 Thank you very much for the introduction, Teresa. So hopefully everyone can hear me OK, if you can, please just put a little note in the chat window there. So I'm here to just give a very quick overview and introduction to the OER 16 Open Culture Conference. The event is taking place at the University of Edinburgh here in Scotland. This is the seventh OER conference, but it's the very first time that it's come to Scotland, so we're very pleased to be welcoming you to Edinburgh. And I'm going to actually just, I was hoping that I would be able to show you a bit of Edinburgh here today, but I've got some light problems in the office, but if I turn my laptop around, hopefully you should be able to see Edinburgh Castle in the background. So not quite the venue for the conference, but it's not far away either. So the theme of the conference, which is taking place on the 19th and 20th of April, is the value proposition of embedding Open Culture in the context of institutional strategies. And a very honour to be co-chairing the conference with Melissa Highton, who is the Director of Learning, Teaching and Web Services here at the University. And Melissa has been behind many of the open education initiatives that have been taking place at the University over the last 12 months, including not just hosting OER 16, but also launching a portal for open educational resources and approving a new OER policy for the University of Edinburgh. And that policy is based on the Leeds OER policy, which has also been adopted by Glasgow Caldwell University and the University of Greenwich. So it's really nice to see this policy propagating across different institutions. So the main themes of the OER 16 Open Culture Conference are the strategic advantage of open and how we can create a culture of openness and avoid the reputational challenges of open walking. We've deliberately not defined exactly what we mean by a culture of openness. You can interpret that as and how you will. It could be about a culture of openness within your institution, or it could be about openness within cultural heritage institutions. We also want to focus on converging and competing cultures of openness, open knowledge, open source, open content, open practice, open data. Because I think in the past some of these cultures and communities, although they are very open within themselves, they are still a bit siloed. So we really want to start bringing some of those together. We also have a strand on hacking, making and sharing, and there was a very popular and current issue within many institutions at the moment. And also openness and public engagement. But one of the main themes of the conference is going to be what we can do to foster innovative approaches to opening up cultural heritage collections for education. And we made real efforts to reach out to cultural heritage institutions across the UK to encourage them to participate in the conference. And we're very, very pleased that many of our cultural heritage institutions have actually submitted proposals and will be taking part in the conference from the library sector and from the museum sector. So we're really pleased with the response there. We did get a fabulous response to the conference. I think we had over 130 submissions altogether. And out of those we have accepted 101 papers from 29 countries throughout the world. So we're really, really encouraged to have such a global spread of papers. The OER conferences have never really pushed themselves as being international conferences such but over the years international participation has really grown. And again we were very encouraged to have a great deal of international participation in the conference committee this year as well. So I'd like to say a huge thanks to all those who have helped to get the conference as hard as it has already. We're also very aware of the gender balance of papers. And I'm sure somebody will be familiar with the All Mail Panels meme that has been going around on Twitter and Tumblr. And hopefully there will be no All Mail Panels at OER 16, I hope. And in actual fact all the submissions that we received of those people who indicated their gender, we actually had pretty much a 50-50 split. So we're really pleased with that. We also have a very diverse group of keynotes at the conference this year which we hope will reflect the diversity of the program and the themes at the conference. Clearly we're very lucky to have Catherine Crohn here with us today speaking about some of the themes that she'll be exploring as part of our keynote. But we're also very honored to have four other amazing keynote speakers, Emma Smith from the University of Oxford. We'll be talking about a wide range of open education initiatives. She's been involved with Emma as a professor of Shakespeare studies at the University of Oxford. And she's been involved in open education initiatives for many, many years. We'll also have John Scali who is the National Library in Scotland here in Edinburgh. The National Library here have recently published a new strategy which is very much focused on increasing access to the National Library's collections. And while clearly going fully behind an opening licensing, everything is perhaps not an option at this point in time, and the library is certainly making real moves to making sure its collections are accessible to all. We're also going to be very pleased to welcome Jim Groome to the conference. I know that many of you will know Jim from his work with the DS106 MOOC. And