 Hi everyone, welcome. So happy to see you all together here. Let me open our presentation. And we will start actually with a video. Yes, I'm familiar with that and with some Wikipedia related projects. Our first experience was with the actual creation of open educational resources for a program on tourism and hospitality. Yes, I have heard of it. I heard about it when I started working at the Writing Centre here at the University. Yes, I have heard of Open Education when I started working at the Academic Retrocese Writing Centre at Nelson Mandela University. Well actually I think the key word is interaction because with group works and also group work during the reviewing process, students can increase their awareness of their own skills. I would like it to be easily available to everyone, especially within the university context. Open education aims to improve access to education. If people in South Africa had access to education and to learning materials, it would create such a reality where education is accessed by everyone and anyone who wants it. And also we'll be more able to create our own content and add to the knowledge base instead of thinking that only one day we will graduate to have professional career, what we'll be able to do that. Open educational resources is a really, really spectacular thing. It gives teachers the flexibility of actually creating content which is fully furnished for themselves, if you will. I love you guys. You guys have a blast in the conference. You guys are doing all of you guys here, all of you guys that are watching this. I love you with all my heart because you guys are actually helping us, helping people like me. Bye. Good night. So we've been blessed to have a good number of students who wanted to share with us their ideas about Open Education and we are here with the same aim today. I'm so happy you can't imagine how happy I am to have students on the stage together with me and thank you in advance for the great job we did together and for this keynote together. So we wanted to start this conference with students on the stage because they are our main focus, I think. All of us share this as the main focus. Is it too close maybe? I'm not used to microphones. And let's start with who we are. I am Paula Corti. I work at METID, which is the Learning Innovation Unit here at Qualitecnico di Milano. And I am the co-chair of this conference. Hi everyone. I'm Trudy Radke. I work as an Open Educational Resource Specialist at College of the Canyons as an OER consultant and advocate to California State Universities and I'm currently pursuing a Master's in History at Cal State University Northridge. I'm Julia Bojale. I'm a computer engineering student here at Politecnico. And I'm also a member and currently vice president of Pohl, which is a Politecnico Open Unix Labs. And I'm Robert Krettenberg. I study comparative literature at the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany. And there with other students, I initiated the Hermione project in which students become teachers and teach their fellow students. So as you can easily imagine, we are here providing different perspectives on open education. And of course, we will start from their experiences in open education. And we are going to go through some of the challenges they have been encountering and they are encountering nowadays actually. And is it not working? We can manage it from here. It's not quite working. Let's go through this by hand. Don't worry. And what we are going to share then is the kind of university support they already received and which our university are providing now. And in the end we are coming to their vision about open education and the vision that we are willing to share with you. And actually we are going to involve you in that because you've been given a small paper note and we are willing to ask you if you want to write down during the keynote which is your vision about the future of open education. And in the end of the keynote we would like to collect them. So feel free to write it, change it, correct it as far as you want. And then please share it with us in the end, okay? What else? Let's start I would say. Let's start with the experiences. Which are your experiences in open education? Well, for me, first of all, I'm a member of Paul, as I said. We are a student club here in Polytechnica and our main focus is on free software. And I mean free as in freedom, not as in free beer. Free software in order to qualify as that needs to grant its user four main liberties which are the freedom to use the software as they want to study how the software works to modify it to suit their own needs and to share it with whoever they want. We organize courses about free software and open technologies. Our courses are open to everyone. They're mainly meant for students, other students of Polytechnica. But we also have some older people from outside of Polytechnica who come to follow our lessons or who follow our YouTube channel. In fact, we try to share all of the material we produce. All of the slides are licensed with a CC license and they're on our website. And we also record videos of our lessons and they're on YouTube. Which is not an open platform, but it's the most used one, fortunately. On a more personal note, I'm also a student and throughout my university career, I've always used the material shared by other people who are either students or professors. And that material was so far and of such good quality that I never really needed to buy a book. One thing I noticed is that not much of that material had a license and I'm afraid it might be because people are not even aware of the existence of licenses. My first experience in open actually occurred in my first year as an undergraduate. I went to purchase my university textbooks and it came out to about $700, which is around 630 Euro, I believe. I was the first in my immediate family to attend college and I came from a lower socioeconomic background. So that was an incredibly large burden for my family that we had not been expecting. I also needed new glasses because my prescription was up. So I had to pick between textbooks and glasses and I chose glasses because that seemed like the more immediate need. I had nothing really to supplement my learning outside of the classroom, so I would just go online and look for things and I didn't know it at the time, but the only stuff that I was actually able to download for free, because I was able to find a few things, was OER resources. And I didn't know that that's what they were, but now, fast forward, that was my first experience. And now I have the privilege of being an OER and ZTC specialist at College of