 Good morning. Let me start by the morning. This paper is written by someone who is working at Distance Teaching University, so this will explain its bias. For Distance Teaching Universities, the internationalization of their curriculum has always been a complicated issue. We cannot simply send our students abroad because they have family or a job or other obligations. And as is well known, the differences between Distance Teaching Universities are tremendous, both in relation to the curriculum and the structure of their curriculum, structure and size of the modules that are offered, teaching traditions and pedagogical orientation, traditions in assessment and assessment types, fees and all kind of formal and legal infrastructure. Evidently, Distance Teaching Universities have put much effort in solving these problems, and there have been several attempts to set up systems within which course change has become possible. However this may be, course change, however streamlined, remains a highly formal kind of undertaking, which presumes bilateral agreements between the participating institutions to govern an assessment, study point transfer, language use, responsibilities for the students involved, etc. Not surprisingly, within the humanities network of the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities, the question arose whether other types of international cooperation are possible, and clearly raised the time under the kind of international cooperation which involves joint course production. But the very few projects which were actually carried out made clear that more often than not, the eventual project is not considered successful by the participants. The fact is that such projects are both time consuming and very expensive, while the eventual course, being a compromise with definition, is generally in poor harmony with the teaching systems and curricula of the participating institutions. In an attempt to find new ways for Distance Teaching Universities to cooperate which are less expensive, more flexible, and more informal, Trevor Murbert of the Britschelten University came with the idea of complementary course production. Essential to this concept is that there is no question of one common course at all. As a matter of fact, each participating institution makes its own course. What is common is only a specific thing. Crucial also is that participating institutions offer the materials which are prepared for this course as open educational resources so that the partner institutions may fully use. In addition, to further reduce cost and to increase flexibility, already existing open educational resources are made use of as much as possible. But differently, complementary course production does not involve team-based cooperation at all. Complementary course production is, so to say, team-based rather than team-based. This renders complementary course production its loosely structured character. It's highly flexible. The participating institutions only choose a common theme. Each institution makes its own complementary course while crucially the courses are completely based on open educational resources. That is, these courses are partly based on open educational resources which are already available whereas newly made courses materials are offered as OER, so that partner institutions can fully use them. Essential complementary course production is, so to say, content exchange, content in the form of OER. The crucial questions in this connection is, of course, to one extent existing open educational resources constitute natural building blocks for making new courses. More often than not, existing open educational resources are not devised as building blocks for courses offered by other institutions. And the obvious and crucial question is then whether they can be used in this way. In this connection, three observations come to mind immediately. First, the number of existing open educational resources is enormous whereas, as we all know, their quality differs. Second, in addition, in many cases the context within which these materials were made is not made explicit. That is, are these materials part of an existing course? Or are they produced as OER? Are the materials made for the general public or are they part of an academic curriculum? Third, from above, it directly follows that existing open educational resources should nearly always be adapted to the system of the borrowing institution. Given the unclear origin of many open educational resources, the unavoidable and often radical adaptation of these materials should not be underestimated. In order to come to grips with the question raised above, the Dutch Open University that I'm a member of has devised a pilot project, the aim of which was to answer the question whether existing open educational resources constitute natural building blocks for course production. In order to keep the number of variable forces under control, we decided to concentrate on the materials offered by one institution, the OU UK. Specifically, in this pilot, we tried to find out to what an extent all the heritage materials offered by the British Open University Open Learn can profitably be used for a bachelor course on heritage by the Open University of the Netherlands. The results of this pilot are as follows and to a certain extent disappointing. There can't be hardly any doubt that the value of the open educational resources offered by the OU UK as building blocks for complementary course production is highly limited. That is, most of these materials are unfit to figure the course offered by the Dutch Open University. The reasons for this are the following. The various materials offered by the OU UK differ considerably in nature. Some materials stem from academic courses where others are contributions meant for a general public. To give an example, the course on Welsh history specifically designed for Open Learn was meant for a general public where most other materials stem from existing bachelor courses be it of different levels. The second reason, due to the lack of standards the open educational resources offered by the OU UK differ considerably in terms of both size and size. The size of the Welsh history course, for instance, is claimed to take at least 25 study hours. Whereas the case study on Abadoulaise Falls only takes two hours of study at best. Third, many of these materials are far too specific to be of any direct relevance for a course offered by another distance teaching university. However interesting, these materials may be for instance on Brighton Pavilion or Abadoulaise Falls. In the Dutch Bachelor course on Heritage they would make an awkward contribution. From this it follows that the British materials if chosen at all