 Hello, Buenos dias, bonjour, and other hello's. Welcome to this bit of a tour of the OEG Connect site for the OEGlobal 2021 conference. I'm your tour guide, Alan Levine, and I'm going to try to quickly point out to you the important features of the site because there's a lot of features, but mostly it's like, how do you get there? So the most direct route is always starting your path at connect.oeglobal.org, which will take you to our open education global community space. There's a lot of other things going on here, but the main thing you'll see right away is that the conference for now is going to be at the top of the list. Before we get in there, just want to point out a couple other things. If you're in connect, if you're created your account and you're logged in, you'll have an icon at the top that represents yours. That always just has some important information. One of them, I see that there's numbers there that blue one, that's a notification. That means that someone mentioned me or replied to something that I wrote. It's a good way to stay connected. The green dots indicate I have a private message that I may want to attend to. All of these are accessible when you click the menu and find them under here. So this is a total summary of the notification. These are some private messages that I have gotten or sent, et cetera. But the key thing is this little person icon that I want to make sure that you know about. So these go to a lot of different things for your account. Importantly, are your preferences. So here is where you can change your profile picture and other, your name as it appears on the site. When you go to profile, this lets you edit your bio, which shows up when you are appeared on the site. You can indicate whatever time zone that you want is local to you. So that actually just going to introduce my current time zone. And you can fill out the information that appears when people find you on the site. Even put pretty pictures on the background. That's all fun, but not necessarily critical. One thing that is important is, and because we're trying to have as much of this conference available in many different languages, is you can change the language of the interface. So if English is not your spoken language, you can change it to many different ones that will be appropriate for you. Now this does not translate the content, but all the interface items, the menus, the buttons, et cetera will be in a language that is more appealing probably to you. So we want to get back to where we were. How do we do that? Always get back to your home by clicking the OE Global Connect site. So let's get into the conference area. And this is what we call the lobby. And we've somewhat modeled this after the lobby of a conference. And there are going to be people to meet and things to do. We'll come back to all these major areas, but important in the lobby, and this is typical of everywhere in this conference site because this is not a website per se, but this is a community discussion environment powered by discourse, the open source tool. So everything posted in here potentially is a conversation. So in the welcome area, this is the general place where you can find out what's going on, participate in social activities, or just perhaps even start your own. So we have a couple different activities that you can go in. So we have a conference survey. And you'll notice also, as I hover over different items, I get a little bit of preview about what is in this area. But I'll go into this survey right now and I can come here and say, wow, how many OE Global Conferences have you been? This is my first, I'm new to this. And so this is a fun way for us and everybody else to get to know you. Okay, well, that's interesting. What do I do now? Do I click the back button? Well, if I just click OE Global Conference, this always takes you back to this lobby area. So in this lobby, we have some important information that you'll see under the welcome. Important information is always pinned to the top of an area and will be shown in the gray. Very important things, such as the conference directory where you can see other people who are registered for the conference, find them. You can send a message. So I can sort of see like, oh, wow, here is my good friend, Aperva. If I click her icon, I get a preview of her bio, I can even send a Aperva message. And it's like, hi Aperva, I'm really looking forward to seeing you at the OE Global Conference. Maybe we can get together for a sidebar conversation. So use that wherever you are in OE Global to find your way around. We'll go back again, we'll go to the conference, we'll get back to the lobby. There's lots of ways to get back here. The other thing is that perhaps I want to start a new conversation here. So as a participant in the conference, this is something that you get for your registration. So I'm looking for contacts who speak Polish and do OER in chemistry. Maybe not the most brilliant thing. So you can post anything that you want and discourse gives you a couple of suggestions. And then you write what you want to see. So this is what you might want to do if you're looking to meet people is to put a message here and hopefully someone will reply and maybe arrange a meeting or if you're looking for particular resources maybe they'll help you out. I'm gonna cancel this one because I'm just playing around here. You'll also see as you go around there are these little links down here below tags. These social are gonna be all our social activities. So these are things that you can do in between sessions for fun to get to meet people. We've got a way to put yourself on the map, a padlet map, we have some sharing of recipes and we have these fun remixable postcards. I'm not gonna show you all these because I want you to get here and explore. But you can see as we're looking at the activity and now we've just started that someone with a dog icon, that's actually my other account, created this, but