 Congratulations to you all for making it for the best theory at this conference. Yep, it's obviously the ones for those with the most stamina and the most dedication, so please give ourselves a round of applause for what's happened. And at the end, we'd like to ask all of our colleagues here from UHI who've worked so hard and timeously throughout this whole week to come on stage as we have some special things to say, so please do get ready later on. And I just wanted to say a big thank you to everybody who's joining us one time. Everybody who's joined us here in a beautiful conference in Inverness, welcoming to OER 23. It's been a fantastic conference and you've all helped make it happen, so thank you very much for joining us. You need to make a rapid exit after this talk and here are some taxi numbers for you to book your travel if you need to. I love the taxi number in the city and all one digit, so these are one, four, six screen, two, two, two, two, two, four, five, five, five, five, five, four, six, one, one, one, one. So hopefully easy to remember and please let us know if you need help with transport. Now, we have a very special announcement as there is a particular winner to announce here. So please, a metaphorical drum roll. We're going to open the chair. And there is an actual winner, but an actual thing because we have here in person. Thank you. I will hear you. The PhD supervisor is a physics boy, so thank you. Thank you. And without further ado, I want to now head over to the chair of the session. And also, I wanted to give you all encouragement to give them a warm welcome because these two wonderful people have been involved for weeks, trying to mark all Scottish members and speakers. And also those of us who are not from Scotland are interested in Scotland to be here to make an impact at the national Scottish level for open education policy. There have been three conference workshops, three conference meetings online, also lots of blogging as well. So this is not just a plenary. This is a whole lot more effort and hard that's going there. So please do give them a warm welcome. So we did that. Yeah. It's always up here at the front, being, you know, making sure everything runs smoothly along the page. But we've actually reached out to the front of the panel. So my name is Lorna Campbell and I currently work as a senior service manager at the University of Edinburgh. We've been involved for five or six years. But I've been involved in open education since about two thousand years. And I'm going to be talking about a little bit more about that. He'll give you a little bit of background. And then we had a workshop on the open education. So then what we're going to do is we would ask our panel to introduce themselves. And to briefly say a few words about how they see open education developing in perhaps next year. What the challenges are in the vulnerable organisations and institutions. And then hopefully we'll have time to engage here as well to get some feedback and to get some input from you. I know it's been an exhausting couple of days. And I think it was quite a lot at this stage. But so we'll try to keep things nice and very important as well. So I'm now going to handle what to do. People will be seeing what the best advice I've got. So I'm Joe Wilson. I'm at the moment I'm head of digital skills in a big vocational college in Gladifold. I've done lots of other things. I've put public bodies and all kinds of things all around. Actually, the beginnings of Open Scotland was actually an OER conference. And here we are at the University of Cambridge. It's a suspicious place. I'll be here to the piece. I realised that the Scottish government wasn't going to be spoken to or sold to. Or any of this stuff. And actually, marketing partnerships with all the other partners. So let's see if we can do some momentum around something that's actually really simple. I just have then some of you countries seeking your support now. So we're about 10 years old since we started in Scotland. We pushed out an Open Scotland declaration right at the start. Because we thought, well, we'll just describe what Open should be. And then in every sense of the word, Scotland will sign up to it initially. What we found was places like Morocco and other countries adopted it. In fact, there's an OER map. Which we always feel like. It's an Open Scotland declaration. And they said Scotland's leading the way. This is policy in Scotland. But it stopped. And it wasn't. So we thought we would take this opportunity 10 years on. And in the background, we pushed it away. To try and engage with the policy makers. And with institutions and all of these things. And we thought 10 years on. We'll have a wee forum session to see how we can really engage with this. Keep pushing this one. And it's a grassroots. One of the things we need to do for our learners. And when I talk about our learners, I talk about them. In life-loving learning. So universities, colleges, schools. What-based learning. The broader system. So, whistle-sharing. So, on this kind of vision, we'll push out to all of you later. I think if we go your way. At the same time. We'll go share it with you. With you all. Keep starting. The next, it's your next call now. I'm going to give it a pass with us. Why am I saying this? Our policy makers. Our high institutions. Our colleges. I thought I'm quite loud anyway. They still can't get open and we need your help and this panel's help today to move the discussion on a wee bit further. It's like musical chairs, you can sit down now Jo. Okay so I'd like to invite our panel members to introduce themselves and to say a little bit about their experience of open education and what they think the affordances are and I'm going to put Stuart in the spot and start in reverse order because also I know Stuart has to leave her at least in case you need to run for it. Thanks Lorna. I'm Stuart Nicholl, I'm the head of educational design and engagement at Edinburgh University. I suppose in terms of open education we've been working in this space for a number of years at the university. We have an OER policy that we had adopted in 2016. It very much sits in the learning and teaching space rather than the library space because we want it to be very much about embedded in the learning and teaching activities at the university. We also have an OER service because the policy without action often gets forgotten about which is why Lorna heads up that service and does a great job embedding