 Okay, so I've been told to start, so I think I want to start, turn this off. Bonjour, this is Colin Leggera from France, from Nantes Universités, and I'm going to talk about a new object on the map. The new object is called the Unitwin Network on Open Education. And even if I'm the only person presenting, actually there's a whole bunch of people and you'll see their names and even their pictures appear in a little moment. So, Unitwin Network of Open Education and UNESCO, this means that it is an object that is created under the auspices of the UNESCO. So what are all these Unitwin networks? Well, the Unitwin networks are actually the big brother of the Unitwin chairs. So UNESCO has got things called UNESCO chairs. There's a couple of UNESCO chairs in the conference in this moment working on Open Education. And when you put a number of UNESCO chairs together, you obtain a Unitwin network. So the program of Unitwin has been successful for the past, I think, 40 years now. And there's about 800 chairs in the world and there's about 100 networks. And the thing you want to know is, perhaps what you don't want to know is that these networks are not funded. So they actually got the prestige of UNESCO without getting the money that could be associated. But anyhow, the idea is that in 2022, during last year's Open Education Global, a number of us were approached by UNESCO saying, we would like you to actually build one of these networks. So why would UNESCO want that? Well, we know that in 2019 UNESCO got the different countries to adopt the recommendation. And even if the recommendation is a successful object, as Cable was explaining today, there's still work to be done over the world to actually get everybody to realize it. So the idea was to put a number of UNESCO chairs, there were about 10 of us there, and say, OK, can you build this network? So why? Well, to be able to support the UNESCO initiatives related with Open Education resources and Open Education, to also think about the Open Education Research Agenda. There's been a bit about this in the conference. We've heard it in the GOGN talks, but we've heard it's also in separate talks where people say, you know, this is perhaps the moment where we want to move a little bit faster with the Research Agenda. So this is one of the things we want to do. We also want to raise funds. We also heard a bit about this in Cable's talk this morning. And we need to support the development of Open Education everywhere. So one of the things hidden behind this is that in certain cases, UNESCO chairs come in handy in a country to help develop Open Education. And we are thinking through this network to convince people in different countries to also go for UNESCO chairs and therefore have an even larger network. So the title is perhaps a little bit exaggerated. Why does the world need this? The world doesn't need this, of course. But why would you want another object when you've already got a number of objects in the setting of Open Education? So the reasons are, well, one of the ones I've just said earlier, we think that we have to work now on research because of question of maturity. So at one point you're actually doing things, and the other moment you need your researchers, whether they're researching in the social sciences or in the sciences, or in this moment artificial intelligence to work in the field. So we want to push that agenda. We also believe that cooperation is, in many cases, at least around research is monolingual, and we want to try and promote multilingualism. This is going to be one of the key questions of this network. North-South is an issue for UNESCO, but for a lot of people at this conference, so we'll continue with that. And yes, Open Educational Resources was what was on the table. That was what UNESCO adopted in 2019 for a number of reasons. One of the reasons was that actually you could have in a solid way most of the countries in the world agreeing on saying, yeah, we're prepared to do this. Whereas if you talked about the issues of open education with a lot of, I wouldn't say controversial questions there, but at least questions that would interrogate a lot of things in different systems, the world wasn't quite ready for a recommendation on open education at that point. So we think it's where we should be going now. And there is a specific link we want to make between open education and social justice. Okay, so this is the network. This is the map. I was hoping I was trying to ask to the map the other way around and put South America at the top. But this is the best we got. So anyhow, you can see in Brown some countries. I'm just trying to show that it's global because we do have New Zealand down at the bottom there somewhere. And we've got countries in South America, North America, in Africa, and in Europe. And if you count Lebanon, Lebanon saves us and allows us to say that we're present in Asia. It doesn't mean we're that good all over the planet, but it is global in that sense. So I'm going to do a quick presentation. I mean, just so you see who these guys are and also understand what UNESCO chairs actually do. So here are pictures of these people. So Rory, who's around, who could be around in the room, he's not in the room, but we heard him speak here and he's clearly the Canadian chair on open education. And we've heard him talk about the questions relating to AI but relating also to the blockchain and to macro credentials, that was his talk yesterday. I've just seen Marisol in the room over there. So it comes from Mexico, where they've got a hugely active chair on a number of topics, both on social sciences side but also on technology-linked questions. Brazil is not present