 and welcome back to yet another great session of the OER by Domains 21 conference. Now we'll welcome Angela Riscous, Catherine Cronin, Claire McAvinia and Celine Perien who are presenting practices what we preach, an open resource on OER and OEP. The presentation is 15 minutes and there will be five minutes for questions at the end of the session. Now over to you Angelica. Thank you very much Martina and hello, welcome everyone. We are so delighted to be at OER Domains 21 this year. It is crazy to think that two years ago we were together in GoWe. Last year suddenly had to shift to the online format and here we are one more year and time went so fast. So my congratulations to the conference organizers for the most impressive format and layout for the conference and really learning so much about running at such an exciting and well-designed conference. So to be the starters Catherine has very kindly compiled all the links and resources that we will mention through this presentation with this link. If anything else comes today we'll also add it up there in this central repository. So that's there for you to make a note of. So to get started I would like very much to introduce the lovely team that I work with. So myself, Angelica Pesca, I work in the University of Limerick where I work as a lead educational developer and just giving passing on to my team if you want to start Catherine. Hi everyone, I'm Catherine Cronin. I work with the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. Hi everyone, I'm Claire McAvinia and I work as an education developer in T.U. Dublin and I'm on part-time second in the National Forum as well at the moment. And I'm afraid as our colleagues in me we having technical issues at the moment so I hope that you can join us in a few seconds. So I hope that we can sort that out but we are ready to get started in the meantime with the presentation as such. I suppose that just before we do that is just timely to say that during the months that followed the shift to remote and online learning all of us have worked at some level with students and staff that teach in higher education in terms of promoting and advocating for the value of OER and OEP in many shapes and forms. For example you could have been through promoting authentic assessments, you could have been through helping them to design and repurpose resources also to develop literacy skills with students and staff or promote equity and so much more. When we began last year collaborating together in this project Catherine very kindly invited us from the National Forum to participate and she's been leading us through this effort to as opposed to structure this advocacy for OER and OEP in a more cohesive fashion. So very happy to come to you here today to show you the progress that we've made so far in this direction. So without further delay I would like to pass on to Claire to start with the presentation as such. Thank you Angelica and just by way of a little bit of context around the resource that we're sharing with you today for colleagues who may be unfamiliar with the National Forum this is a small neutral academically led body which is supporting teaching and learning across the sector in the Irish higher education sector and that work is being accomplished through collaboration with staff and students across the sector so all those who are learning undergrads, post-grad, mature students, part-time people, all those who are involved in teaching, so our lecturers but also our librarians, our researchers who teach, our academic developers who teach and all institution types, our universities, our technological HGIs, our private colleges and all members of the sector are a part of this enterprise and one of the National Forum's strategic priorities is to support digital in teaching and learning with open education being a key aspect of this work. And if we can just go to the next slide. Thank you Angelica. Sorry, I wasn't sure if I could do that. Okay so just to highlight two important aspects of the forum's work which the forum has been active in supporting open education since its inception and we continually aim to support the development of open capacity across the sector built on a recognition that there are already numerous open education resources in Irish higher education arising from the institutions themselves and also representative bodies such as the Irish University's Association EDTL project and you might have heard a bit about that in the previous presentation this morning. Two important publications to mention here from the National Forum in 2019, the Open Licensing Toolkit which was devout fine consultation with the sector about what was most needed and in 2020 how to choose an open license which was really to address questions that people had around appropriate Creative Commons licensing. Beyond these guides however we've also seen a deep desire amongst people in the sector to explore OERs and OEP and to go into more depth with all of that particularly following the move to online which was so sudden in 2020. And we wanted to work with them to look at the possibilities of OER and OEP for teaching and learning. So our this is the full team those was here today but we're across multiple institutes and organisations and we began to develop this in-depth resource last summer on a part-time basis. Thank you Anna Delica and this is where we've got to so launched in March 2021 this is our resource which is called using OER and OEP for teaching and learning and you can access it at open.teachingandlearning.ie. So this is publicly available and available to anyone who might wish to have a look at it now and there are four key sections within the resource. So what we have then is a set of links off from the homepage which I think you can see in the next screenshot and they're looking at understanding open using OER creating OER and using OEP. So these icons take you from the homepage into those sections but they're also mirrored in the navigation structure you can see at the top there and within each is a set of subsections which goes into much more depth around the key information on these topics but in a manageable way so we're not inundating people with details but trying to give them essentials to engage with these areas of practice. We've also got some localised support here as well because much of this resource is going to be familiar to you if you've engaged with OER, OEP