those practices in the university. I suppose in terms of open Scotland it is quite disappointing it's not had more traction at government level but in terms of Edinburgh University there's a lot of support from that institution and I guess partly Lorna your presence at Edinburgh University is a little bit about that and that was one of the early things that you did when you joined the university was to have some space to look at that. I think in conversations that we've been having even at this conference is probably more about the people, it's about working hard at pushing the open agenda within institutions and beyond institutions and short of having that government level kind of movement, that kind of government level policy it's more about the institutions working together and we just had a session just now where we talked about the sharing of policies between UHI and Edinburgh, we kind of base ours on Leeds policy and Glasgow Caledonia and it's kind of, I think it's about events like this coming together and having these conversations. How many passages do you get? That's that one. Hello, thanks. Thanks, Stuart. Scott Connor, I am the Digital and Open Education Lead here at the University of the Highlands and Islands so you've probably seen me around this week and I feel like I've been up here as a sacrificial lamb. Somebody from the institution probably had to come here and that happens to be me. But it is in my job title to work in open education and we've been working in this space probably since about 2016 when we were involved in the open education Scotland project. Keith was involved in that, Keith Smyth. Since then we've been trying to adopt open education more in the institution, we've been doing that through developing an elementary enhancement strategy which is a value in it which is directed right at open education and harnessing open education approaches. We've underpinned that with a framework for open education which is a three-year plan which is slid slightly due to Covid but we do have a plan to enhance a lot of the work that we do in the institution to make capacity to deliver open education and underpinning that, same as Stuart has done at Edinburgh and Lorna, we have an open education resources policy which again we plagiarised from Edinburgh, from Leeds and from Glasgow Calais. So this policy is a truly collaborative policy now and I think you can take ours next time and you can give us some credit for the bits that we've added. For me, I agree with Stuart, I think that it has to be a sort of grassroots kind of thing where we all collaborate and build up together but on the political spectrum I'm a wee bit more to the right than the left and there's a part of me that thinks that the adoption of the open education declaration by the Scottish Government and I believe that the real impact can be done through a change in the funding mechanism, so how they fund how we develop and what we develop because at the moment one of the things that I hear coming up is what are the barriers and the barriers are, how much does it cost, we can't afford the staff, we can only afford the staff to do what we're doing so I think if we can get the declaration fully accepted by the Government and the Government to use that declaration as a way to aid the funding, so to say you must, if you're creating resources using our funding you must take those resources and push them back into the open space so that everybody can benefit from that, I think it's a two-end approach on that and I would really really like to see that declaration adopted full on. In addition, I mean the other, we're not going to hold this for much longer, we're trying to get it all out now till I remember, in addition I mean we have what I see is a lot of different policies and frameworks, SDG4, UNESCO, UNESCO Paris 2012, 2019, but I don't actually see anywhere anything that says we must do it, there's nothing I see that says we must do it, there must, there is an absolute commitment and if you don't do it, there are any repercussions, so the line of least resistance is what happens if I don't do it, nothing's going to happen to you, I'm not going to do it then, sorry. Thank you, I'm Robert Schubert, I'm from the Netherlands and my role is I'm currently an independent researcher and consultant on OER. Well actually the situation in the Netherlands is a bit different from that from Scotland, especially considering the involvement and the interest of our government in this movement and it started already in 2006 where they were a big funder for the first OER project with us in the Netherlands and it continued after that with the WQI platform which was an initiative from the government, from the Ministry of Education in 2008, the Ministry in 2014 actually put in the strategic agenda the statement that in 2025 each teacher in higher education should share their learning materials, there came stimulation grants, there were innovation programs, so I think we can consider our government a unicorn in that sense because they supported it a lot and it made things now I won't say easy but I think easier than in your place but still there's a lot to do because you asked me also to what has to be done to be done in the future and still there are institutions laying behind, you see now I think everyone knows the case of the TU Delft which is a frontrunner in our country but there are also institutions, smaller institutions which are just about to start and that is our biggest challenge in the next coming years to what as Roger says cross the chest from the early adopters and innovators to the early late majority of teachers to adopt the principles of openness in their education and I think you should start there with the teachers and connect to their passion and that's teaching and that's not sharing materials but it's teaching and make clear for them where their advantages lies in becoming a better teacher. I think this particular course just have you know our coalition with Engelons here because you're good at this because it was certainly a time when developments in the UK and the Netherlands were kind of a parallel in terms of the government support for OER and just start in particular and also had an memorandum of understanding to work together but you just got to learn the longer operation on this idea that open education sources and open education are not allowed to do this but it's I think it's still really important. Yeah and the colleagues of SERV that played an important role in