 Welcome everybody to our Open Ed 20 community meeting. It is October 16th, which means this is our last meeting before the conference. So exciting and so thrilling, but also a little bit scary for some of us planning and working on the back end of things. My name is Spencer and I am part of the steering committee and just wanted to welcome everybody back and remind you of some of the other folks involved. Here's the steering committee and some photos of fresh faces. And here's the agenda for today. So you'll see we're kind of following a similar format that we have for past meetings for those of you who have attended previous meetings. And we are going to be using Menti again today, which is a tool, an online tool that we've been using to gain feedback during these meetings. And so if you go to menti.com, you can use the code 7902650 or we have a QR code that's up on the screen currently. And normally we recommend using another device for maybe another browser, a separate browser so that you can kind of stay in this presentation, the Zoom call, but also respond to the polls that we have coming through on Menti. So just throw something in the chat. If you have any issues using Menti and we'd be happy to guide you through those next steps. And as usual, we'd like to kind of kick off with, we have a bit more intimate group today, but we'd like to learn where you all are joining us from today. So if you could enter your US state, Canadian province or the country that you're joining us from, we'll get a feel for using Menti and we'll get a feel for where folks are coming from today and here come those results. Awesome, looks like California's taking center stage today. We also have Edmonton, Alberta, Canada in the house, Texas, BC, I see USA on there a couple of times. That's great. I haven't put in Colorado, but I'm going to. Great. And so I think now we're going to shift into conference updates. And for that, I'll turn it over to Daniel. Thanks so much, Spencer. It's great to see all the people joining, although not as many. I'm sure everybody's busy. I think this week is actually midterms for a lot of schools. So it makes a lot of sense that we don't have quite as many people here this week, but we do have really exciting operational updates. By now, I'm sure everybody knows that the conference is November 9th through 13th. It will be virtual this year. So we'll see you right back here on Zoom in about a month, which is really fantastic. I also want to give a quick sponsorship update. So we were able to secure foundation support to underwrite the conference this year. As we've said over and over again, our goal is to keep this conference as affordable as possible, and this support from the Hewlett Foundation as well as the 20 million Mines Foundation has made that possible. It also allowed us to defer a decision on whether or not we should allow sponsorship from companies this year. This has been a point where I think we need to clarify our community's values and take time to figure out if and how we might allow companies to sponsor an open education conference in the future. So one of the things that we'll be looking at this year at the open ed conference is what the future of open ed looks like. And hopefully one of the areas we can dig in a bit on is sponsorship. But the good news is this year, we don't have to worry about that. We are underwritten by Hewlett and the 20 million Mines Foundation. So that's fantastic. Registration, the registration rate we landed at was $75 for a five day conference, which is I hope very affordable. We've also made generous allotments for students, so $25 for students. And we also have scholarships available. So just a quick update on where we are right now with registration. We have over 500 registrants already. We've also received 46 scholarships request. And thankfully we were able to fulfill every single one of those scholarship requests, which is really, really great. And we still have about a month until the conference. So keep encouraging your friends, make sure that you have signed up and registered for the conference. And that'd be great if we could even see that surpass the attendeeship for last year's conference. So everybody, you're our marketing team, get out there, ask all your friends, and I'll see you back here in about a month. Thanks so much. And then I think I'm up to give a program update. So we're really excited that we have the program available. And I think we're gonna be able to throw a link. Thank you, Lee, in the chat. So this is gonna go out on social media today and by email shortly, either today or on Monday. But we have over 150 live sessions. We have over 100 asynchronous sessions, which are the lightning talks and the showcase galleries. And we're also very excited to announce our first keynote, Mahabali and Mia Zamora are going to have an interactive discussion around how we can promote equity in the online environment. So promoting equitable online communities. So we're super excited and there's gonna be more keynote announcements to come. And I just a big thanks to the program team that's done a lot of heavy lifting, getting all of the proposals reviewed and getting this all put together. Big shout out to the Spark team. And everyone who's had a chance to look at the program and the schedule is so excited for this conference to happen. So I hope as you get a chance to check it out, this just increases your motivation and your excitement about the conference. And again, maybe it will help drive some more registration even though we have a very healthy number of folks registered as it is. So let's see, I think I get to pass this off now to Tiffany. Yeah. Okay, so accessibility update for the conference. First, we will have closed captioning in all sessions. Right now we are planning on trying to do as many sessions with live human captioning as possible and then we'll supplement with automatic captioning. And we're also looking at ASL interpretation for people who have asked for it. So it won't necessarily be in every session. It'll