before and we're also drawn on the wealth of resources that are already openly published which have been excellent so they inform what we've got here but we had identified a need to focus specifically on the Irish context and as you might see in terms of copyright law and you would think of that straight away because it differs from one jurisdiction to another so you'll see reference to the Irish Copyright Licensing Agency and there's an Irish sector flavour to this but most of it would be usable and applicable to your own settings as well. So just to talk a little bit more about the purpose of the resource briefly to build open capacity across the sector to support individuals who wish to expand their own knowledge of OER and OEP but also to help people who are helping others so the staff who are supporting students and other staff in their institutions with OER and OEP and as I've said and we're all aware there are many excellent resources already in existence openly published for OER and OEP but this resource was to acknowledge the need for some more contextualised and localised support for the Irish HE sector. We also wanted to share and curate national practice so there were pockets of expertise all around the sector that we were aware of and this was an opportunity to gather and collect them together in terms of projects, experiences and approaches and many of those have come to life recently through OE week. Communities of practice have existed for many years in Irish higher education around OER and OEP so we wanted the resource to continue to support that development and not only to give examples of OEP but to model OEP and that brings us to the ethos and the thinking around the resource and I'm going to hand over to Catherine to hear a little bit more about that. Thanks so much Claire. Yes we chose an intentional title for the presentation which is practicing what we preach so in the presentation and in the resource itself we knew it was important to share the foundational ethos so yes it contains a lot of information about the nuts and bolts of OER and examples of OER and OEP but what was also important especially in terms of building capacity as we spoke about and the next slide was just to reinforce the potential benefits of OER and OEP and we see those in three areas access equity and pedagogy so I'll go through each of these really briefly but just to give you a sense of kind of as I said the foundation of the resource itself so in the area of access of course you know the primary thing we often talk about when we talk about open education and we're talking about getting the message across that we can increase access for students you know in terms of say open textbooks and open educational resources access for staff particularly staff who may be teaching online for the first time we may be developing digital resources letting them know there's a wealth of material available to draw from to adapt to reuse and really kind of sharing and sharing that access more broadly you know beyond the bounds of an institution or even beyond the bounds of our educational sector in Ireland the second aspect is equity and this is of course vitally important when we talk about when we talk about open so yes open education can reduce overall costs for students primarily OER are available before, during and after taking a course you know we know from a lot of the work that's been done the research that's been done over the course of the past year that financial hardship was exacerbated for many students so OER being available you know during any breaks in study for example is very powerful. OER are available for editing of course as as open advocates know to address diversity equity and inclusion so including perspectives that are often missing from resources that we use for teaching and learning to better represent marginalized identities and experiences and to involve students in creating OER and finally you know the the narrative of so much of of this conference over the next couple of days will be about open pedagogies so you know I won't I won't dwell on this but many people who may come into this resource thinking about licensing a particular resource or looking for a textbook this introduces the whole concept of open pedagogy so again as I said adapting and using OER in different contexts students co-creating OER developing forms of authentic assessment contributing to public knowledge the whole inter-relationship between digital literacies and OEP which I know Jane Secker is talking about at the conference and diversifying the curriculum and of course all of the aspects of local and global collaboration but finally I hope that those of you who are advocates of critical approaches to open education can see that this is really woven throughout the resource there are some explicit references but woven throughout is really our collective recognition about the importance of critical approaches to education so thinking about some of the things that came up in the panel this morning who is included and who is excluded when education is opened how can agency be incorporated OEP is always continually negotiated as I've said before so openness is always a choice so how can we ensure that students can choose whether and how to be open in particular contexts these choices can best be made by individuals who understand openness at a deep level and again that's interwoven with digital literacies and data literacies so that's really the foundation kind of the foundational ethos of the project and I'll hand over to Celine to talk about where we're going in the future lovely thank you Catherine so what's next where we hope that the resource will be useful to all who learn teach support and lead in Irish education and beyond by first encouraging the critical use of OER and OEP in teaching and learning the resource which supports OER and OEP champions in the sector many of whom are actually here today I'm talking about staff from teaching and learning units libraries and the academic community and of course the resource will support students with access to more resources as Catherine mentioned at zero cost or very little cost it will also support the introduction of open pedagogy to support collaborative work the resource is there to help libraries and that's a very important point to me support libraries to support students with various learning needs libraries have a crucial role to play in