the Kenyans. I'm the creation of about 80 open textbooks all under CC by license. I've also am a co-lead for the OER Student Advocacy Group, a group in California that tries to advocate for open on California campuses. And I also work as a private consultant to help other universities make their own open textbooks in California and open textbook pathways. When I hear you talk about this experience of having to buy books on this scale, I'm just so happy to live in Germany and have the benefits of the very free German education system in comparison. But I think it's also just a really great example of how from a need, you can come up with a great idea and an urge to want to change something. Our projects, of course, are not so much related to sharing materials and textbooks and also have nothing to do really with free software. But there was a need nonetheless and I can share a little story like yours. So this goes back to, I was living with one of the girls I started the project with at the time living together and we often had this conversation that when, you know, we've just written a paper and we thought it was really good and so we're quite happy about what we did there and we felt it was valuable. But we didn't know how to share it with anybody. It was just the professor who had to correct it and maybe like a friend who read it to check it for errors. And those are the only people who ever got to see this and we thought like there's something that we want to change about this and we want to make student research more visible. And so this was the need that we discovered and what we wanted to do with our project. And what we do is basically we give students, I'm from the literature department so it's students from a number of philological subjects that get to present their research. So it's preselected, it's really good stuff like good bachelor's thesis and so on or master's thesis or also like smaller projects that have like outstanding research quality and they get to present it to other students. So in this way we make their work more transparent. And what we also do is we don't stop with the finished product because in a way we think very often education is also not open or not transparent in a way that when teachers present their work they only present the finished product but you never get to find out like how did you even get there. And so what we do is all our students that teach in this class they get to actually first work on reflecting themselves on how did they even get there again and then they also present this to the other students so they serve as role models and encourage these other students to maybe follow in their footsteps and learn from their experiences. And of course because we've done this project now three times there's also another level at which sharing comes in and this is educational practices. So we started this as students we had no idea about what we were doing at the beginning but now of course we've learned from our own experiences and we're trying to develop this course further and further and so we started sharing at this level also. When it comes to the open educational resources I think it would be just a great like puzzle to add in there as well. But I mean you mentioned that the challenge is one challenge that we found especially as students trying to find our way in this is that you need to know quite a lot of things or at least it feels that way to get started with sharing stuff online and we didn't feel prepared to do this at the beginning so we want to do this in the future but so far it's been like a little bit of a challenge for us to incorporate this in our concept. Well let's talk about the challenges in sharing then. In my experience the main challenge I've encountered is that people don't provide a source code which could be for example I've found some really good notes but only the PDF version and if there was a mistake or I wanted to correct or something that I wanted to improve I wasn't able to do that. I think in order to be really open you need to not only provide the editable version of your work but also all of the tools that another person is going to need to improve and continue working on that. Another issue I believe is that without a proper CC license it's impossible to give credit to each of the others who contributed to the work and since we are sharing our material for free this credit is kind of the only form of payment that we get so I think we need to use a CC license for that. Another issue when I was looking for material to study for my exams for example that I found was that material is extremely sparse and it's published on very many different platforms which makes it a lot harder to find. One thing that I think would have to solve this problem is to have a centralized platform maybe sponsored by a university like each university could have their own website where students and professors can share their material and they are of course strongly encouraged to use an open license. What about you Robert, did you encounter any other challenges? Yeah first of all I think those are so important points that you mentioned like having an accessible platform would just be fantastic and I think that's maybe one other challenge or like one reason why we found it so challenging in our situation to use this more and that was that we didn't design our project in a way with this in mind and when you want to do it retrospectively it's so much harder because also in our case it's not just one teacher it's this group of students so we'd have to run after everybody and get their consent and also just rearranging the material afterwards like in a way that it's openly shareable it's just really hard so I think one take away from this is that you really need to make sure that you design it for sharing from the beginning and that's one thing that we want to do in the future and this is I think something that also applies to whichever other person you want to encourage to participate in this movement you've got to reach them at a point where they can still design whatever they have planned in this way. Well yes I agree instilling an open culture at the beginning of a work would save us a lot of time after the work is done but Paula you and I are both at home here for the technical what is it we do here to help solve these challenges? Well actually here I talk about what the work we do in MATED which is a bottom-up work of course what we do around licenses first of all is try to support teaching staff in order to have the basic skills they need and to work in advance so if they start thinking about licenses before they start their work then they will be able to share what they produce