be more on a case by case kind of basis, but we're still in talks about that. And then on the speaker resources page, there is lots of new resources. So we have tutorials for getting captions on videos. We have tutorials for doing accessible presentations and accessible documents to go with your presentation materials. And so we really encourage you to go and look at those if you need help with accessibility. And honestly, even if you already feel really comfortable with it, it might be a good idea. You might find something easier there. Right now the tutorials are geared more towards Microsoft products, but we are in progress on some Google options as well. So keep an eye out for those. That's it. Oh, let me pass it to Nicole. Sorry. Wonderful. Thanks, Tiffany. Yeah, accessibility is one of the very clear priorities that the early input from the community really impressed on us as being important. So that piece of it is something that we've prioritized and made sure to include adequate budget in order to support it. So and thank you to Tiffany for leading that process. So since this is our last meeting before the conference, we wanted to just take a little bit of a minute to gather some overarching feedback and then ask a couple of questions about the conference experience itself to gather input on. So if you're in mentee, there's gonna be, I think four questions. Feel free to also expand in the chat on anything that we're asking. But the first question is just sort of an honest. How are we doing? How's it going? Do you think that the organizing process has been going well? What are some of the things that can be going better? Menti is pretty much anonymous. So feel free to put stuff there or in the chat. And I know that we have a lot of members of the planning teams in the session. So this question is also sort of a, how are we doing inclusive of you as well? So I think just thinking back to where we started, I mean, really we started doing this work in January where our biggest focus was, can we find a venue to hold 800 people on such short notice? And after solving that challenge, like everybody else were surprised by the pandemic and had to adapt to that. And over the summer, some of the uncertainty around that. And now we're sort of staring down the last few weeks here. So I think what's just speaking personally, I think what's been just almost overwhelming to me is the level of enthusiasm and commitment from the community and the willingness to step up and do hard work and put in the hours to think these things through and attend Zoom meetings or review lots of proposals. And we were just trying to calculate the review process itself included over 300 hours of work. So it's really amazing how many people have stepped up to be part of this. So I'm seeing some really nice comments in here. Thank you from me and the Spark team. Anybody else wanna jump in and share anything? Anyone wanna unmute and say anything? Well, we seem to have a question about karaoke. Okay. The logistics of that are really challenging because of the delays. But it's gonna happen. We're gonna find a way. And of course, there's always a question about karaoke. Well, yeah, definitely the RFP could have gone out sooner. For sure. We'll bump up karaoke on the list of the priorities. Well, organized. Yeah, thanks for the positive feedback. It's been really awesome working with you all. Right. We shall move on. But this will stay open for a while. We'll turn it on manual. So if you wanna come back and add anything else, please feel free to do so. Okay. So a couple of logistical questions about the conference platform. We have asked speakers who are gonna be presenting scheduled sessions. So either 25 minute presentations or 55 minute panels or interactive sessions. What's most important in terms of the features of the how you experience those sessions? We've noticed that presenters are sort of gravitating toward just presenting in a Zoom meeting like this. And just wanna get a sense of like how important is chat, how important is the ability to ask questions live? Do you just wanna listen and watch the presentation? What's important at a virtual conference? Any feedback here would be very helpful. All right, a few people sharing. Thanks. All right. Yeah, I guess listening and watching the presentation is important. Okay, so moving on to the next question. We are talking through what the social spaces for the conference might look like. And obviously part of the magic of an in-person conference is the serendipity. And we actually saw that word pop up a lot in the early feedback and sort of consistently throughout the organizing process. Just the desire to have those coincidental opportunities to talk to people you wouldn't otherwise get to connect with, catch up with old friends, especially in these environments. So we put a couple of platforms in here. So obviously a lot of the community is in Twitter, but not everybody is. There's some work we can do around Twitter to help make that piece of it feel more engaged. So Discord is a platform that we've been talking about this week. It's new to me, but it's often used by gamers and some conferences have been organized out of there. It's sort of slack like I would say you can have voice and text channels and just sort of check out who's in there or meet in groups and have live conversations by voice or video either privately or within a channel. So having open Zoom rooms where like a virtual hallway Zoom room where you can drop in and see who's there and maybe get kicked out to a breakout room. Quiet Zoom rooms if you just wanna come and chat with other people and not talk. Just having spaces that you can enter and experience that sort of serendipity type experiences. And then finally, the idea of having a central hub where everything is connected and feeling like everybody is in the same platform space during the conference, even if there isn't a direct interaction in that space. So just, I think the distribution or the averages here may be less interesting than the distribution. So