here. At least Telemiel isn't present. But there's also a very strong chair which has been doing a lot of things for the UNESCO for a very long time. I think it's the oldest one of the UNESCO chairs on open education. Perhaps even older than Rory's, which is to show. The only UCL-led republic is represented. I mean, the ex-chair is here, but there are people representing the chair here. So this is interesting. We've got a bit of South America and again we can find technology involved in that chair. La Université de Rabar, Morocco. So this is not a UNESCO chair. This is another organization which is called ISESCO which is more closer to an Islamic organization. And they've just started a new chair on open education and they're tremendously active in that part of the world. Even if you'll see less of them in the English-speaking conferences, perhaps. So, UNIR in Spain. Daniel Burgos is named here. A lot of people have seen here. And he's also in this network. Not University. That's me when I didn't forget to cut my hair. This is University, born in Germany. So they're my friends from Germany. They're Christian Schrecker. And they're also active very much in the computing areas. Here's I'm Stefan Institute. Slovenia. Richard Ramon, he used to come very often to this conference. So, again, the people who are involved in this community have been involved for a while. And Michin is, well, he's also known for his work on trying to apply artificial intelligence in the context of this. He was in charge of the video lectures platform which was one of the most successful platforms for videos at some point for open videos. IRKI is a new player in the case of artificial intelligence and UNESCO. And so they are part of the network. Université de sous Tunisien. So Liliane, she was at Open Education Global last year. And she's also tremendously interested and active in all our questions. Notre Dame in Lebanon. And this is Fauzi Baroud, who runs all sorts of things in that part of the world. We've got two universities from Cape Town. The first one is represented by Glenda Cox. I think there was a talk by Glenda Cox but she wasn't giving the talk in one of the rooms just half an hour ago, so she's also clearly involved in our community. And another chair in South Africa, this time it's in the UNISA, and Mimpine, she's very interesting for us because when we're thinking about open education from the north point of view, she's an eye-opener. She's actually really much more interested in how open education gets out of universities, gets out of schools and plays a role in the city or plays roles in the society and with communities. So I think that's another direction in which we'll be wanting to go thanks to a sort of a broader, more global approach. And New Zealand appears twice once because the Open Education Resource Foundation is part of the network. And the second one, because the actual university in New Zealand, Tepe Kunga, is also part of it with Wayne McIntosh there. So I've shown you 16, so why 16? Well, actually UNESCO said we were allowed up to 15. So we pushed it a little bit. Okay, what are the goals here? So the goals is open education in the sense that open educational resources plus open educational practices plus free and open source software. It's a combination of a bit all these three objects that we're hoping to move. And we obviously, and this should remind you of the talk, the keynote we had this morning, thinking how can open education allow for a better sharing of knowledge? That's the sort of questions, overarching questions we're interested in. And the second overarching question is how necessary is open education to achieve some form of social justice? Okay, so we had defined when we actually had to present this to UNESCO, we defined the 10 objectives, go through them quickly. I mean, we're still as an objective, you know, phase-only something. This is what we want to do. So community-building, which is logical. I mean, it's part of what we should try to do. But not just in the 15 universities or the 16 organizations as I showed before. We have to go in a broader sense and outside our own countries. In a way, UNESCO chairs play a strong role in the countries in which they are. They, you know, in many places, UNESCO is an important, or at least it's, you know, it's something that matters. So we're able to use that to move the agenda in our own countries. But the question is, can we sort of use this UNESCO brand, this UNESCO label, to move it in the countries that don't have UNESCO chairs? So this is what we're going to try and do with, of course, forces on the ground. It doesn't mean that we, the UNESCO chairs, they're the countries. But people who are thinking, you know, we could have some help, we need some help. I mean, if you're asking for money help, we won't be able to help. If we want UNESCO help, we can come in and sort of think, well, you know, perhaps, you know, organize it, just invite us to come. We can pay for the trip, but then we might be able to force a meeting with somebody to get the agenda rolling, that sort of thing. So we have to, of course, cooperate closely with UNESCO and get the people there. So, research, what are the sort of things we need to do in research? Well, we want to, we want to actually do research and circulate research. So we have the feeling that it's not that easy to find research material. A lot of the material research material in our field is strangely enough inside some books that belong to editors and you have to actually pay to access them. I don't know why we're in this strategy of publishing in, you know, collections with chapters that then you have to pay a very, very strong price to