accordingly otherwise it's quite difficult to go back and catch up with the work already done and all the permission required. Sometimes it works actually one of our last experiences since we produce MOOCs and our MOOCs are really open MOOCs so CC licensed MOOCs one of the last MOOCs we published is about the relationship between higher education and sustainable development goals and actually we started with a more restricted license but then we came up discovering that most of the professors involved and there are more than 30 professors involved chose by themselves the CC by license then we contacted each one of the others and asked them for their permission to change their license and they all agreed so we have our first CC by completely CC by MOOC now online so MOOCs are one of the other activities that we try to do together with professors because mainly we work with them and sometimes we succeed in adding also some of the work done by students for example in this MOOC we have also a video completely designed by students which is nice for us and other things that we try to do together with the teaching staff during workshops we have specific lessons for them in which we work together around licensing and they work actually in order to choose their license understand what does it mean to remix different OERs together and what we encourage them to do and sometimes this is already happening is of course to reuse other professors materials and it works pretty well when we succeed in doing this other things that we try to do at present time in order to support professors in their day by day work is to encourage them to open up their practices not only with open educational resources but also sharing their practices in themselves so the design of their lessons so also the process Robert not only the final result and sometimes it works it's a step by step activity the last thing that we try to do I'm very happy about it is the translation of the Creative Commons certificate for educators and librarians in Italian because language sometimes is still a barrier and we don't want that so having the Italian version could support many of our professors at national level to get in touch more closely to the licensing system which is not so easy for everyone even if the materials are very simple, very user friendly sometimes people are frightened by facing legal issues and even if we are not a legal team at all we can try to support them at first so that's what we are trying to do what we want to do in the future since we are reaching that point is to have a larger involvement by students because professors have a limited amount of time so we certainly understand when they have problems in knowing better how to deal with licenses it's perfectly understandable but if the network becomes larger and larger and why not to involve students in this network the work with licenses which is very time consuming at first could be managed with many people on board and I really believe that students could give a great deal of effort in this and they could be really the game changer so that's why I'm willing to go ahead with this it's really encouraging to hear all of the work as I've been here that's going on at Polytechnico to bring students into the open creation process that's something we try to do a lot at College of the Canyons where I work with OER we actually recently hired two graphic design students from College of the Canyons to help us design kind of an OER textbook we call it style guide but it could also be considered kind of a workflow a how to create an OER text from scratch basically if you were someone who wanted to get into open content creation but perhaps you didn't know where to start we had two graphic designers just help us create an entire branding initiative for our campus for OER help us market OER created banners, merchandise and it was amazing because they I mean the work that they produced is gorgeous and they agreed to put it all in a CC by license and then they agreed to compile it all into a document that we're going to share on our website soon and it's a packet so it's not just information on how to create content or a textbook it's all of the materials you would literally need to do it like textbook graphics they've made them, they've put them in that packet all of the banners, everything, all their designs and it was they were so excited about it they were so excited, they wanted to do it it was quite brilliant and a privilege to work with them we also are currently working with a student who is blind her name is Lauren Roem and she's helping us create an accessibility guide for textbooks it's very important to us at College of the Canyons that the visually impaired have access to our books in a way that is equitable and real and we have someone helping us create an accessibility guide and we have the person who should be helping us create it and that's been really impactful for me and our whole team and these are students and they're excited and they're willing to do it and they're willing to bring into the process bring students into the process so we have a geometry professor who's actually assigning questions for credit homework questions and then his students are literally writing the homework section of his textbook and they're vetting the problems and they're doing all the math work and they're showing the work and we're just going to lift that and put that right in the textbook we also have a geography professor who takes his students on field trips every year and we have a textbook so these students what we're trying to do is we're trying to create incentive and buy in we feel that if they see themselves reflected in the materials they're using they will care about the materials they're using and we think that that's really powerful we're also working on another small change that I've noticed that's just been really impactful is we're actually going into our textbooks and we're changing some of the names of the content and the reason I think that's so powerful is because it's a very simple thing to do but it's actually only something you can do with Open you can't call a publisher, email a publisher and say, you know these names they don't really reflect my students can we change this work problem to use names that reflect my students but with Open you can make that change and it only takes a couple of seconds really but it's so impactful there's a famous American educator Marina Alderman so when we bring our students into the creation process when we bring our names into the textbooks there's incentive and there's buy in and there's care and I think it's really been powerful it's been powerful for me