 for you to join. There we go, there's a recording started. So we've got lots of lovely sessions for you to join this afternoon, one of which is coming up just now, so thank you all for joining us. And I'm delighted to welcome Dr Patrina Law to OER 23 with her session, Supporting Ukrainians with OER on Open Learn. So I will hand over to Patrina. And if you've got any questions, comments, do feel free to pop them in the chat, I will be keeping my eye on that throughout the session. So over to you Patrina. Thank you very much. Thanks for coming today. I can see there's just a few people, a few participants, one of whom I know, and that's Anna. So hello, Anna. I just wanted to start just by asking a quick poll actually, if you would just like to say yes, whether you know about Open Learn or no that you don't know much about Open Learn, here you do know about Open Learn. Okay, so for the person that's just joined, just a quick poll to say, have you already heard of Open Learn? Do you know about Open Learn? Okay, so there we go. So there we go. There's our anonymous poll, says that you all know about it. Okay, so I will move through my slides slightly quicker then with regard to explaining what on earth it is, if that's helpful. So what I'm going to talk about today is the OU social mission via Open Learn, just a quick reminder and then say a little bit about the invasion of Ukraine and what that actually meant to us as a department and what we thought we wanted to do about that, how we could help and what we've done and what we plan to do, how we've provided supported materials and what we want to do next and what that's taught us really the whole experience. So just ever so briefly then, this is just a quick slide that we produce, which is to say, explain the size of the Open University. So it's a pretty big distance university with a large proportion of students with disability and a relatively young cohort as well, but you don't need any qualifications to study with the Open University. So we have a royal charter as well, which means that we give learning to the community at large. So that free learning element is something that's been delivered through our BBC relationship and through our free and online learning relationship as well for many years now. Over 50 years, university is and Open Learn has been running now for 16 years, 17 years, I can't count. Anyway, it's been going a long time and we're deeply proud of this activity. So what that means is people come into the platform now mostly via Google, it's just natural search, so people come in and find us, they're searching for information and they dive in, they make an inquiry, they find themselves in the platform. Perhaps they were just looking for information, not necessarily seeking to sit forward and study something, but they could look at an article, a video, an interactive or they could enroll on a free course and a proportion of those learners go off and become our students. And that's the kind of business element to all of this. It was never its original raison d'etre, but it is, it remains the case, not surprisingly really with an audience of so many that a proportion of people go off and make an inquiry, which is good. It's brilliant because that's what it's about getting people through at the end of the day to realise that they can study and they don't need qualifications for an undergraduate degree to do so at the Open University. Many of those people can't afford to study, never will be able to afford to study, and so Open Learn, excuse me, is there for them to, okay, I seem to be tumping through. I'm getting ahead of myself, here we go. Excuse me just a second, there we are, that's better. So this is a snapshot of Monday's home page to give you an idea of the type of content that's on the platform in terms of the subject, broad subject areas, and also the type of content you can see. So that might be a collection of articles, it could be a video, the one that you can see, primary education, that's a badged course, managing my money for young adults is a badged course. There's a game there called Perplex. There's all sorts of things, basically videos, articles, you can learn a language, and that just is a snapshot, and that home page gets changed, if not daily, then certainly on a weekly basis. It's often reflecting topical information as well, things that come up in the news. And that's the lovely thing about what we produce is that we get a piece of everything that come out of the curriculum. As this slide sort of demonstrates, a tasty slice of everything we make is shared openly. So we get a slice of everything that's from our curriculum that's shared for free, but also we commission with our wonderful colleagues in our various faculties content that we think is topical and pertinent to modern debates. And that really comes through on open land. So it's not your focus, what you would necessarily expect from a university to see these kind of really interesting topical things being brought to the front. And some of those things won't yet have made their way into the formal taught curriculum, they could be outputs of research. So Opelins is brilliant place for publishing those short, interesting pieces of information and then taking those subjects further over time and turning them into courses. And if we think there's a desire to study something at course level. This is the impact data from the last year. And I don't mean to December, I mean actually it was the last academic year, 21-22. Let's give you some idea of the scale of the platform now. So you've all said you're familiar with it, but perhaps we're not clear that since the pandemic things have really really grown in terms of all our numbers to the platform. So excuse me that was 16 million visits in that year. From a quite a broad range of places in the world we have a less than half now coming from the UK. We have a much bigger international audience, which is critical to this presentation actually when we think about who's using the platform. We spread our content over different platforms. You can see we had 5.7 million YouTube video views. So any videos that are made for open and courses get put onto YouTube as well as a way of reaching different audiences with free learning too. We also had 660,000 