 There are no fire drills planned, so in case of emergency, if an alarm goes off, go to the nearest exit. You'll see there's plenty of exits around the building. A reminder for the colleagues who volunteer to be session chairs, that there's a handout for session chairs in each of the breakout rooms. So, if you need some tips on being a session chair, if you've not done it before, they will be there. And a reminder too, that if you're in Studio 2 or in the Western Gallery, it's a little bit further away to walk than the other rooms. So do try if you're presenting and it's after a coffee break or whatever to get there just a little bit earlier to make sure we can set up so we will start. Our colleagues from the CADARN initiative are filming in and around the conference and they're also providing opportunities. I noticed some of you are doing it already to be interviewed as part of their work on disseminating open education and open education resources. If anyone has any concerns about being photographed, being videoed during the conference, then please speak to the team at CADARN who have their stand in the main foyer on the right side in the way that I'm pointing. So the right side as you leave the room. It's a reminder too that what we're here for is OER 15. We, here in Wales, who've been involved in the OER Wales project in the sense of universities Wales and have worked closely with the Association of Learning Technology for Learning Technology, are pleased that this has come to fruition and so it's really good that we are here. A reminder that we're all likely to be social media users. So please use the conference Twitter account. The hashtag is OER 15. The direct contact for the conference Twitter stream at OER com. And we also have a Facebook page which a number of you I know have already signed up on because we've been part of those conversations. So I remember OER 15 is the hashtag. And it is time to thank the people who have funded and supported the conference. The Open University in Wales, Canvas Network, Zero, as well as the organisations I've already mentioned, plus the Open University across the UK, CADARN, the Learning Portal Association Special Interest Group of the Association, which I'm a chair and I've been encouraging many of you to join and just. And so it's over to my co-chair, Professor Martin Weller of the Open University, to say a little more. So I'm just going to talk a bit about the kind of theme of the conference. So like these chaps here. So I think OER is kind of almost mature. We've kind of been around for 13 years now. So it's reached a certain level of maturity. But I think the point in this conference is like how does it go from there? It can seem like a long time, you know. So that was before Web 2.0 was going to start out with OER. And actually I think changing education is a slow process. And actually OER have been very successful in developing across the globe and getting stuck in different languages and creating a really vibrant community. So the theme of the conference is to mainstream OER. Now it doesn't mean OER is in the mainstream. I think it's from the cusp at the moment of moving into mainstream practice or perhaps remaining in a slightly peripheral interest or even dwindling and dying. So I think we're kind of at a really interesting point in the OER story. So if you can have time just one question in your head as you go around the sessions of the next two days. I think it's different. What does it take for OER to move into the mainstream? So we've got some great sessions lined up. A really good mixture I think of staff on policy, research, implementation. There's workshops, lightning talk, short papers, good poster sessions. So there's a really good mix here. I think there'll be lots for everybody. And I want to say thanks very much for coming. It's going to be a really good couple of days. So I'd like to ask Madam Deepwell, the Chief Executive of the Association for Learning Technology, to welcome us on behalf of all. Thank you Hayden and good morning. It's a privilege to be here and my privilege to add our welcome to your host co-chairs and the host institution. Openness is a core value of our members and our community and we support all things open in a variety of ways. I've put some examples up including our open access journal, open courses, our open education special interest group which is also exhibiting and recruiting new members, policy development and creative support strongly as well as our open access repository. I am really delighted that we are in the position to support this event, to support OER over these two days but also throughout the year. We have a big team to make OER go mainstream, to make OER work at scale and we know first hand that that can only happen if we all work together. Now, I see a lot of familiar faces and I'm delighted to see you again but I'm also looking forward to, just like you are, to sections. So if there is one thing I'd like to add is that we'd really like to encourage you to make the most of the social time, of the networking opportunities and of the garlic dinner this evening to really make that connection and help grow our community. Thank you. I'd now like to invite Professor John Gratton PVC from Aberystwyth University and Chair of the University's Wales Open Education Resources and Practice Expert Group to CRETA. Good morning everyone. As Chair of the University's Wales Open Educational Resources and Practice Expert Group, I'm very pleased to officially welcome you all here today. I sit in many conferences so I know that you have to get through these opening speeches and I assure you that I am the last opening speech. I'm very pleased to be here for a personal reason as well. 20 years ago, as a fresh-faced young lecturer wearing short trousers in a school cap when I started my career, I actually developed in supporting education through technology and I was very, very pioneering in my university at the time to developing websites that would support students' learning and I was running a field trip to the Island of Malta and I decided I would create a virtual field trip, which I did and I did it in the days when you had to write the code and then keep your fingers crossed and hope it would work and it did work and that developed an interest in me in effective pedagogy and my colleague Mary Jacobs is in the room who is a pedagogic expert. It would tell you that I'm not a theoretician, I'm not a pedagogic expert but I sort of have an instinct for what works and so I developed quite an interest in that. How do we encourage students to engage with this technology? How can we use it more effectively? So as well as writing papers about how volcanoes affect