Jim has also now been working with Reclaim Hosting which I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot more about as part of the conference. And our final keynote at the conference is Melissa Hyatt in my co-chair. And she'll be talking about open initiatives here at the University of Edinburgh, what it means to be an open institution. So we've got a really diverse group of keynote speakers here. The conference itself will be taking place at the John McIntyre Conference Centre within the university. That's in the Pollock campus, which is a short bus ride, or about a 20-minute walk away from the main part of the university. And the conference dinner will take place at Peaviet Roe House, which is also the student union of the university. And we'll also be having a social program, which will hopefully encourage people to learn more about the university and the city of Edinburgh. And of course there are lots of nice attractions here as well, like that catholic window there. So please do, if you haven't already, register for the conference. Unfortunately, early bird registration has now passed. It closed on the 6th of the month. However, people who are members of ALT or members of the conference committee are still able to register at the reduced rate. And we will keep registration open right up until very last minute, so there's plenty of time to register. Of course we would very much encourage people to come to Edinburgh, but if you're unable to actually get to the conference in person, there will be many options for participating remotely. All the keynotes will be streamed. Radio Edutalk will be around to do interviews from the presenters. And we will also have various social media channels, which you'll be able to follow. We'll have people tweeting and live blogging. So there'll be lots of options to participate remotely. So that's really my brief overview. Like I said, save the date. If you haven't registered, please do. Yes, virtually connect will be there as well. Thanks for mentioning that. So please do register if you haven't. And if you can't come along in person, then I hope we will be able to see you participating remotely. So, thank you very much. Thank you so much, Lona. It's so exciting seeing this conference coming together and seeing the tweets going around. And also we've had meetings around finding funding for people who needed support in order to attend the conference. Really good to know because Lona and I and several of us were involved in making sure that funding support was available for those who couldn't get funding. And great to know that we've got about 4,000 pounds coming from Alts to support people so that they can attend and they can present. And I'm sure it will be absolutely brilliant. I'm totally gutted that I can't be there physically, but I will absolutely be following the live stream and following on Twitter and interacting everywhere I can. So thank you very much, Lona. So Edinburgh is a fabulous place to come to and I'm sure everybody's going to have just a great time. Now, we've had a great week and OER 16 is a great way to sort of build on the momentum that we've had throughout this week with Open being sort of very much centre stage and we've got some great open champions to talk to us next. Very much looking forward to listening to Catherine as well. So Catherine, I'm going to move to the first of your slides and we're looking forward to hearing from you. Okay, thank you so much. I thank everyone who's tuned in here. Delighted to see you all and thank you to Lona and everyone on the conference team for inviting me to keynote at the conference. I'm really looking forward to it. That was a great introduction, Lona. I often have some difficulties here where my video competes with my audio so I just wanted to put the video on here at the start and I'm going to turn it off so that the audio isn't compromised. I'll turn it on again to the Q&A and hopefully we can use it then. Sorry about that. To be honest, I'm hoping that the keynote is going to be as participatory as possible in line with the themes of the conference, of course. And by participatory, I mean for those at the conference and those who might be participating virtually. So to that end, the title of the keynote and I wanted to start thinking about the keynote in terms of the question. And I blogged that question a little earlier this week and it was this. If open is the answer, what is the question? A little bit awkward, as some people commented to me. My sharp blog posted out the question as well as about 15 different comments and stores I have the tweets are there at CatherineCronum.wordpress.com. The provenance of the question, I suppose, was the observation that... This is possibly something that's not pre-occupying me for a bit. The observation that people arrive at openness, at open education, we are an OEP from a number of different places and sometimes those can be very different. So as I know, Viv is going to talk about in her piece this afternoon, that can be maybe a focus on providing free textbooks for students. That can be a focus on OER itself, perhaps focus on pedagogy, open pedagogy, or people talking about their core values of openness, openness as maybe a political stance. So as open practitioners, we gather around our kind of metaphorical campfires or tables and we talk about openness that we sometimes have difficulties because of those different underlying assumptions and motives. So really, that's what I was getting at with that question