thanks for this feedback, really appreciate it. All right, so I think we have one more question and it's about, what is it about? Expectations. So just wanted to ask another open question about general expectations for the conference. What are your, what do you think it's gonna be like? What you hope it's like? What are your hopes and dreams? Learning about trends, learning a lot, great inspiration, diversity and thought voice approach, medium, love that, care less about the sessions and more about the serendipity. It will be like grad school, interesting, interesting. Opportunities to network. Well, thanks. Networking strategies for OER addressing COVID challenges, there's an entire topic around that. Networking again, lots of takeaways, space to connect and learn. Opportunities for collaborations, variety. Someone thinks that the virtual platform will be even more conducive to learning. Love that, excited about that. Seeing friends and colleagues, yay. Okay, I think we'll move on. All right, so again, this will be open later. I am going to turn it over to here to Andrea and members of the future of open ed planning team. Thank you, Nicole. I'm Andrea Scott and as Nicole mentioned, I'm here with other members of the future of planning, open ed planning team. Our team is responsible for envisioning the open ed conference beyond 2020. So one of the things we've been working on with the future of open ed team is looking at different ways that we can gather community feedback regarding the strategic planning process for the future of open ed beyond the 2020 conference. One of the methods we discussed is holding a plenary session on Friday at the conference, November 13th, for the purpose of gathering information from the community. So what we would like to do now is gather some feedback from you and we have a couple of questions that we would like to ask you. We are going to break out into sessions, different rooms and the open team will be, the future of open ed team will be facilitating these discussions and the two questions we would like to ask you are, one, how can we best use the Friday plenary time to get community feedback? And two, what types of questions should we be asking during the plenary time? So I would just like to remind you of the breakup room questions. First, or structure, introduce yourself quickly. What input can we put together at the conference to inform the long-term strategic planning process? And what questions can we be asking? So, and then if we can move on next to the next slide. And so some of the breakout ground rules I'd like to remind you when we're in these breakout sessions, if you tend to speak up a lot, make space for others, listen actively, take time to repeat back and clarify language and help make others look brilliant. And so I'd like to too, if I've left anything off, we've got some people on the call from the future of open ed team. So if you'd like to jump in, if there's anything that I left off that you'd like to say, you're more than welcome to jump in here. Other than that, we'll go ahead and head to the breakout rooms. All right, so people are swapping out. So I'm just trying to stick people back into rooms. All right, so facilitators should know who they are. It looks like mostly everybody's back now. So we can go ahead and get started on touching in with the different facilitators. So who would like to go first? How about Lee? I'm gonna call on you. That sounds good. So I'm just gonna kind of summarize some topics that we were kind of discussed. So a possibility of ideas of moving online and asking some questions around how did that specifically go just in case that would be something that would need to be continued. And there's obviously the option of having an online component even if we are face to face. Asking questions about scheduling, following up with another conference where we're really close to another open ed conference. They've mentioned that the community calls have been really, really helpful and very transparent. So modeling that within this plan, planetary type of thing is in Mentimeter where there's options to have a lot of voice that's not only an opportunity to show honesty but anonymity to give honest feedback. And then also the, how can we continue the conversations after the conference? So those are some of the highlights from our group. Okay, great. Thank you, Lily. Sounds like some great ideas there. Okay, Spencer, why don't you go ahead and jump in next? Absolutely. So there might be a little bit of overlap but I'll quickly cover what our group talked about. So on the first question, we talked a little bit about what are we hoping to get out of that session and that might help us to guide that approach. Menti, again, was mentioned as a really great tool that has been successful in these community calls and just wondering if that can be scaled up to a larger group. And I've used it at large conversations for keynote type, I'm sorry, for keynote type conversations. And so I think that it was a successful tool but that was my personal experience. And then there was a recommendation that's been kind of modeled at some of the original statewide conferences of an informal conversation to debrief the conference. Can we like embrace that type of spirit? And then there was a recommendation of another tool called RIMO, which is essentially breakout tables that you can kind of drift in between. So maybe for the group to look into that. And then on the second question, one big kind of overarching question that our group came up with, which was good in response to that question, a question for the question, was whose voices did we hear from during the conference? That might be good for us to learn a little bit more about assessing, let me see here, assessing the content or the sessions. And then if we think about who is leading that session, that might also help us in answering the questions. And then there was last suggestion here was like assessing the content or sessions and understand actionable ideas for their work. In other words, can