the environment and that sort of thing, which I still do, writing papers about this sort of thing was actually published in Alts J back in the day and it actually was a very successful sideline and some of the papers I wrote then are still regularly cited mainly now for what I got wrong, which was a lot but I was hauled to one side by my head of department and told him no uncertain terms. If I wanted a career jump, I'd better stop messing about with this crap because it wasn't going to do me any good. So I'm delighted that I'm sure you had very significant and you ignored that advice and got on and brought this subject to where it is today and the conference programme I see here reflects the great maturity of this discipline so I'm really, really thrilled to be here because 20 years later I feel like I'm coming full circle because of the Pro Vice Chancellor of Learning and Teaching now in my university and I chaired the Learning and Teaching Action Group for Welsh universities. This is what we're about. It's about finding ways of reaching our students and making a difference for them which I'll come back to in my speech. So congratulations to everyone in this room for sticking with it and producing such an amazing programme. Also congratulations for what is genuinely the largest conference badge I've ever seen in my life and there's so little on it as well I expected a hashtag and maps and things but anyway I shall treasure this. If you want to ask me what I got really wrong in my research in this area you can ask me at Coffee. So I've got to go back to the prepared speech now but I hope you enjoyed that brief diversion. So back in September 2013 Wales as a nation confirmed its pioneering status in the world of OER by becoming one of the first nations to embed the concept of open education within their national strategy and so we feel that this demonstrates our collective view that open access to learning and research materials has the potential to benefit the learner and the community at large. So Universities Wales is proud of the commitment that Wales has shown through the Wales Open Education Declaration and the underpinning activities that are helping to operationalise this vision. It's not been easy. I still talk to lecturers about making their material available openly and they talk to me about well are you going to pay me for my performance rights and things like that and we still have to work our way through some of those debates and I turn to them and say don't be silly but they say I'm going to pay for my performance rights and the union says I'm entitled to it and so we have to get those but anyway we'll get there I'm sure. But one of the activities we've been involved in has been the establishment of the Universities Wales Open Educational Resources and practice expert group and that's been one of the real successes of this strategy is to bring together this community of experts in a place where they can really engage and discuss with people of like mind and actually identify them to folk like me. There's actually a dynamic community who have a skill and resource that we can use because I think often what you do is sometimes just below the horizon and we've got to do everything that we can to raise it above the horizon so do Google search OER Wales and you'll see that. So as part of this we've built a showcase portal populated by a growing selection of open education material from Welsh universities we're proud of this collaborative work that we've undertaken and basically we've developed the first pan Wales bilingual students survival SMUC so for those of you whose acronym translator is not working well this morning that's a short massive open online courses SMUC which we've created in partnership with existing students so colleagues from across the world have come together to promote and form a network of practice champions who are working collectively towards promoting the use of open educational resources so if you're interested in finding out more information about the work we've been doing in Wales there are several presentations you can choose from across the conference programme and I must pay tribute here to the work of Debbie Baff in steering this and bringing it all together and people talk about herding cats as a sort of symbol of the difficult organisational process steering universities and people who work in universities to actually come together and work is probably a metaphor for an even tougher job of collaborative working but we see this work as vital to the enhancement of the learning experience in Wales yes we've got cities like Cardiff which are dynamic and classic cities but we've got a very large dispersed population I'm based in Aberystwyth and I won't accept that it's remote as a geography professor, we're only four hours from Heathrow but it is inconveniently located and so everything that we can do to make technology accessible to people is great universities in Wales don't just provide graduates with the practical skills and attitudes they need to succeed I think they also instill a thirst for knowledge and challenge and what we want to do is challenge paradigms by different systems and ways of thinking and also ways of working my personal story is that I didn't go to university until I was 26 years old and going to university completely changed my life before that I was a motorcycle courier in London so I hurtled around London in the 1980s delivering parcels from the back of a motorbike and so going to university utterly changed my life so when people ask me what universities are for I simply say we're in the changing life business that's what we do we're in the changing life business we're about allowing people to find out creating an opportunity in a space where people can find out what they're good at and to become brilliant at it and I think that's what people in this room what you've focused on here so I think it's really important so I'm really delighted to see so many colleagues here across the open education community and especially internationally this really shows that this conference is coming together parallel sessions to me say gosh how can I see all of this I'm glad to hear it's all being recorded so you can catch up with the sessions you've made but it says that we're part of a dynamic and highly relevant community so again congratulations to all of you for sticking with it I obviously shamelessly bailed out of this and went back to the mainstream research but I'm coming back and I will maybe take tentative steps towards another paper in Oak Jay in the weeks and months ahead but thank you all very much I'm going to hand you back over to the safe hands of the conference team now thank you