should be completely adapted to a Dutch setting. In some cases, adapting these materials would even be meaningless. This is also a very general problem with these materials. For existing open educational resources it is unclear whether the actual status, particularly whether they are up-to-date or not. For instance, the OU UK course on Welsh history was paid for by money of the Hewlett Foundation. As such, this private sponsoring of courses in humanities should be very much welcome of course. But to the best of my knowledge it is absolutely unclear who is responsible for the maintenance of the course. Who keeps this extensive course up-to-date and how do we know whether it is up-to-date or not. The general conclusion seems to be the following. It seems to be the case that there is no general standard for open educational resources neither as to their size and format nor as to their quality and up-to-dateness. That's a consequence of even the open educational resources offered by one or the same institution different considerably. From this it follows that the possibility to use these materials by another institution is limited. Clearly this lack of standards is a very serious drawback as far as the possibility to reuse these materials is concerned since it complicates the unavoidable adaptation process considerably. Likely stressed that these are no isolated problems only specific to the materials presented by the British Open University or Open Learn. In my view the outcome would be exactly the same if you would have focused on the materials presented by the Open University of the Netherlands or my own faculty. The fact is that in the first stage of offering OER we simply were not efficiently focused on the issue of the reuse of the materials presented. Clearly above remark do not mean that the materials offered by the OER are uninteresting as such nor do my remarks imply that the concept of complementary course production is ill devised. For a general audience these materials may be highly interesting. In addition these materials may function as teasers to attract new students meaning there may be an interesting marketing tool. As said to use these materials in academic setting as building blocks that the course is a completely different issue. What these remarks imply for complementary course production is also clear. To avoid all kinds of problems at unnecessary adaptation this process should be structured much more rigidly to become a fruitful way to make courses in an efficient manner. In addition we should define standards. Before institutions embark on a project of complementary course production the institutions should invest in determining the characteristics of the course that is envisaged and the open educational resources that will be offered and exchanged. That this complementary course production should start with a team-based first stage. A purely team-based approach seems to be far to lose. In this team-based stage we should define the size and scope of the materials, the level is aimed at and we should make arrangements in relation to the question how the materials offered are cut up to date. Clearly why rebuff remarks imply that the value of many existing open educational resources is far from clear as far as course production is concerned. These materials may be irrelevant but it is made by no means be the case. What is more the idea of a complete academic course based exclusively on existing OER seems to be highly doubtful. The outcome of the pilot suggests that complementary course production is most fruitful if it is preceded by an intensive team-based stage in which participating institutions make clear arrangements in relation to what each member has to produce. In general the role of existing OER seems to be rather limited it seems to be wise to concentrate on the exchange of materials which still has to be made. Thank you. I'd like to know if your conclusion that it works very well for this team-based simultaneous creation and coordination of these materials. Is that based on experience or is it just a common sense conclusion based on what you've seen earlier? At present we are working on a common course and we have had this pilot which was a bit disappointing and now we try to set a new course in a new stage so we have not decided to stop the whole project of complementary course production but we have tried to learn from failures in the past and we tried to enter a new phase. What help do you think there is for traditional universities which have begun offering online distance learning to really collaborate together to create common classes to essentially distance universities to be able to collaborate and make a common resource. Is it even possible for much less so for two traditional universities offering distance? I do not exactly know what would be the answer to my question to my answer to this question. The problem with distance teaching universities particularly in relation to courses for a bachelor level is that these courses were very detailed and in many cases relatively large so it is many of these courses there were no teachers involved only a very few teachers so the students should be able to work through this material themselves so that is the reason why traditionally many of these courses were very very expensive to make and that is why all kinds of distance teaching universities try to work together to reduce cost. I do not know exactly what the role would be of traditional universities because there are teachers and there are meetings every week or two meetings every week or whatever so it is a completely different situation for you, let's say traditional distance teaching. Your conclusion that it was a disappointing experience might have to not be also a driver for changing the development and production processes in the university because I think you are saying this was such a large course where it would have been smaller components that could be better reused. I think a conclusion could also be to change their development and production process. I think this is correct but I stressed that this pilot was related to course material level and I think a more flexible kind of system is much more easy to introduce at master level where the courses need not be that much detailed and where you can use all kinds of materials that students should be able to find their way in all these materials but at the bachelor level this was aimed at the bachelor level 2 then you in many cases particularly in the Dutch universities you still have a need for a rather detailed traditional kind of course that was the general idea and that was the background of our pilot but in future we should really think of making other kind of courses for us. Okay, thank you.