we can see the icons for other people who have participated in the conversation. And again, wherever you see these icons you can find out who they are. Paul Stacey, I know Paul. He's a great guy, maybe I should message him. Anyhow, I'm being a little bit silly. So we're gonna come back and here's the other navigation key wherever you see this menu. I'm gonna come back and see O-Global Conference and I'm going to come back here to the latest and I'm going to try to get back and already my demo is not going very well. So I'm gonna go back to the front, pretend I didn't do that. But anyhow, the lobby, use it, pay attention to it, go in there, make lots of comments, reply, connect with each other. That's what you can do before the conference, during breaks in the conference, even after the conference. The main part to understand now are these different areas that the conference is organized with. And there's a lot of them. And so it might get confusing. So we don't want you to get panicked and we'll show you how to get help. But anytime that you are lost, remember you always click the O-Global Connect to get back to the beginning. So blue areas are generally information about the conference, red areas are related to the sessions, we'll get to them shortly. The Info Desk, this is gonna be where we have information about the conference, help when using OEG Connect, some guidelines for making it a safe space, navigating, these are all things that our staff have written to sort of help you get figured out. Important thing is like, how do I get help? What if I get stuck anytime? So there's a couple different ways that you can get assistance from OEGlobal. You can go to our help center. And so these are people who are on hand to help you and you can send a message and it will go out to everybody in our help desk. You can send an email to this address and that will go to someone, his name is Alan and he will answer you right away. And also, very interesting, we're giving an experiment because we heard a lot of people use Telegram. If you're in Telegram or wanna join, we have a little chat group there. So you can go to that group and you can say like, that website, it's so complex. I can't figure out how to get to the sessions or what time should I get up to make this session? So you can use that space as well to have conversations even outside of the conference. So we're gonna go back to the front desk. We're gonna come back to these areas in a second. But most important areas are related to the conference because that's what you're here for, right? So the way this conference is organized is that there are specific action area webinars. These are live sessions organized around the conference theme of the UNESCO OER recommendations. And so they are also organized around different languages that they're offered in. So we've got webinars happening in English, in French, in Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish. I think I got them all. And so within a webinar, you'll find anywhere from two to five different presentations. So the webinars are generally the important ways that the conference is organized. You can also find, and we'll explore these in a second, individual listings for all the presentations that are included in the webinar. We have other formats known as prerecorded presentations. These are ones you can come to at any time and explore. And we also have some interactive activities, which again are things that our presenters have created that are activities you can do during the conference, share your results, connect with each other, self-paced independent learning professional development right here in the conference space. But the most important piece is to come first into the action area webinars. So what you'll find here is they're listed and there's about 24 different webinars. And they're not really in order because again, this is kind of a community space. So this is maybe not the best way to navigate and find the webinars that you go to unless you know for sure that you wanna participate in this webinar too that's happening in Spanish. So for any webinar activity, you're going to find out some information about it, the UNESCO area that it applies to, who the chair is gonna be, very important here. Whenever you see a date and time in OEG Connect, it's set to your local time wherever you are in the world. This is where I am, but that way you don't have to do any time zone conversion. The reference time for most of this is going to be the time in Paris, which of course is the host of the conference and non-twitch will be the face-to-face conference, but OEG Connect will always convert this to your local time. So you don't ever have to do any of those time zone calculations to figure out how long. And so most importantly is within the webinar area is where you join. So this is where the link to Zoom will be activated. It's not quite activated yet. And then you'll find out an overview of what's going on. So there's always introductions. These are a summary of the presentations and letting you know that what we want you to do is after a webinar or during a webinar, participate. Make a comment, ask a question, make a suggestion. But as well, if we're going to go to interested in this particular session, we can find out the full details, the abstract. There's often an extended abstract. Again, it's got the time of the webinar that it's part of. It's not specifically the time of this presentation with the webinar. Very important is that if you come to a presentation that's part of a webinar, you have to go to the webinar summary page to get to the Zoom link. So that's what this link is for. And letting you know that you can see the other presentations that are in the same part of the webinar. Now, as these things, the conference unfolds, the presenters from the webinar perhaps will start replying to their own session and offer things like additional information, web links, videos, anything that they