to watch that happen I honestly just feel like a part of the process and last but not least like I mentioned earlier I'm working with a group of advocates from California to create a OER toolkit that will be used by other campuses hopefully to brand and spread OER awareness on their campus we're going to publish that sometime in late December and last but not least I and my two OER colleagues at College of the Caneons who design these materials we are currently graduate students and we're starting to realize as we work that we will be students for the rest of our lives and that's kind of the mindset we hope to bring to Open Education Thank you Trudy we are going to if all of us are going to be students for the rest of our lives now it's maybe the time to go forward and move to the vision for the future and what about you Robert what is your vision on that? Well I think after that very inspiring stuff by you Trudy maybe it's a bit tough act to follow there but I mean when I think about the kind of stuff that we shared and we talked a lot about this together I think there's some common denominators of course it's about access about transparency but we were all students to me it's a lot about empowerment really and we've had this before like actually this morning we heard about like how the relationship between education or the university and society is complex and I think in this day and age we need more than ever we need active citizens and if we want active citizens we need to have active students in our education system and so what I take from working with you and thinking about this really is an encouragement that there is an open future possible in which everybody can contribute and everybody has a place to shape this and not just the education but then society at large so maybe we can think about some practical roles that students could cover something like being co-creators of contents which means working on homeworks to support professors in designing texts supporting them in preparing share their already done exercises with others through licenses so that they could be reused for different activities instead of getting lost in time and wasted in a way or also we can think about students as a licensed tutor let's say because you are all smart and if you get to know licenses you are the best advocate possible to work with the professors and teaching staff in order to support them understanding them better and also keeping it simple it's not such a big deal to work with licenses you can do it and it could be good coming from students also or also students could be good peer teachers as you already are doing extending this practice as up to you as a chance because you encounter such some Hermione project or you are lucky because you have friends who already work with licenses you know it could be really worth it because students could really give a great contribution to the building of this big network some of the projects already I mean this conference is full of projects that are already talking about the role of students and some of you are already thinking about what we could do also in the future but it's something that could be really improved I think you are absolutely right and it's important to not just have like the dream the vision the grand thing which is also important I think we need that but at the same time to think of what are the concrete steps and then the simple steps that you can take because like from my own experience you need to find a way into something and it always helps that the initial threshold is not too high it's not too hard to become involved so as you say there are so many simple steps where students can start to become involved if they are being trusted to do so and then of course they can build on that and become more and more involved in the ideal world this is of course like an open spectrum so that at the end you can design entire curricula and everything together with the faculty and become really empowered this way so I think the small steps is really the one important thing and the other important thing I think is the role models and when you have this fantastic quote about you can't be what you can't see this is one of the reasons why we think our project is working so well and it shows in the evaluation that we have is because the students see another student appear being this teacher and being able to do this stuff they become inspired themselves and we've just had like an application for the next year where somebody actually wrote this so I was at the first thing you did and I was at the second thing and now I feel ready to do it myself so it's working and I think this goes for all kinds of student involvement if you see somebody who's a peer and you feel empowered to do it yourself maybe so maybe before we go we leave some time for the questions we can share with you why we chose these kind of images for our keynote actually there's a reason we as you can see there is a painter here and he's preparing a wall all the pictures we shared with you today through this presentation are done by this painter this artist whose name is Afran actually he works very close to here because he works in Lekko 50 kilometers north from Milan and we came up with these images by chance searching from Pixabay and actually you will find the explanation in the presentation later on but what we did was to choose a mural first because we wanted to have something coming up in the open and the wall in this way is seen just as a support not as a boundary so that's the meaning we wanted to have in our presentation and that's why we chose those images and Afran we contacted him actually because we had the chance to get in touch with him he was very proud of being with us on the stage but also even if he's a artist he wanted to know everything about open culture he wanted to join us in the future in order to produce a piece of art to be shared in the open so the world is spreading I mean we just have to continue working and advocating I think okay well I'd like to add a word about how we worked to prepare this keynote first of all there were no bosses even though it's officially Paola's keynote and she wanted to join us here and give us a chance to be here then we tried to always use open source software for our work I insisted on that but they all agreed we used an open source software to do our conference calls we ended up using Google Docs for our notes we had to because it just worked so well but what I'm really grateful for what we did is we even though we are four people with completely different backgrounds from opposite sides of the world we truly had to wake up very early to participate in our calls