read research on open education. So in Cable's talk this morning, I think we are quite guilty of not doing it the right way ourselves. So we want to engage in shared research programs and have some mentoring activities that we do have in our teams, people who can help with this. We hope to do that. And yeah, there's a link to be done and again, we saw things about this this morning between open science and open education. So I'm not going to talk about which are exactly the themes of research we're interested in, but if you look at the words here, the first theme is saying, what is education of tomorrow? How is the open education agenda going to be moving towards education of tomorrow? And this of course brings us into the role of artificial intelligence, but perhaps other technologies like blockchain also. How do these things influence the futures of education? So that's one of the themes. The capacity building to, as an object of research, sort of how does open education change the relationships between the people, between the teachers, between the teachers and the students, and try and sort of examine what is happening there. And the third question is around the social justice, is in what sense does open education, we all say it's very important to keep the prices low and this is allowing people to actually access education. We need more evidence about this and it's probably different in between the different countries and so we want to see why does it work when it works and what conditions, what are the conditions that are necessary for this to work. So there's of course a focus on education where we think that there's a number of courses, but we also need courses on open education itself, so we've heard about some of these in the rooms here, but if you're in a university and you want to train your teachers or if you want to train your librarians or your educator, whoever you want to train, it's not that easy to get a whole of material that you can use. We've been doing some, we have to actually make this shareable in a way we can say look, we can certify we know that this works, you should be able to try it. Okay, and then we want to do some education, some curricula and academic research to understand what is working and what is not. So then there's two more, so let's say research and education are the two normal things you would expect in a network or an open education to work about. There's two other ones. So one of them is software where we think that there is software out there that should be used in order to better share what we're doing because software and computers and digitalization obviously matters a lot, so we want to be careful about this. So there are two questions there that we have at least identified to try and work on this and we're hoping also to be able to offer proposed entry points for people to come and download suites of material, of free and open software that they can use here. And I think I had another one before that so I don't know where it's gone to. Okay, never mind. Right, so conclusions and what happens next at this point we'll have time to perhaps answer some questions. So conclusions on what happens next so first is saying that I'm presenting something that I had to also authorisation to UNESCO am I allowed to talk about this? We don't have a single paper saying that we've got the network so the answer is they said yes please go ahead and we're not very good at administration and it takes time and it's going to take also a lot of time to actually sign things so you have to understand that in comparison to other more open networks this one is one which is very heavily constrained by signatures and things of that sort it's a bit of the let's say it's the downside of such an object. The second way is saying that the network has assets but they're already and we have to acknowledge this a lot of our associations and groups out there that are already working in open education so the first thing we're trying to do is reassure everybody saying we're not coming here as a predicate to try to sort of pick anybody's place we just think that the assets we have is a small group of UNESCO chairs and trying to use the UNESCO labels to favour this with different techniques and with different ideas could be of help right but we're obviously open for discussion with absolutely every stakeholder there are and this is what we've been doing these days well yesterday at least in networking and we'll continue there doing today and tomorrow. Talk to people and say you know if your group is interested in collaborating we're still going to have to find you know our speed here but we are open for discussions. The third point is an important one it's perhaps to remind you that open education is very important for UNESCO. In September there was the Digital Learning Week in Paris and it was four days of conference which is one of the big conference on the question of digital education with a lot of key people a lot of ministers a lot of education specialists and out of those four days two days were on the effects of artificial intelligence and two days were on the effects of open platforms. So how important open platforms were for the futures of education. The problem with UNESCO is that they don't necessarily always use the word open they might use shared platforms or common platforms or other terms so even terms for which they have fought so hard to actually bring into the agenda the correct words then for some reason they may not always use but it is important really important for UNESCO which means that it's good to have them in let's say the common cause or in the common battles we're all welcoming out with and yes as we're