that and supporting the institutions with it and then doing all kinds of stuff in making plans for instance how to come to an OER policy how to come to quality model and so step-by-step institutions can forward all of course probably CC by so so so available for everyone. Thank you I think there's two points that I wanted to make which is that you know we're talking not just higher education we're looking at openers in all parts of education and training whether you're looking at schools training vocational education FE HE research and I think our government in the UK as a whole kind of looks at research that's open access so the open box is ticked and I've tried over the last 10 years to work with those contexts that we have had within Scottish government but also with the department for education based in Westminster and very often there just wasn't a contact person at all it was very often we don't have anybody responsible for open educational policy beyond open access and open research funding and I don't want to take away from the achievements we've had in open research and and disseminating that more widely but I think it doesn't really solve the problem and I think the the cause for us here in the UK is that we see openness as another challenge alongside you know brexit alongside the cost of living crisis alongside climate change sustainability like the list of that is endless and ultimately openness is never at the top of the agenda and I think our opportunity here is to present openness as a mode to solve some of the other challenges rather than as as an add-on and I read the padlet and it's so ingrained in us that openness is the extra step that we're not going teachers need more time more funding more skills rather than us thinking actually openness would solve a lot of the resource scarcity would solve a lot of our training issues would help small independent providers across sectors collaborate and and that is something I think that we as a conference have been leading the way in for us here in the UK so if there's anything I would like to see us doing is to show the open model as a way to solve these other challenges rather than being a standalone challenge I think that's a very valid point man and so thank you to our panel for putting their perspectives and now it's over to you what what's your suggestion as to how we move forward from here what are the affordances what can we do and what can we learn from you because you all have expertise in this field I'm aware that we have got like a huge sort of cohort of gojn researchers here and we need to learn from your research as well and how do we translate that into practice so would anyone like to go for it and if you would like to introduce yourself as well my name's Phil Johnston and I'm a retired old person weren't you also an old person I work at Stratford University where she went up here walking in you want to know what Phil cuts one of these I comment as follows a lot of things I listen to people that's through these and many many other conversations about education it's sectoral and we're kind of always trying to sort out the intersectionality of ourselves as institutions and kinds of institutions and that's that's where we are that's what evolved and this is what we're trying to do it I can just suggest that we start thinking about rather slightly differently and taking rather than the sectional approach to your whole population whole population is the student body if you like for open education you see what happens and that would mean we'd be educating for all of our futures not just the folk who can afford to go to the posh schools and not just the folk who get shoved to one side into a second or third rate institution because the money's not there let's go well with the Smith scene a starting point about practical importance is this dance it on future of the population you can define Scotland on the map as a geographic entity you can also define it in terms of the people while looking at the demographic data and so we can really learn lots of people work on it and play with it in different ways and open educators haven't done that you should have a little bit doing it or teaming up with people who are already it's that's a very good so ancient population really would be one of the most important in Scottish population and you know we've been older for decades I was fortunate now to be shitting my pants with the healthcare small people's care system in the UK thinking that will be me in about a year's time so something has to change and open education could be a key to absolutely do you want the panel want to respond to that nodding vigorously I think anybody yeah have we got any other inputs or comments or yeah my name is Vit I'm a PhD student from the University of Edinburgh and I'm thinking there are so so many points of intervention where you can try to make a difference so or a parallel in a different domain in the world of tech we often talk about gender balance and we see this in workplaces we see this in education many places but one of the key points of intervention that I see has affected a slow but sure way of going where it is starting in primaries of our children about like how do you learn what they learn what role models they see so since open education has a lot of element of culture starting early is also important because you won't get people who are set in ways to change their ways that's rather you can train a new generation of people start different ways I'm just wondering what do you think of like where's an appropriate point to start yeah right that's a good question and I'll go back to something actually that Keith was talking about the other day and it's the fact that we we have the general teaching council in Scotland and within that whole general teaching council program there isn't one mention of open practice within it so that would be a place where I would think would be a logical place to start is start with the teaching staff who are teaching these young children how to learn that would be the logical step and it's just it's just about the challenge because we've had lots of conversations and again in Scotland we've got some good things we're not being Scotland there is a there is a thing called glow which is the Scottish schools intranet and again if you're a college lecturer and things you can actually get in and position things and do things in there but but GDPR and the protection of children means it's quite hard to encourage you know