but we managed to get together and to put our thoughts and ideas together to share something with you and I hope we managed to really communicate our love for open in general and just really briefly to go off of what Julia said I feel extremely empowered and privileged to be on the stage with these people I've gotten to know them over the past a couple of months and it really reminds me that there's people literally I mean this isn't called OE Global for Nothing there's really people all over the world that are doing this and this is a tangible reminder for me and that's really the goal that we have in doing this environment practiced on a daily level that is going to lead to greater open advocacy policies and acceptance so thank you very much for being here and taking the time and sharing your time with us the one thing that I would maybe add is that of course it takes more time if you work on this like with four people and not just everybody says that little thing but you try to communicate it took more time but it was worth all the time it took because I think first of all we got to know each other in the process and then I think it just turns into a whole different kind of thing and a different kind of message that we can communicate hopefully to you today now we have to ask one last thing of you remember the papers that you were given at the beginning we asked to write your visions of the future on them as open to sharing as we hope you are we ask you to give them back to us as you leave the room and they will be put on a poster upstairs for everyone to see and maybe draw inspiration from just one last thing at the beginning we skipped this part there is a quotation here from Offer as you can see is 1973 so it's nothing really new actually you know but the thing is that if we want to be learners and we don't want to consider ourselves learned we have to give away something in a way you know which means in order to make room for something new in a way we have to unlearn something and relearn from scratch and to do this properly I strongly believe that the contribution from students could be really worth it and really powerful so thank you all for your time and if there is any question we have five minutes maybe so we can manage with some of them is there any question okay I can give you the microphone yeah thank you so much that was great to listen to your practices and experiences great choice glasses are more important than text book also good to know that now there is a very first book available if you have one wish from your university what would it be is this being recorded hopefully no seriously I would say trust the students is the key thing for me because it will pay off this probably applies to my university just as much as to most other higher education institutions that there is a lot of room still for more trust to be put into students and giving them more of a say over there over what they want to learn why they want to learn it and how they want to learn it and maybe even how they want to teach their peers as in our case we encourage sharing because it benefits everyone I've had professors who copyright their exams and you can't share them and I think that makes the sense I completely understand being proud of one's work but I think that sharing it with other people and it's giving it another use and augmenting the value of your work I would just have to agree with Robert just trust the students it's shocked me the talented talented people that are in every nook and cranny of our school at college of the canyons it blows me away every time I talk to a student not only are they interested in the idea of open there's something about it it's altruistic it makes them feel like they're part of something bigger and they are and we all are and they're just brilliant yeah trust the students I guess I'm facilitating this here I wasn't told that I have to here we are thank you for this, where's Igor okay so any more questions interesting what came up here about trust and I think the important factor is to trust students I'm coming yes what about staff okay please introduce yourself thank you Matilde Fontanin University like somebody said last night I'm on both sides something since I'm a librarian forgive me about it but something you said about sharing makes me feel since I worked inside university for many years what I feel is I don't know how you feel about it there's a kind of problem in communication maybe so there are a lot of resources already working on certain topics and they don't get together so to make an example Julia was speaking earlier about sharing resources, creating a platform and I know this is even open access publications are open repositories and you have to go and look into every single open repository so why don't we just make an effort and involve large databases already so archive worked okay it changed the word if we have open access we owe it somehow to the stubbornness of somebody who created a globally shared resource so why don't we just skip on the train of large catalogs which are already there and showcases for everyone to see well I completely agree with you I think the problem is not just the people don't share but those who do do not advertise enough the work they've done and so you end up having to look for material and different platforms and wasting a lot of time I generally think that the only one who can do that is the university because it's big enough to get everyone together and share the work that everyone is doing inside and outside the university I maybe like add one thing about sharing and maybe more generally also about like open technology and so on I think there's a massive opportunity if like open databases or open software tools or whatever if they are designed in a user friendly way because we live in a time where convenience is everything and especially for students especially students when they have like a lot of a workload to do and maybe they're not yet at the level where they can like see how they can become involved themselves and they're just trying to get by and pass their exams and so on and they're just trying to take part in these kind of or use these tools we have to make them as user friendly as possible and this has a lot to do with design and I think there's a massive opportunity to make open tools much more user friendly so if there are no more questions I think that our time is finished so thank you everyone and thank you first of all for your effort and for your time and for the next 10 sessions okay thank you the conference committee has asked me badges so if you need any help find any of us and we'll all send you to Igor like we agreed thank you