and I'm grateful to all the people who jumped into the conversation during the week. I have a couple of slides which really kind of paraphrase and cluster some of the contributions from people. Now I don't have citations on these slides but the citations are in my blog post. The first cluster was around resources in OER, as you might expect, but not just textbooks that I categorize but also I think the second item there in that first bubble is from Lorna about educational and cultural heritage resources and Lorna just described so beautifully how that's going to be a focus of the conference which I think is going to be real strength of the conference. The second cluster is around personal practice so a number of people contributed from their vantage points as learners, as researchers, as reflective educators that their question to which opens the answer is how can I do, learn, share, make, reflect, collaborate more and better, more or less. And there was an awful lot of discussion around those things. The third cluster was how can I teach students and support staff better. So those of us who are involved in those enterprises saw a lot about digital capability, digital identity, empowering learners. And of course many of these are integrated. No one, I'm not suggesting that someone is in one cluster or the other but these are definite clusters that may or may not apply to different individuals. Another cluster was really around the ethical and political aspects of openness. So how can I serve the democratic purpose of knowledge construction? My colleagues found more and contributed that. People who are concerned with the question of education as a public good. So there were a number of contributions around this and there were some rhetorical and philosophical questions and responses which I loved to what does open refer when we frame that question and why not open? I think that was Sheila McNeil's question. Why do we have to justify openness? Perhaps the question should be why not open. And Sheila also I think brought up the point that you might ascribe to all of these questions but we can't assume that people do so I think that was my point. One framework which has been really useful for me in discussions around openness what is looking at the different definitions or interpretations I suppose of openness and kind of you know this is not just my work this is based on work by many people and I'm sure we all use similar frameworks which just happens to be one that I use. And by the way I should mention that many of the points that I'm referring to here were raised in the excellence LCHE chat earlier this week which Leo is here. This was facilitated by Javier Atanas and Leo Hazeman. So for example a question came up about what about the open university? How does that fit into open education? And that is a question that often does come up. So if I start at the bottom and open can refer to open admission not obviously just in UK or EU but open universities globally then some people use the word open to refer to open resources which are simply free. And then obviously we refer to open resources which are open and licensed or available in public domain and then open educational practices. And that dotted line there is the pivot point of very much of our conversations. And when people say something is open we say well don't you mean free? You know it's not open and licensed. You know many of us in the open education community or who perhaps I should say those of us who consider ourselves open practitioners might say that only things that are kind of above that line are truly open. And another part of the framework is really looking at levels of openness and again from the bottom up these are we're moving kind of from individual to institutional or organizational levels. So you know different activities might be might prove to be on ramps for openness. So a lot of digital literacies initiatives and open practice initiatives like campus create which is going on at our university at the moment which was inspired by DS 106 provides educators with the opportunity to just engage in fun creative activities which might as I said encourage them to consider open practices in their work as researchers or educators. And then you know further up the scale we have open policy and open culture like the example that Lauren just gave around the University of Edinburgh and Greenwich and GCU. But many of us are individuals who are working in institutions which do not have policies in open education. So I'm doing research at the moment which is exploring why and how individuals choose to use open educational practices when they're not in a culture of openness which is probably most educators. So just a short snapshot of some of the research that I will share also in keynote is based on my own study I'm just going to stage one of the study it's a qualitative study of academic staff practices. As I said the setting is one university which does not have any open educational policies. And the second phase of the research will involve working with staff and students together and exploring their engagement in open online spaces. But the first phase has just been speaking with academic staff. Just in a brief summary some of the findings are that although sometimes we talk about OER leading to open educational practices where you are looking at the practices of educators who are working in institutions without policies around openness it's actually the reverse. There's finding emergent open practice