ensuring access to new resources and equity for all this can be achieved in in different ways first by including OER in future collection development policies for example by supporting the inclusion of OER in reading lists by directing staff who teach to watch OER when researching new material and of course by encouraging them to adopt first adapt and why not publish open educational resources let's think even further what if the resource could inspire higher education institution to invest in open publishing tools and platform to support staff and ensure access to OER for students and now going forward the resource will stimulate the discussion in Ireland around the development of enabling education policies we're also hoping that the resource will help to foster collaboration in the Irish higher education sector towards the creation of a new national resource hub now this hub will host OER for teaching and learning initially and finally the resource will form the base for an open professional development course on using OER and OEP for teaching and learning so that's a very exciting development now the goal of all this work is to contribute to systemic change across Ireland's higher education sector and this can be done by addressing UNESCO's five year old faction on OER namely built open capacity for all key education stakeholders raise awareness develop training programs support integration of OER in learning teaching research and ensure access to open licensing tools authoring tools platforms systems and so on and develop supportive OER policy at institutional and national level encourage inclusive and equitable quality OER now let's consider all our learners their background their circumstances let's assess current standards and evaluation tools for OER also there to nurture sustainability models for OER properly implement and constantly improve OER models and finally we must facilitate international cooperation encourage cross border collaboration promote international networks to support efforts to develop and raise awareness of OER so we know that working on these key areas is a decisive step towards building more open and inclusive knowledge societies Angelica thanks so much Celine for for bringing those points and great as we could serve as the earlier little technical hook up to to have you and well I suppose that we've seen some very complimentary comments in the chat and looking forward to to hear about any further feedback that you may have we welcome very much your ideas and your feedback I suppose we wanted really the practice what we're preaching that that comes to the fact to give back this back to you which is our resource which is very much a student development and will form the the bones of an open course down the line so we would like to hear if there's any other examples that or information that we could add that would be relevant keeping in mind the audience that is pitched for for that introductory level do you wish perhaps to share some of your own work please let us know case studies that could be relevant while keeping us opposed the reference to the audience as well and are you doing similar work and and would you like to share it as well so basically we'll open the conversation in a second but we would like to follow from here today as well in the twitter sphere so here are the handles for a respective and just thank you my my team Catherine Claire and Celine very much for your presentations today so hand in your back Martina thank you thank you everyone that was a wonderful presentation thank you so much and I could see from the comments that people are thrilled by this resource already so the the links that you provided have been already sort of checked up and and there are lots of connections here that are being made I could see that your resources are actually CC buys so they can be changed they can be remixed they can be further developed which is which is wonderful which is actually absolutely wonderful and I noticed there was one question coming from the chat earlier on which went to the the language that you are using and and the question actually came from Parkour Ola Korti she said it's amazing work but the question here is it would be wonderful to localize it in different languages so are there any plans for further languages we don't have explicit plans for further languages we hope that by you know making this available and CC buy that you know it's free for anyone to use parts of it all of it or whatever to do what they wish but certainly we'll bring that feedback back to the national forum in Ireland as I said this was just the first draft of the resource and you know it will be continued to be developed so that's wonderful feedback thank you and there is another one for you here in in the chat so this is relating to the size of the community and is there anything those of us in the rest of the UK can learn that you would like to point out and I think this is basically the last one meant England the rest of the UK sorry sorry England so maybe Angelica something that you would like to say here I would say not I would say it's not quite related to the size of the community because there's a relatively so few of us compared to the huge large amount of but I would like to bring in Claire as well to bring your thoughts because you have such a long history of working so closely with the OER community in the country thank you Angelica I think it's a sort of yes and no I think there are a lot of long-standing networks particularly around OER that stem from the first project national project we had back in 2004-5 to develop a national digital learning repository and DLR parallel maybe to Joram in the UK but I think because of the size of the sector in Ireland perhaps those networks sustained a little bit more easily people keep bumping into each other there might be something in that but I think we would like to see more growth and and you know I see people commenting a little bit you know is it becoming more mainstream I think we probably have the same challenges as everyone has to grow to grow it and make it more mainstream okay I'm afraid our time really is up and I would encourage everybody to actually follow up on conversations via discord there are wonderful channels to do that in discord so once again thank you very much for wonderful presentation and see you around thank you bye bye now thank you everyone thank you om nom nom