saying in certain countries UNESCO doesn't really matter because there's a lot of other organizations a lot of other groups like reminding people in some countries where education is complicated to organize and the Ministry of Education is perhaps spending most of its time just trying to make sure there's one teacher in front of each pupil in those cases well UNESCO plays a bit a role of the Ministry of Education that we have in our rich countries a place where you're thinking about the futures you start considering what your policies are going to be so all that is going to be done at UNESCO level so that's why it also helps us very much to keep UNESCO into these discussion point four is a joke it's not a joke it's important but we were obviously open for funding opportunities if people say well why don't you I mean we'll take this into account so point five well this is the moment where I just say we're starting now we're going to start doing actions try and get into into activities going and the real thing is next year you know you'll be able to say have you done anything in the first year so I hope we will we have said something yes not just we managed to sign the contracts that would be disappointing if that was the only thing we've done so we're hoping to have achieved things that we'll see you in one year's time to tell you what we've done and point six is that is now later on in the evening tomorrow at any moment we're open to discuss with absolutely everybody we still have to invent a way to involve other people because it looks like a very small closed group it is the way UNESCO asks us to set it but we know that there are other people who would like to discuss to do similar things and we just have to be very inventive there to be able to actually do this thank you I believe this time for questions oh yeah is that your question or is that we have started we've started there are bigger organizations the thing is when it was one of the questions cable got this morning where people were saying going for funding when you're little is more difficult than going for funding when you're big so we hope that's correct so we are a bit bigger and we're hoping we'll be able to get some funding from this we've started I mean even if it's not signed the first thing we worked on this summer was already starting writing our first grant applications hi Colin I have a question here I know it's hard to see up there so my question is is UNESCO would they be willing to consider adding chairs so I feel like there are many many nations with many many great academics and scholars that are not represented in this group so would they be willing to add some UNESCO chairs so I obviously can't speak for UNESCO I have speaking with UNESCO and I can interpret what I've understood so the way you add new chairs is every country has got a national UNESCO organization and they have to are supposed to filter the applications and each country is only allowed to come with two so each country will come with two proposals including the renewals so it's hard work to actually get through but the message for UNESCO is that open education is so important that if one country arrives with three and the third one is one for open education then it will actually get past the two barrier so that's the first thing and so then the second thing is one of the things we can do as an organization we've all gone through the rotor of actually depositing a chair application whatever so we can help people go through the it's not just the paperwork but actually understanding how it works sometimes people get very disappointed when they find out there's no money they're thinking you know how do you want me to actually write an application for something so complicated without saying and I want so much money it's worse UNESCO for your application to be accepted you have to come and say oh by the way we have got money so you have to already have a project running with things happening for that to work but it is it is possible I mean if you're showing that there's energy if you're showing the things are happening UNESCO tends to to show a lot of interest in in letting you through well Colin can you say a few words about the extent to which the network will work together as opposed to like each of you autonomously doing your thing and is there some way for those of us that are interested in the work that you're doing to follow what's being done and see what each of you are doing so that's a good question we haven't quite got that yet so we're working with the OER foundation to find out if we're actually going to use their platforms and we don't have to invent a new platform to actually keep people informed I should say not university has been generous enough to actually appoint somebody you know called Solene right to actually play the role for the logistics and to help run this thing and not let somebody hopeless like me do it right so this is all this is going to be we're working the right way to find out yes we'd be on social I suppose on social media and make sure we tell people the interesting thing is when we're going to actually want people to collaborate with us and we're going to put things on the table to be able to collaborate and so then how do we work as a group of 16 is it going to be you know make sure that things are happening on each continent that's going to be very important but we also want to make sure that different languages are taking into account I think it's clearly something that we have to work on and if possibly that the different languages are taking into account but in the same network not in different networks okay I think we stopped there then we've got a network