you help kind of the attendees reflect on their experience and then think about actionable ways forward? Okay, great. Thank you, Spencer. Ethan, why don't we have you, your group go next. Yeah, my group has a very productive conversation. So I just wanna thank them for all of these awesome ideas. We basically, I think we kind of split our thinking into two pieces. One is the how and one about the what. So on the how we collect feedback, we talked about how it's important to get feedback in a variety of formats. We talked about some ways to offer graphic and visual opportunities for people to give input. And also not just about the big picture of the conference and the community, but about the content and creating channels for people to give feedback about sessions and quick thoughts just to help inform the presenters. On the what, we sort of focused in on two different pieces, the governance and the funding. And so the things that we wanted to ask are on governance like what level do people wanna participate? What are they comfortable with? What's necessary to make sure they feel their voices heard? But then also like how do you maintain trust with leadership and the community, right? Like there has to be some sort of steering committee or guiding body. So how do you build trust there? And then on funding we talked about like what might a membership model look like? How do you make sure that something like that is equitable? And how do you sort of weigh the competing interests of funding needs and wanting to center the community versus sponsors or other folks? Okay, great. It sounds like a lot of excellent feedback there. So I will go ahead and go next with my group. So thank you to my team that took some time to talk about this in hopes of with time I'm going to only touch on a few items because I hear that mentees mentioned several times. So one of the ideas that our team came up with was to make sure that we're offering multiple ways for conference goers to provide feedback. We could do a traditional survey but also one of the ideas that came up that I really liked is have we thought of an idea of maybe letting conference goers have a few days to digest the information? So maybe delaying a survey after the conference that was an idea that came up. Regarding the questions, we had some open-ended questions that we thought might be helpful. How are people feeling about some of the ones we came up with, what do you want to see for next year or the coming years to come? What worked well, what did not? Are you on board with a hybrid conference? And what would you like to see in the future? One other question was how are we doing with equity, diversity, and inclusion? And one point I wanted to make that someone brought up is if we can possibly form questions that are in a positive light rather than negative, that might be helpful as well. And then one other idea, sorry, I'm checking my watch, is maybe is there some way we can fold in the feedback during a social hour? So that was another great idea that came up with our group. So I think that about summarizes it. I'm gonna go ahead and turn it over to Hailey now. I think you're the last group, Hailey. Sure, yeah. I'll be super quick. Our biggest takeaway was we just kind of talked about, what were some of the things that people really like about having the conference online this year? What are some of the benefits and how can we carry that over into future years in a hybrid model? So for example, we talked about the ability for people to be engaged while still being at work, to be able to save money on travel costs, which are going to be, even if we are able to travel next year to a conference, will that be feasible for participants and is that gonna be available in professional development funding? So that was a question we considered. How can we take the positive aspects of the online conference and move it into a hybrid model for future years? How can we also use that to engage new voices in the movement? For example, I know there's a lot of student interest in coming in to see what this is because it's more accessible financially and simply in terms of time, not having to travel. So that is really great. We also chatted about just ways of collecting feedback from the community. So strong support for like a survey method so people can sit and kind of think about their thoughts afterwards, give us feedback that way, whether that's one survey at the end of the conference or one at the end of each day, kind of depending on what people have the capacity for and how they want to give their feedback. I think it'll be important to have sort of a dialogue session as well to really get people's minds going, but how can we welcome feedback in as many, I guess, sort of forums as possible? So that was kind of the stuff that we touched on. Okay, great. I think we've got all the groups now, if not speak up if we missed a group, we got all the groups. Okay, perfect, great. So I'm now gonna turn the time over to Lee. All right, Nicole, are we ready to wrap up? Or do we have any other points we need to mention? Yeah, I guess just if people have additional thoughts, again, we have the open question here. I see that there are a couple of other notes that people made during the conversation, but if we wanna move on, we can. Okay, awesome. So thank you everybody for joining us. Please make sure that you do join us on social media. All of those are right there, so anything that you follow, follow us. And please register. If you have not registered yet, please make sure that you go do that. If anybody is interested in scholarships and that's something that you guys need, we're still looking at scholarships and taking applications. And thanks for attending this last meeting. This is the last community call before the conference, and we'll see you at the conference, open 20. Open 20. Open it. There we go. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, everyone. We can do it. Thanks, everybody. Thank you very much. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.