of our own student visits. So 660,000 students put many visits by our students to use the platform too. We awarded 44,000 digital badges in that year. And as you can see for the UK audience in the middle that 10% is the click through to make an inquiry. Excuse me. So those are our top visitor locations. I think the flags speak for themselves there. Our main audience is the UK, followed by US, India, Philippines and Australia, but it's a very broad range across the world of people that come to visit us. And that's a graph that you can see that shows how our visitors have grown. That blue line is the total visitors during each of the financial years from 2011 to 12. You can see that big peak in the first and second year of the pandemic. And the proportion of UK visitors as well, peaking there too. And the pink line that runs across the top is the UK, is the UK percent of the learners that are UK based. And then just on the right hand side, how are people learning with us? One to remember just now 38.8 or roughly 40% of people using a mobile phone there, 3% on the tablet and about 58% using a desktop. Those figures haven't really changed much over the last few years. Generally speaking, that's been the proportion of device types that we've seen has been pretty steady. I just want to say a little bit about language use on OpenLearn because this is where we're heading with this. So we already have a section on OpenLearn. OpenLearn is Moodle-based called OpenLearn-Kumri. There's a version of this in English and a version of this in Welsh. And the materials on there are translated. We have someone working in the Open University in Wales specifically on OpenLearn who is a Welsh speaker. A great deal of work is translated that they feel is going to be popular and fact is desired by the Welsh Government to support various different initiatives over the last few years. So that's all supported. The navigation is in Welsh as well. And it's really good. We're really delighted to have that and it's become a much bigger endeavor over the years. You can see there's 29 items in that section. I can't possibly begin to pronounce what that is in Welsh, but so that's a really good canon of work there. We're also able to publish, obviously, courses and videos in other languages as well. And that's really about putting that content inside of what is effectively an English language website. We also have a bit of Ukrainian which I'll talk about in a bit and a little bit of Chinese as well. So it's ostensibly in English though. I would say 99% of the website is in English. There's about 1,000 courses on there. So it's enormously in English. So a year ago, obviously we all know about the invasion of Ukraine. Just a little quote here from the UN to say it was the fastest and largest displacement of people since World War II. There's so many things that have shocked us in the news in the last few years. This felt really horribly shocking and really quite close to home, quite scary I thought too. And while scratching my head thinking, well, what can we do about this? How can Open Learn help? What can we do really just sort of desperate helping in our own communities and the people that we know? But how can we as an institution respond to this? Open Learn wasn't the only response but there was, we were a significant response to this problem in trying to use the tools we had, basically. We could see as well, this is another United Nations source here, where people were going as they were leaving. This is a map from last year about where people were heading to from Ukraine. And from our perspective of our analytics, this was very interesting to us. So my colleague, Ben, was mapping this quite carefully as it unfolded. But from the Open Learn analytics perspective, the learning preferences of Ukrainians, generally speaking, prior to the 14th of February last year, there was nothing really special to say about them. Their topics of interest were the same as pretty much everybody else. There was nothing really that sort of separated them out from everyone else. But from the point of that invasion, new Ukrainian learners we could clearly see were rapidly switching to looking at language courses almost just universally. It was English, French and German on Open Learn and anything relating to workplace skills as well. So that was a real moment. That's what they're doing. They must be a clever bunch if they're doing all of this in English. So what about everybody else? So what we decided to do was really look at how we could potentially translate some of our materials into Ukrainian for these learners. So the first thing we did was we put together a page in English of a bunch of resources, free online resources for Ukrainians settling in the UK. And this was a collection of courses that were about English, French and German, how to learn those languages because we could see what people were looking for. There was also, if you look at this page as well, you'll see at the bottom of the page there are many links to how to find support in the UK, charities, where to go, all the kind of information that was gathered by our colleagues to support anyone who was coming to the UK as a refugee. So it was a really good collection of material and some advice in there as well. The courses that were pulled out were provided on advice from our own data and also from the Government Affairs team at the university. So they were very much in contact with the government, how is the university going to support Ukrainians? And they wanted us to highlight well-being and mental health resources. So those courses that were translated and articles, as you can see, language learning plus mental health resources as well supporting children too. That's the link to the page and obviously this will be shared after the session. It was very interesting though, in fact, interesting putting it mildly, but the page was launched in May 2022 and within two months it was the seventh most popular page on the platform. It had bypassed everything and there's a lot of pages on the platform but it was immensely popular and then to January 2023 it had almost 92,000 views and that's just the page in English. So it was presented by various different networks and it surprised everyone how popular that page became. So