we can change the teachers but they're always going to be to protect them they're always it within this this intranet so that you know people can't so there's a wee challenge in some of that I mean again it's probably more about safeguarding and training them how to manage their digital identities and all of these kind of things and again there's a kind of unacknowledged bit I've seen with my own kids a lot of these platforms say you've got to be 16 you know and my kids are all used from whenever they discovered these things that were all on on on these places but the the system doesn't really acknowledge that they just protect them when they're at school they don't look to see what they're doing in the playground or what they do at home. I can comment myself there as well that was certainly again one of the conversations we had at the very very first open Scotland summit was how can we embed this idea of open practice and open education in teacher training and again we still not really crack that I think but I still think that that I absolutely agree is critically important that we really need to develop this idea of openness and sharing knowledge with our children at the youngest age and to do that we need to upskill our teachers but we haven't really found an in to do that yet. Surely as we said earlier that's not just about higher education it's about education all the way through so the logic go back to what I said previously was that you get that open education scotland declaration through and it helps support education right from the bottom because they have the Scottish government they have the input to the Scottish education they could change it. I think there's a question there in a minute but I just wanted to say I think that really relates to the points that Dave and Rika made in their keynotes about that sort of paradigm shift that we're not really seeing at the policy level. Okay question at the back here or a comment. Just an observation the baby box has been a very important aspect of discovery and learning for parents and for children and perhaps even just a leaflet about open education. That's a great idea actually. I think it's this idea but it's and one of the things that can be about frustrating is Scotland has always had this very egalitarian tradition of education and you would think you know that you know the principles of openness fit so well with the whole idea of education in Scotland right from school all the way up and it has been quite frustrating we've not been able to sort of introduce it at that level so that's actually a very good idea. Have we got any more comments or suggestions for Martin? Hi I'm not sure I believe what I'm going to say but I've got to channel my inner gym room which is always dangerous thing too but maybe we should be fine too hard. Stop trying to come up with policies I think why don't we just have fun doing the stuff you know sharing what we like to do demonstrating open practice and I think that's often quite powerful then it's like people say how comes that person's getting all the keynote invites because they've got a great blog and this person has been sharing this stuff you know or sharing bits of your course or just demonstrations doing what you can at the kind of small level the kind of small area rather than always trying to go with the big area and then I think people say okay I wouldn't mind it so I'm not sure I believe that's the way I think we've tried the other way let's try the fuck I was going to have fun out of a way you know it's like when you're doing that that's that. We've got another comment there isn't it there? So back in this that idea I think I do kind of try to and it's it's that the strength is the grassroots as soon as it gets sucked into towards big politics it gets watered down you know and I think that's what it is things happen you know and sharing it in small ways makes it makes a difference and I think that's that's very much what we have been doing and sort of like giving that you know we haven't quite given up on trying to change or to influence policy at national level but I think we've been a lot more successful at influencing policy at institutional and partner level. I'm just I'm going to reflect on so I've done all this openness and done all these other jobs and then I arrive in a really fantastic college and I'm busy pushing things out openly and at the moment every six months I have a head-to-head with the colleges marketing team because the colleges marketing team doesn't doesn't understand they want everything on their website but they don't want all of this stuff about lecture development and things and they don't really want me to have my own google site doing all these things they don't have any you have any concept about openness now I know what I'm doing and I know it's the right thing to do but if I'm getting shut down at institutional level for doing the right stuff I wonder and that's why that column about what next and influencing policy at institutional level there's lots of people when I tell them the old scott story they say great I'd love to do that but and it's even more extreme if you're a teacher in a local authority where the local authority says you're not you're not allowed to publish anything or push anything out you know Anne-Marie and yeah just reflecting on what you said there Jo and also what Marta said behind me there um I have been doing work directly with the government ministry in another country recently and yeah they will not tell me the verses to do things because they need you to answer from where's the money but beyond that I think we have to think really carefully about Europe by Jo what comes with government policy what money might come with it or what else comes with it do you really want some people who just named Jo to be in charge of implementing like who because you see some control when it goes to that level at grassroots level today we have controlled it and we can shape it and manage it I know it's I know it's hard work I know it's pushing upwards but I do think that there's a danger when it comes from the other direction that we lose something in that um and that it gets co-opted by people we may not win so I think that's an interesting thing okay I'm going to pass on to Robert because I want to to respond to that yeah I see this danger I haven't seen this happen in Netherlands uh they they so so but I I think it is a balance uh and and uh in the Netherlands and if I gave the impression that all the