based on maybe values or pedagogical choices that then may lead to OER. So in the case that I'm looking at there's emergent open practices a little use of formal OER. Another finding is just the primacy of identity and by that I mean that you just don't have to dig too deeply before you hit questions of identity which I'm sure many of you who work in open education are very familiar with. And that's why I think some of the work is done by Helen Beatham and others at GIS and the National Forum for Teaching and Learning Higher Education here in Ireland around identity and digital identity is so important particularly with respect to openness. And there's this balancing act that I saw myself speaking about with many, many people in the course of my study. And that's this balancing act between privacy and openness. So we can share these wonderful stories of openness with educators but if they have very clear ideas about how they want to maintain their own privacy that can work against moving towards openness. And the different levels that identify here are calling at the moment macro, meso, micro and nano. And macro is just the first thing, you know, will I share? Will I share my research? Will I share my interim research findings? Will I share my teaching ideas, my teaching practice, my teaching resources? But that's only the first question. The next level is who will I share as? So when a professional decides to embrace open practices there's a very fundamental question about, you know, who will I share as? Will I per share as my professional self? Will I integrate my personal and professional selves and identities and how will I do that? Another level is who will I share with? And by that I don't just mean who's in my networks and how will I use different settings so that I can choose who I share with. But how will I signal my presence to various people? How confident am I in doing that? And the nano level is very interesting and I'm sure all of us open practitioners will relate to that moment before you press, send, or post, or tweet. You say, will I share this resource or this idea? And as one of the participants in my study said, it's a lot of work for one tweet. So I think, you know, certainly the overall conclusion of my study at this phase is that open practice is individual. Harkening back to the first questions that I asked, it's contextual. It very much depends on where we are located and what the culture is. It's complex and it's negotiated continually. Sometimes on a minute-by-minute basis. So I'm hoping that collectively we might look at some of those issues at the conference. Again, this question is just the starting point and I hope it can be more collective endeavor. I'll mention my research, but that's just one part of what I hope to explore. That's it. That's great, Catherine. Thank you so much. I'm just sorry, I was in the middle of a tweet so taken by the words on your side and I feel like I'm on constant overload this week. There's so much going on. I need to find a darkened room at the end of the day and sit down and think about so much stuff because so many things have been shared and it's all so exciting. So thank you all very much. If you've got questions, do pop them in the chat for Catherine and let's discuss them. I was particularly grasped by your comment about practitioners. But we often do find ourselves sort of stuck between policies and institutional ways of doing things and then how do I decide who I am and what I share and where I share it. This is something I've been grappling with for ages. So I'm really pleased to hear that OER 16 may have some of those conversations and help us find our way through. So great to have that knowledge that that conversation is going to be going on and I certainly hope to be contributing to it as well. I'm just taking a quick look back, Francis. If you've got any particular questions you'd like us to come back to. Hi, can you hear me? Yeah. I looked carefully and there weren't any questions just lots of comments but I can make my last comment into a question as I've got the microphone. I'll give that last slide where you talked about how we make decisions to share and the different sorts of decisions we're making. And as you know, something that I've been thinking about is the conditions that pertain at the time we make the decision to share can change in the future. So sharing isn't just a one-off thing. It's something that might last for a longer time and I just wondered what you thought about that, Catherine. Yeah, that's fascinating, Francis. I'm enjoying our discussions about this. Yeah, I suppose quite often what's disliked back to me is people asking me, do you use such and such a tool or not and realizing pretty quickly that that doesn't really tell us very much as you say it's contextual, where we're located, what's going on in our lives, what's going on at this minute, even just what you said about feeling overwhelmed this week. Sometimes that can be part of the context in which people decide whether or not to be more or less open at a particular moment. So a number of the educators that I spoke with in my study said I understand all the value of openness, but I'm just overwhelmed. I'm teaching more and more students all the time and I'm having a difficulty just keeping up with what I have to do and I think that's really wonderful but I don't have time to do that. So that is our challenge in engaging with other professionals around openness and its possibilities and also its limitations. Yes, it's