in the summer we thought okay this is all great, this stuff's all in English, what are we going to do now? And we decided to translate six of the most popular courses on this page plus some of the articles on how to write a CV etc into Ukrainian and that included translating the certificates and the digital badges as well. And that work was interesting because trying to find a Ukrainian translator was quite hard. The agency that we had gone through had said you can't get Ukrainian translators at the moment, not surprisingly. I happened to know someone who was an Ukrainian speaker so between us we patched together three different sources to get some of this work translated and we added the Ukrainian language pack to open learn as well to take the alphabet which obviously is very different from the English. And that's the page, you may recognize it, it's the English page that is quite literally been translated into Ukrainian. We're able to give one of the translators access to the platform so that she could really see for herself how things were coming together, thinking about also things that always translate very well in terms of next and and all the kind of navigation things that we were trying to say and to say nothing of some of the colloquialisms that were inside some of the the courses. So not everything was translated but as much as we could do which was as I say six courses and articles in that period in the summer. And it was quite a labour of love, loads of things broke behind the scenes, it was pretty complicated actually and it was one thing to get the courses translated but then we had to deal with all of the navigation that was wrapped around it as well. So this is what was translated every day English, English in the world today, languages at work, writing a CV, understanding your sector, making a set of mental health and again all those links to the legal advice, the government and the charity resources too. So it was a real team effort to get it all sorted certainly from a technical perspective I would say what's probably the toughest part. I'm not heavily technical but I do know that it was a bit of a mess behind the scenes but we got there in the end. I'm just going to show you what some of this looks like so to compare the English with the Ukrainian so you can see how it looked on the site. So that is the course description page for English in the world today and then on the right hand side the course description page for that course in Ukrainian and not just the course but all of the navigation in between. So this is quite heavily modified and adapted Moodle and you can see you've got the title, the free statement participation on the right hand side where you're talking about the course, how many hours of study, the reviews and the buttons, how to enroll and everything had to be turned on its head and translated into Ukrainian for it to be anything like a meaningful experience. Happy to say that that's had three and a half out of five stars reviewed by people Ukrainians who have studied the course. That's another thing here so if we drill down into one of the activities within that course and if you ignore the fact to the top you've got one which has got the enrolment button in it and one which is already shown is that someone has completed the course. You can see how that activity works in the middle of the page in the blue box activity one and the revealing of the comment all of those things had to be sort of mapped as well and then on the left hand side there's the translation of the structure of the course, the course content. That's my Ukrainian statement of participation so that's my free certificate and the badge as well had to be redrawn and translated too so the whole thing hangs together and the rest of this certificate the certificate runs to three pages it shows all the different sections of the course that you've passed and the learning outcomes as well so you get a robust certificate that's yours that sits on your open line profile in Ukrainian. So just a bit of data on that then the page was launched in September with the translated resources on it and to the end of January there were four and four thousand three hundred six seven course views of those translated courses so that's pretty good um we'd like to see more but um we're very happy with that. And um just wanted to say a little thing about the mobile uses the usage so remember when we were looking at open learn overall we have roughly speaking that 40% 38 39% of our learners using a mobile when we look at the Ukrainian resources we can see very clearly that the ones that have been translated it's mostly its majority of those people are looking at it from a mobile phone no surprises there I suppose um in terms of location 16% of those people looking at those resources in Ukrainian were in Ukraine and 67% in the UK um so I just wanted to just go back to that I think really the point about the mobile usage was really was again a big reminder to us that uh forced migrants uh people on the move are not using desktop computers not surprisingly to study and that this really has shone a light on our mobile experience if you want to be truly open and accessible to everyone having it in other languages is one thing but actually making sure that that mobile experience mobile experience is the best it can be is really really important so that's given us a lot to think about when we think about um migrants using our site so uh just finally then to say what our next steps are um just going to talk through these the first one is the improvements to language pack implementation it was a bit of a mess it wasn't very good um and we really want to improve that process so that we can apply other um other languages to the platform much more easily switch them on as and when we're able to when we get the funding to do other translations as it stands at the moment we are seeking funding for more Ukrainian translation and it looks like we are going to be funded by a specific charity that's interested in this um so we're hoping to take that further so there'll be a really good body of work and get the rest of those English courses and articles on that Ukrainian page translated into Ukrainian um we're also seeking funding from a donor to develop a mobile app and