just try to kind of map at some point some suggestions but for example Christina was mentioning here that in their policy it comes for tenure producing an OER but are they telling you which kind of OER can you tell us a bit more Christina? Sure I'll just have fun and so it's actually for we have two well we have multiple streams of faculty but two streams of tenure track faculty one is focused on research and teaching and the other is educational leadership and teaching and which is the stream that I'm in and it's for the second it can count as part of educational leadership which counts for part of tenure but there's no there's no information in the policy about what kind of open educational resource it's it's just you know creation of educational resources that are contributed openly to a repository or or in some other way so yeah could be a textbook could be something else. Yeah it's an interesting one isn't it because it's quite a sort of a new kind of area of practice and I guess it's it might be hard for people who are evaluating the like how significant is this practice or how you know I mean I do think that they're there I have used earlier in the slides the term innovation and I always kind of feel a slight consternation at using it even but but it sort of feels like that it's something that people will know what I mean but but I do worry that people shouldn't necessarily have to do something that's actually innovative so much it's just something that's good and worthwhile and valuable but it also is a little bit relative to you know people might regard something as innovative just because it's a bit new to them so but yeah I think I think we do need these these kind of policies to be quite flexible not necessarily kind of that you know like if you if you've done an open textbook then this is worthy but if you've done that some other kind of OEP then it's a bit less. Yeah we did it could I sorry yeah I mean on on that because I totally recognize what Leo is saying there and and I'm thinking I think the the the issue I'm seeing I mean I've been in teaching for 35 years open educational practice was not something I had ever heard of sort of 15 years ago but open educational practice was something I'd been doing ever since I'd started in teaching so it's this isn't open practices are not a new thing to teachers teachers generally share and provide tips and give each other ideas and that's how you you become a better teacher you learn a lot and because teaching is very demanding in terms of you know you have limited time and resource it's that collaborative practice that is really important and I wonder sometimes whether we get a bit too hung up on the acronym and the label and actually I think as Leo was saying we we're not paying attention to the activity the activity is part of the core of being a teacher and you know I think it what you're doing by getting it to a policy or strategic level is recognizing that it's important and that's that's a difficult thing because of managerialism because actually collaborative practice is not very easy to manage it makes it that you know I can perhaps say this because I've now stepped out of the working arena but it makes it difficult to be selective about who gets promoted and who doesn't if everybody collaborates because you can't clearly see who's the one that's you know the person that needs to be employed or whatever and I think we should be pushing back against that managerialist tendency and saying this is part of the nature of being an educationalist this is part of the nature of being a teacher in the same way as you know this is part of the nature of being an HEI and I think that's what's been eroded yeah that very much connects with that that rambling point that I was trying to make about you know sort of asking our organizations to remember what they are supposedly there for okay well this has been absolutely wonderful to discuss all of this with with all of you we probably should start bringing it to a close you share them that what we leave as a present for for whoever wants to update yes I am about to move to the next slide and did you want to just explain a bit about this yep in the last few years actually I will move this a little bit so it doesn't look so weird that in the last years Leo and I have been creating quite a lot of toolkits and things for doing policy just a few things so what we think is like this is kind of a good time and opportunity and this is also part of the conversation that we had with Catherine Cronin no longer ago to review the existing policies or strategies at the institutional level kind of start thinking about co-creating and open tables co-creating open tables for to bring in students librarian any stakeholder that might be affected by it by the policy so you can bring sort of like an exercise to get to start like redeveloping or up to developing or updating and existing policies so you want to move a bit other so basically we like shamelessly we have written some stuff quite a lot but mostly we tend to write in a kind of guide-ish style so if you go back it's not just like theory around it but also some practical guidance on how to do things or how to co-create so we give you here like come back to your your too fast your too fast one one further down is like 12 so then we have like a timeline so it's to help you to see about how you want to do it in for example from the next year how you want to kind of update your your policy or create a new one next one please then we have like a little roadmap for you to think about which kind of how to map your strategic priorities so if you want to map your policy landscape maybe you have an open science then you have open data then you have an open access and then you have an OER policy and maybe you you're in a digital strategy maybe you like to bring them together this is something that you can see like the open open policies it's quite slightly fragmented around in such a high education institution so and different units are responsible for such policies so you have like open access and open science sent to sit in the library but digital and open education tend to sit like in the educational lab domain so maybe it's kind of time to bring all the policies together and create sort of like an open knowledge one this this is an idea and actually I know a university in Spain there is kind of experimenting with that maybe next one Leo of course this is a good exercise for people that is quite new into policy making just to sort of analysis of your policies and the policies policies landscapes and different open policies around and educational policies to see where are the weakness and the threats and the strength of your policies to kind of start thinking how to really sign the policy world around here and no comment yeah no comment and next one Leo and of course I can download from Sonodo or you can have it here as a kid so if you want to start working with students and stuff oh I don't know why I got let me fix the last slide because they're customer segments and it should be there that's my bad I didn't copy the whole policy in there so I'll fix it and and they'll be shared with you in Sonodo and we'll put the link on Twitter so if anyone wants to use the kids it's an open educational resource at the end of the day any questions that us will look pretty in small pictures well if there's no more questions then I would like to ask you all to give our wonderful presenters a big round of applause it's been an absolutely fantastic session really exciting for us here to get us into the mood for this year this week's conference and the session recording video from the session will be up on the website later today or early tomorrow I'm ready for sharing more widely so from all of us here at OER by Domains21 thank you very much