one that I've been struggling with actually just recently because I'm very aware that as I have conversations with practitioners around things like photos and attribution, it's just another complication. It needs to become so second nature or actually first nature so we start with open and then pull it back in. I tend to find myself, I work the other way around now so I publish the resources that I've made and then bring them back in to my course or my students rather than going the other way around. I don't know if that seems to help things for me but we need to find ways of making things, not another burden, not increasing the burden on practitioners. Yes, I agree completely and I think Francis is writing recently things about disconnection and you might want to say more Francis but I think that's vitally important for us as practitioners that we don't seem to be advocates who don't recognize the other side and I think sometimes we can be seen as champions and cheerleaders and a critical approach is so important and I think people will listen, we're more likely to listen to us if we're willing to talk about the complexities of openness rather than being simply champions or cheerleaders. Well it's great to have that. Already I feel less anxious because I've had some feedback and people saying yeah we've got to think about these things and that helps. That's huge and I hope everybody takes comfort from being part of the open community in that area that we can actually support each other through these tricky decision-making processes. Francis is there anything else you want to or if anybody wants to grab the mic you're very welcome to grab the mic if you've got questions for Catherine or indeed for Lorna we didn't stop and have a chat about OER 16 so if there's anything you want to come back on there as well before we move on. If I can just briefly chip in there as well. If people do think of questions or comments after the webinar finishes then do please feel free to just post them on Twitter or even just email any of us directly. I just was thinking about something while you were all speaking there and I mean I think that this is something that I think has done well in the OER community but it's very difficult to resist some time preaching about openness. So part of acknowledging that people find it complex is thinking about how you can address it with them and I'd just like to point you to some practice of some ex-colleagues of mine at Salford and I know this sort of thing happens elsewhere but their nurses and when they first came across social media they were quite preoccupied with the fear of how it could all go horribly wrong. So what they've done is they model curation activities so the lecturers support students taking a week at a time moderating a hashtag and I think those sorts of modelling activities are really valuable and I'm hoping to watch out for those at OER 16. Absolutely, absolutely Francis that's really helpful. I think the modelling is very much part of it. These things tend to be incremental so if you see one idea and you see it in action for a colleague and it works you're far more likely to give it a try. Great, thank you. Well we're going to move on to the final part of today's webinar and that's Viv who's going to be talking to us about a new dawn for UK OER and I know you've been travelling extensively so I'm looking forward to hearing your news from abroad as well. Was that expensively or extensively? Well I don't know, I don't know about the expensive, extensively. I feel awfully privileged and really all of these types of travels are drawing on the last amendments of my national teacher fellow funding which I don't know if you know much about the higher education teaching excellence scheme there but sadly being delayed this year but if you get to be awarded a fellow you've got a pot of £10,000 and boy that's been a lifeline, really that has funded every conference, every bit of travel and really everything I've done over the last three years and I've just did a bit of a loss to know what I'm going to do without it but yes I've been very lucky recently. I went over to an OER meeting, it's a hard life, it was in New Orleans which you can imagine for me was just through it by and last year also we went to the OER conference in Vancouver and I just want to make some comparisons between where I think OER is in the UK and what's happening in other parts of the world and I think really what's fired me up this week which has been a bit of a surprise, I've always enjoyed Open Education Week and there's lots of great stuff but I think the conversation this year and the discussion around it through these three webinars has been absolutely exceptional and it's just driving me mad now and Catherine started it off with her question, you know, if Open's the answer what's the question and I think he can be awake for a nice night so I've just drawn some ideas together really just to hopefully feed into further debates I see I can forward my slides it's fun to make sense of it all and these aren't my observations but I mean I did agree with the comments from audiences from the event earlier in the year and the Open Ed from last year there is a real monopolization of the open agenda and field in the US and Canada by the textbooks which in itself is a great thing but there's a real concern that over there they're losing the diversity and what about the little projects and the case studies and the small resources and just that culture of sharing