feel might support the webinar and the presentation, as well as this is the place for you to interact with them. So this is, you know, in a typical conference presentation, there's only five minutes for Q&A. You have forever to do Q&A here because I can ask a question now of these presenters if I want to ask a question about what UNED and Costa Rica is doing, which is always good. And so this is a presentation that I think, I wanna, you know, I wanna come back to. So important feature here is I can bookmark this webinar listing, so it saves it in my settings. Very interestingly, it actually even sends me a reminder based upon the date of the webinar about when this is coming. So I've added this to my bookmarks. It lets me know my bookmarks appear here. And so I can see that I can collect sessions I may wanna go to by using this bookmark feature. So we hope that makes sense and will provide help for you through the way. So now we get into some of this navigation here. So I can go back to all the webinar presentations and when I'm in one of these environments, I can click this to go back to the conference, but I can also now jump over to another conference area. What are these prerecorded presentations? What is that about? Well, these are ones, obviously, they're presentations that their presenters will have before the conference. They'll post a video, slides, additional resources, et cetera. For this very first one, we can see that Lizzie Garner Ford from University of Edinburgh has already posted a link to the slides. There's a presentation of a video and links, et cetera. And so the presenters may also put questions or lead discussion prompts that they want to reply with. So again, really use this reply button often to ask questions, to post comments. The presenter will get notified that someone asked them a question. Very, very important just to use as much as possible to participate by communicating within this connect environment because we aren't together in one room. And so this back and forth communication with an OEG Connect is what will make the conference experience come alive. So again, we urge you to explore the asynchronous activities. These are all ones that you can do it any time during the conference. So if I'm really interested on inter-institutional community, again, this quest, this looks really fascinating. There'll be an abstract, there'll be details. By the time the conference comes around the presenters will have posted here the instructions and things that you should do to participate, to do an activity and to share your results here in Connect. And so I think I'm gonna like bookmark that one too because I wanna save that. I'm kind of in the use of my bookmarks. I think that's going to be really handy. So if we go back to the conference just to let you know again some more information most important is like, how do I find what to do? So we do have a schedule and there's a lot going on during the week. So there's a mixture of these live sessions and there's things that you can do any time during the week. So there is a schedule page for Monday sessions, Tuesday for every day of the week plus the listing of all the interactivity, social activities. Whenever you're on one of these session pages, schedule pages, you'll find the links to what's going on on each day as well as the access to a list of all prerecorded presentations, interactivities and social activities. The schedules will be listed in the order that they take place during the day. Again, remember, local time. So if I'm really interested in this one, I might be up at 2 a.m. to watch this presentation. So all the information about this webinar, you can click the title link here or go to webinar. That's where you get access to join it the via Zoom ahead of time. But you can browse the presentations that are part of it. So these are gonna be organized schedule pages by all the things that are going on. So you might wanna go ahead and bookmark things, webinars you wanna attend. We really encourage you to not only go to webinar just to see one presentation, but to see them all because we really wanna have discussion around these overarching themes of the conference. But just to let you know when we look at these, this list of prerecorded presentations, this one is a little bit more orderly than the one when you're in the general area where they're all together because they're organized by the recommendation action area. So these are all the prerecorded presentations related to building capacity to developing supportive possible, et cetera. So you can read all these different areas. We've built in a lot of different ways to find these presentations. So there's tags. So if I click here, building capacity, I'm going to see all the presentations, all the activities in the entire conference related to this action area. We can also find out, if I click the Spanish language tag, we can see all the activities, all the things going on that are tagged, that are gonna be done in Spanish. So we're trying as much as possible to create different ways for you to navigate and find information during the conference. So again, that was extremely fast. There's a lot going on, but we hope that you really get in there as much as possible. If you need help at any time, you can find me, the dog icon, you can send me a message anytime or any other of the OE Global staff. And chances are other people in the conference will be willing to help you out. So speak up, speak often, participate and contribute as much to building out this understanding and implementation of the OER recommendation areas. And we hope you have an exciting week. There's gonna be a lot going on, things are being added right up until the doors open and there's gonna be a lot more social activities going on as well. So again, I hope this helps provide some context and information about how to use the OE Connect environment. And we hope you have a really fantastic experience at OE Global 2021.