that would enable us to do something that I've wanted to do for a very long time which is to take that learning offline so that obviously we know that there's a mood a moodle app uh as well a moodle study app but this is something that will be fully translated so all the navigation in the app will be completely translated all the content will be translated but it will be a subset of open them so you would download what you wanted to study if you have poor connectivity connectivity you can study offline and the tracking of that learning still takes place in the app and then when you're back online your progress uploads again so that you've always got that experience of having a really good profile you can keep all of your badges and certificates to yourself it doesn't matter if you're offline as long as you've been able to download what you need to study um so again a really important thing there we are looking at um working with other donors to for example translate into French because we feel that's extremely important what's been told it's extremely important for countries in Africa um some of the lowest um socioeconomic groups in Africa will be speaking French or can speak French um and ditto syrian not syrian ditto arabic for other migrants as well if you can't all speak um arabic many people can read it so we're looking at those two languages as possibly moving to necks in terms of working with donors so we could hopefully see a future whereby we've got a range of apps in different languages to support people with OER in their languages and languages that are needed most um can actually yeah can I interrupt I just got a question that seems pertinent at this moment so Anna's asked about how many language packs does open learn have actually didn't know you had Spanish and French content on the site uh do you have the language packs for them as well um I think we do but that only really relates to when we're teaching Spanish so for example um there's level one two and three Spanish content that comes out of the curriculum and um many of those courses will require you once you move up from level one to be able to read your what you're being taught in Spanish so we have to have Spanish on the site because it reflects that five percent of our curriculum excuse me Ditto German Italian and the other languages but that does not include the navigation excuse me so that would just be the teaching materials inside the course I don't know how many language packs we've got on the site if I'm honest with you but I can find out sorry um is that okay so when I said ah so that sounds like the language packs haven't been applied for those languages yet okay um so final point just to make here is the development of a language toggle for open learn and so what that would mean is when we've got um got up ahead of steam with another set of materials certainly the first in the queue for that would be Welsh that you would be able to come into open learn and you could toggle how you saw the site the whole of the navigation of the site so Welsh would be the first contender for that then I guess as we and the current trajectory around that would be Ukrainian I would imagine looking forward a couple of years then we might also introduce French so that's the kind of roadmap around all of that would need to come through our development office um and be funded by donors because this is pure outreach work um so yes that that's our vision and this whole Ukrainian translation activity has taught us a lot it's enabled us to kind of re-think about other languages on open learn and really just extending the social mission beyond English speaking content I don't think you could translate all of open learn it would take you years it's just masses of it and then you'd have to keep it updated so that's the other headache to it is it's hard enough keeping the English versions up to date of everything we've got imagine a thousand courses it's it's really it's a whole project just to keep all that work going and to then do that and all the other languages is going to be quite an overhead so all of this will rely on external funding um so that's me done actually Trina I'm going to give you a round of applause from where I am so shall we invite any other questions as well um if you want to pop them in the chat I will repeat them back for Petrina I'm very happy to turn microphones and cameras on as well if you'd like to pop your mic on and just ask the the question directly uh Paul has said that was wonderful and Anna has said thank you Petrina um so um I don't think there are any other questions but I'll pause for a minute or so just so people can pop them in the chat if they want to uh Anna said Arabic brings brings its own special challenge as we've discovered on Open Learn Create because it is right aligned yes thank you Anna um I'm sure it does in fact we've already asked we've asked our developers uh Moodle developers to look at that for us so we're anticipating the joy that that will bring um so that's something they're already working on behind the scenes as to how we might bring that into the platform my my brain just kind of implodes when I think how on earth we would bring uh Arabic into the whole of the navigation of the sites I need someone to sit down and explain that to me but um thank you Anna I know you've been there so thank you and I said oh good thank you Anna any other questions or comments I'm just uh I have to say um really impressed um and it sounds like um you know when you were talking about the way that the students in in the Ukraine and other uh people in the Ukraine have been using it sounds really like it's a really valuable um resource and obviously in the current situation uh what a wonderful thing to be able to offer as well any other questions or comments before we uh finish and beautifully on time Petrina thank you a gold star thanks okay I'm going to assume there's no more questions and I'm going to stop the recording so just a final thank you um Petrina for a really interesting wonderful session and people will be able to come and watch the recording later on today as well um so other people will be able to appreciate your hard work as well so another mini applause from me over here and I'll stop the recording and we'll finish the session