there seems to be quite a seismic deviation and tangent from the past there now in a way I can see that that's great because it's been a really important political lever and you can't dispute the massive strides that people in the US and Canada have taken the most vulnerable textbook at there's an open education advice in the White House you know it's really ingrained in policy and state policy all over the US now which is really tremendous so it kind of gives me a clue to perhaps what we should be thinking about in the UK because I'm always thinking where do we go next is that relevant for us but I think the bit that concerns me that comes along with that is the whole narrative around the importance of adoption I don't see any reference to open practice or changing cultures or the lovely things that Katherine and Lorne have just talked about it's all adoption, adoption, adoption and I think they're losing something and I've come away thinking as a UK community there is so much they could be learning from us and it would be good in some way to try and encourage all those UK OER projects to reflect back and share evidence of where they've come from and to feed that back into these US conferences because the UK representation is very small there now so they're my reflections from the recent US and Canadian conferences I've been to and it just leaves me thinking and answering Katherine's question really where next for us in the UK and I was quite fired up also by the discussion on Monday and Joseph's contributions in that really our sort of green reality in England it has to be said is pretty great isn't it there's no advocacy at any sort of senior or strategic level of OER we've got an awful lot to learn from Scotland of course and Wales who are leaping ahead and I think us in England feel a bit jaded by that it's like we want to be doing this stuff too and not only that students are not reaping the benefits of what we should be aspiring to do here so some of Joseph's comments on the Monday webinar were really quite thought provoking I think she reflected also that one of our strengths is our diversity isn't it from courses to MOOCs to badges to practice you know we really cover such a range of openness in terms of the activities and cultures that Katherine's just talked about but I think in a way because it is so dispersed you know what's pulling it forward and also as she commented we're in danger of being ignored if we can't create some arguments to put forward and it's funny the comments just now about how to create arguments and so what we do I was I've got a new head of department and she said oh what's this open thing why should we be doing this and I had to talk for quite some time before she tried to oh I get it you know and I think we've become so entrenched in working in this way we forget what some of those more strategic arguments are I could be in a lot better at that so I think that's quite interesting thing for me there's also writing from last year that all the waters you know opens diversified in other ways people are slapping open on things and thinking that's it that's good enough but I think we're losing some of that original definition of open really meaning a license, technology, accessibility and it's kind of taking lots of other dimensions I think the open data community is really interesting because as my new understanding of it is it's really difficult to use open licenses in that sense because you're having to license an attribute individual data points rather than data sets so I think data is going to maybe take open in a bit of a new direction for us so yeah I'm just left thinking this week really what next for us and how do we move forward there's a rather grumpy looking build up there so maybe there's a few things that we could do so there's a Hewlett funded initiative at the moment to create a global world map it's quite data intensive input and stuff to this map but Rob Farrow and myself are kind of pushing that out on Twitter and through the email list at the moment you can simply register and add a project you can register and add a publication so it's just gathering assets really and I think that could be really good for us because I think with a little bit of effort we could cover that map with total awesomeness and all the stuff that's going on and if we can gather reasonable quality data that's going to be quite a powerful data set for us so do look out for OE World Map tweets I think there's a webinar for today and do look at Rob Farrow from the Open University for some of the stuff he's doing so that's all compiled and led by Jan Newman who's over in Germany Jan's really cool so that's one thing we can do I think really just do what can we do to encourage people to keep publishing keep writing, keep that evidence coming there's still very little reflection and articles that have actually looked back over those UK OER projects there was over 85 probably encompassing all UK universities and many colleges that volume of work was massive and I just was so like just could just give us a little bit of money for some case studies just to keep drawing some of that together because that's really powerful too just a little plug for Project that Catherine and I pulled together for OEC last year really updating information for anyone wanting to go open and trying to reach out to new practitioners who might want to get started or people who want to enhance the practice and that little wick is quite good actually it's a useful resource and