activities are only in high education it's not the WQIs platform for all uh educational sectors and especially primary and secondary education have adopted it and vocational education also so so the the the support is for all levels for me most visible was that was a high education and there's a lot of autonomy in those institutions and not only in high education but also in vocational and primary education secondary case so they they are very reluctant uh and actually the government is very reluctant also they stimulate they they provide a lot of money but they are not prescribing things on one exception and that's the the exception 2014 where the there came a law that in 2020 is all uh results of research should be published uh uh open access that's the only uh uh law they have made and that really helped this move from the lot uh in the in the open uh in the open science uh like that's a sensitivity stimulation of prescription yeah Shila Shila was actually involved right in the sort of setting up of open Scotland so I think it goes back to I don't not quite sure what we're going to see here but bear with me a comment and a question yeah well it's more common so I think it goes back to something that Dave was saying today about trust I think we have to trust ourselves and I think we have to ask why our readers would trust us and what we're telling them and I think we're seeing us so choose that we are getting more people in the predictions do you want me to stand like that but I think we have a wider political problem in that we're used to education but we know very much about education that's a very valid point so you have a new minister I mean in Scotland we have a new education minister and really his priority is not about education it's going to be we've got a big problem with exams with school exams which is always going to be the driver so I think it's how we can and continue to trust ourselves I think this is a fantastic community we're doing all the grassroots work there's people lots of people in this room we are making a big difference and it goes back to what Marion said open is not just about open education it's about sustainability it's about all the agendas that are coming up I think it's how we can continue to feed up messages saying here's a solution this is how you can do it and it's maybe maybe because we all in this we've got a very safe community in that bit of a moment but maybe we actually need to get a bit more of it right let's just let's try and not maybe we do need some out there I don't know whether it's a paper or something or we just take out an advert in a paper I don't know but there's a but I think it's about trust is how you develop the senior management to trust what we're seeing and that's always a problem because it actually you know we care about it I mean we care about research well we're going to have to draw to close out Robert the last word yes I think to that did you also involve students in the Netherlands and in one time student unions were directly contacting the minister and that led to to this statement with some other things also the statement about this sharing in 2025 and the students were actually one the drivers for the way our policy in aid for us well thank you so much for all your input I'm afraid we're going to have to draw this discussion to close now we have I think five minutes on the nail before the end of the conference so I'd like to thank our panels like Marin and Robert and spot it's here so thank you very much to all of our speakers here for the plenary and we are very close to drawing a close to this conference and while I just give some last thanks I'd like to ask all of our UHI colleagues yes all of you to please come on stage because you're going to take a very well-deserved bow and get the final thanks so please all come on stage and join us so please Keith lead your team all your colleagues please do come on thanks Marin thank you very much thank you Marin colleagues for bringing it here a bit of a thank you appreciate it thanks for creating up the days I do just want to say a few thanks if that's all right there's a number of colleagues that have been behind the scenes how great don't want to miss anyone out so I want to thank Leanne and Rory who have been on the screen these pictures you're seeing that on the screen they've been behind the scenes kind of helping call all the sessions that were being recorded Martin and Tom from H&M Burness for post planning and bringing all the technical support that's been fantastic but John, Carolyn, Scott and Yona have been famously facilitating running around most of something like this anything and I want to thank you and I'd also like to thank some of the ones very close to the UHI and I would like to give special mention to Debbie and Jane who are here just uh who were on registration desk and also set up the reception for last time so you guys can go sit down and have a good night oh okay sorry so one one other thing to say which is regarding Marin actually so many of you will know that Marin is coming to the end of what can only be described as a stellar and transformational stint as the Chief Executive of ALT come the September conference you will not be able to say an appropriate and fitting send off but for now we want to acknowledge all the work you've done in putting and taking forward the open agenda for us you know both within UK and and beyond all the work you've done for OER conference this will be your last conference at OER conference as Chief Executive of ALT so on behalf of previous conferences this conference and GOGN network I'd like to extend all of our thanks to you so thank you so much. So just one final word from UHI, safe travels, thank you for joining us and if you don't know the list but you're saying you kick up, kick your back. Thank you and yeah safe travels from us. I did have one final call to action particularly as we're talking about putting OER interaction which is that if you would like to follow in the big footsteps that Keith and the GOGN team have set here this year we're going to shortly announce the call for co-chairs and our venue for next year so if you're feeling like there is a lot of fun missing in your life and you want us to descend upon your institution or you want to host next year you want to become involved our call will open shortly and we hope very much that many of you will make it to next year so from us all here thank you very much for joining us. This is the end for this year.