we keep adding to it so do join in if you find any nice bits of information that you're free to share on there so really I'm still looking for what the question is in all of this what is our question to enable us to really forge forward draw things together in the UK and who is it that we ask and I'd be more than happy on behalf of the open-edited to pull ideas together and think what is it we can do to move forward even more amazingly as a group and I think really that's all I was going to say so questions, comments would be great so I haven't got any red whirlies to show you if I did I'd expect my dog would eat them thank you so much I don't think red whirlies are actually compulsory but it's a nice thought get your red whirlies on for Edinburgh what I'm really interested in is the difference that you've highlighted between the way the US and perhaps Europe and the UK are going and the importance of us learning from each other oh thank you Catherine, that's what you're sure of thank you for that comment and I'm really grateful for you sharing those insights because we tend to sort of focus on our context and it's great to pull these things together and maybe there isn't just one question we're looking for here I kind of feel as though lots of questions are going to bubble up if we're having the conversations and getting down to the nitty-gritty about what exactly do we mean and why and how does that affect things so I think we've really got those great opportunities and Open Ed Week has been a good way of focusing our minds on those opportunities but there's lots of work to be done and I'm sure a lot of it will happen over OER 16 when people are in the same place and talking that always helps so I'm just going to come back to Francis and see because I know Francis has been checking on comments and questions we don't have a huge vast room of number of people in here today unfortunately but the recording obviously will reach lots more people so if people are listening on the recording the same rules apply do still ask your questions do use these hashtags we've been putting out there the OER 16 hashtag and Lorna provided information about how to contact her for queries and questions in the chat there and of course the Open Ed SIG hashtag as well we're still very much in beta mode but we're still moving gradually towards within the Open Ed SIG a community space and I'll just make sure that so from the Open Ed SIG main page the landing page here that I'll just tweet out just putting the chat for you you'll now see that under Get Involved you've got a link to the community space now it's still very much in beta we haven't been able to finish everything we wanted to be able to finish but the first blog post is up there we want to put a machine readable CC by license on the blog and it will be that community space will be open to not just everybody who's obviously in the OER SIG but anybody who's interested in Open Education and so there is a mechanism that's being put into place at the moment to make sure that whether you're a member of OER or not you can access the Open Ed community and there'll be more on that link there that main page as that becomes live and becomes available so we want to take these ideas and build on them have these discussions in forums and make sure that we can very hopefully helpfully draw these things together and mediate these communications so that we can get a picture of where people are so if anybody has any further questions or queries or contributions please grab a mic and speak to us or pop them in the text chat if you'd rather not Can I dive in there actually, Carissa? I just wanted to pick up on the point that did make I think you're absolutely right but I think there's a depth of open practice here in the UK which I think is quite different from the way Open Ed is going in the US but I think there are things to be learned on both sides perhaps and one of the things that I've certainly seen is that open practice is still there in the UK and I think we can still see the impact of the old UK where we are program and a lot of us here were involved in that and I think we've carried that practice through with us but at the same time there has been a real lack of traction in trying to promote open policy at the higher level and some of you will be aware of the Open Scotland initiative but some of us here have been involved in and although we have tried very, very hard to engage the Scottish government in the hope that they will actually have some kind of policy on open education similar to open access we've actually, we've had no success in engaging them at all we do tend to get sort of like encouraging noises back from them with the awareness of the Scottish Open Education Declaration but we haven't managed to get any further than that so I think there are still blockages at that higher level but it is very encouraging to see more and more universities certainly developing their own open education policies which at least give some indication that the senior management level in higher education there is growing awareness of the benefits of open education and open education practice and hopefully we can that will socialize into other sectors and clearly the college sector has undergone enormous turmoil over the last few years but hopefully that settles down hoping this can come back on to the agenda there but really I think our colleagues in America are very good at lobbying at government level they're very successful there I think that's something we're less good at here I don't think lobbying works the same way so I certainly don't have the answers but I think there is a good question about how do we get government ministers interested and aware of the benefits of open education Yes, yes, you're very right it's kind of it's there but not there isn't it? It's one of these very sort of mysterious phenomena that turns up in policy documents and we were looking at metadata on policy documents recently for the word sustainable and it's open in the same way as sustainable that we don't seem to actually have clear definitions so I think the discussions that were going on in the chat this week around defining what we mean and the discussions we have to have there are important discussions because every time something is put forward to policymakers they are finding it difficult to actually equate what we're saying to any clear action and I particularly fond of the point that was made earlier about little OER and the trouble with little OER disappearing off the agenda is that actually it's little OER that actually infuse people about getting involved in open practice it's the fact that you might take a contribute something to open source code or you might be able to remix a collection of resources to make something that is very specific to your context and reusable I think it's important that we raise the profile of little OER as well so that's my soapbox anyone else going to dive in? Yeah I think, oh sorry am I going over the wrong way anyway I should press on I think that's what we always tried when UK OER was going all those years ago was actually how can we link it to university strategy and policy and I think we've hit the nail on the head this week with some ways forward one is if you're aspiring to be open you're aspiring to generate things that are sustainable on Wednesday we saw the relationship between open and accessibility which I think is going to become ever more relevant we're talking about education on a global scale also so I think those three areas open education is the foundation and sort of underpins all of that so we could just frame the arguments in those three directions that might be one way to go I might think about that I'd be very grateful to have additional brain power going on these things I think our collective brain power could help thanks very much with connecting practice and policy yes and it's something that is very rarely done very well connecting practice and policy then the same way as sort of theory and practice and sort of join up yeah I have no idea where we can get a soapbox there we've just heard a couple of new people join us I'm sorry but we are coming to the end of our webinar we've had a few minutes left can I ask one better question is that a question for both is there such a strong aspect of open education practice in the US at the moment I think there might be but it's difficult to surface because people that get the funding to go to the conferences are people working on sort of high impact projects so I must say in the last two events I've been to 2015 and this year there were practically almost without exception no presentations those sort of case studies from colleges or departments that had changed or adopted open practice there's none of it and it's all about the textbook story narrative which I can understand that's where the funding is and that's been political neither so it might be there but we're just not seeing it thanks I did wonder if that was the case thanks apologies Caroline you've not been able to get in earlier but hopefully once the recording is up you'll be able to catch everything just a reminder that I'm just going to move to the final slide here just a reminder that the text chat can be saved so if you come up to the top left and go to tools sorry no file and save you can save the entire chat or indeed the whiteboard to your desktop if you wish to do so and yes Catherine yet again the time flies by doesn't it great to actually be even if it's a virtual room with all of you with Lorna and Viv and Catherine and Leo and Francis you're all people who inhabit my world very much virtually we haven't managed to make it into one physical room yet but it's lovely to have to have you all here together and if anybody has any further questions do just pop them in the text chat with a Q or grab a mic and speak to us well we've got everybody here and Sheila as well well we've got everybody here we've got lots of brain power to engage thank you Celeste thank you for that feedback and yes let's have some applause for our presenters today it's been a very busy very tiring week and it's great to feel that we've gone out on a high as well with some more things for us to think about and those things will eventually sort of help to bring together exactly what we need to focus on I'm sure these discussions will will help a lot thank you Caroline and looking forward to those of you who can actually attend OER 16 looking forward to seeing the ripples of that online personally and thank you all very much for coming today and thank you Catherine, Lona Viz for your contributions and thank you Theresa for being a wonderful moderator, thank you all thanks Catherine thanks for all your hard work and it's been a very long week for you but it's great to hear it's been such a successful week and like I say we look forward to seeing you virtually as OER 16 so thanks again thank you you're all very welcome take care and I hope to see you on the open ed community very soon