 Hello everybody, just some information. We have a very interesting webinar with great speakers looking ahead. Please, if you have some questions for the speakers, ask them in the Q&A session, and I'm pretty sure we will try to answer to them, and you can introduce yourself from where you're coming and who you are and what you're doing in the chat. But please select families and attendees in the chat in Zoom, so everybody can see from where you are coming and who you are. For those who are following us on YouTube, please put your questions, your information, from where you are coming, your hello's in the comments room, and our people, our colleagues from Eden will transfer all this information to us in Zoom. So I'm Diana Adonan, I'm the director of the e-learning center in the Polytechnica University of Tinshara, Romania, but more importantly, I'm the Eden vice president in charge with communication and communities, and I'm very happy to be doing this in a very important year for Eden, the 30 years of existence of Eden. This is the fourth series of the webinars, which Eden has started more than a year ago, in the idea of supporting the educators around the world on how to provide quality into education and how to improve their educational skills and digital competences. This webinar, and I will start now the presentation, so you will be able to see all what I'm speaking about, just briefly, okay? So this webinar, as I said, is going to be in this last series, which is called Time for Action in Shaping Higher Education 4.0, and we are looking very much forward to discuss about the future of education and what will be in store for us starting next year, and also what we can do to finalize in good condition this academic year or this school year. And as I already mentioned, it's part of the celebratory events dedicated to Eden's 30th anniversary, and please go online on the 40.EdenOnline.org, where you can share your stories and your memories and everything what Eden has done for you, for your community in the last 40 years. It's still time to submit your papers and to register to attend our great conference on June in Madrid, virtually, unfortunately still, but we have great speakers and great papers already in the schedule, and please join us. We promise it's going to be a very interesting event in the middle of June 21st to 24th of June 2021, the Eden Virtual Annual Conference. As I already mentioned, this webinar is part of the series of the webinars which Eden started one year and a half ago, and this theme for today is sharing and collaborating our way out of the storm, and we are looking mainly on how we'll be able to share and collaborate. What open education has been able to do to support educators around the world? Have they been using open educational resources, tools and practices or not, and what the future will host for us? We are trying to do a very brief analyze of what happened in the last years, especially in terms of open education, but we are definitely trying to see what the future will hold, how we are going to improve our education system, is open education part of the improvement or not? And for this, we have some amazing speakers, and I thank them very much for taking the time and the dedication to support the Eden webinars and our community. So first is Melissa Highton coming from University of Edinburgh, UK, and she is in charge with online learning. Everybody knows her quite well because she was very much involved in the open educational resources conferences and in support of open education. And University of Edinburgh is one of the universities who is very much advanced in the implementation of open education in everyday educational practice. And then we have Stephen Downs, who is coming from Canada. He's very famous mainly for initiating the open online courses, the MOOCs, the famous MOOCs, and for inspiring all of us on how to do open education in the last years. He's the Digital Technologies Researcher at the Research Centre at the National Research Centre of Canada. And then we have our very good friend, very good collaborator of Eden for many, many years, Alistair Krillman, who is specialist in learning and is coming from Linus University of Sweden and who I consider a person who inspires and give us food for thought. And it's always trying to put perspectives in balance for everybody. So first I would like to let me just stop this. I would like to present for Stephen Downs if it's possible, as he will be our first speaker today. Stephen Downs, as I said, works with Digital Technologies for many years. He inspired all of us about open education. He is one of the originators of the massive open online courses. And he published very frequently in a blog which is dear to all of us all daily and also a newsletter which comes in every month and sometimes even twice per month in everybody's inbox. Stephen, I don't think something more is needed to be said about you and I'm pretty sure you will be inspiring all of us. Stephen, please. Hi everyone, thank you for having me here. And here are my wonderful slides for today. I've just stolen the name of the webinar for the title of my presentation because I like to do that. And if you're wondering those railway tracks and those clouds or what it looked like on Saturday just outside the small town in Canada where I'm giving this talk. So I want to begin by observing that any change is going to be hard at first. And I think that's something that we really learned this year during the pandemic. A lot of people tried to jump right into online learning or as they called it remote learning. And as we all know, I think it takes time to get comfortable with new technology and new ways of doing things. And this is what we're gonna find in the future as we return to the classroom, it's not going to be the same and it will be hard to jump into the new classroom environment. We'll try to get everything back to normal but it won't be back to normal so it'll be different because of the experiences we've had. But the main thing we want to keep in mind here is we can't directly compare the new thing to the old thing. We can't directly compare our experience of remote learning and online learning to what we were doing in the classroom. We've been doing classrooms for years but we've only been doing many of us online learning just for, well, in the case of people who just started just for the last 12, 14 months, wait until you're really comfortable with it before you make the comparison. Now I wanna talk about sharing first which is one of the two major themes of our webinar today. And of course we know that open media plays a key role and yes, it's important to save money and increase access to learning. And that's a key motivation for open media but it's not simply about changing money or sorry, it's not simply about saving money. We need a way to talk to each other and this is what we learned during the pandemic. We can't just talk to each other in words. We need media. We need an alphabet of images of resources. We need sentences. We create out of TikTok videos and Facebook posts. We need data to share with each other and we need these to be available like in any language without worrying about who owns it and how much it costs. That's why we needed Zoom so we could share freely and that's why open textbooks became so essential during the pandemic. We also learned that learning is social. We knew that already, right? Everybody has says we need to be in classrooms and whatever but I think what's really different that we learned during the pandemic is that some of the important outcomes of learning are social. Outcomes like all of us remembering to wear masks, all of us practicing social distancing, all of us together beating the pandemic. We can't learn to do that just as individuals. We learn as a community and it isn't just about remembering stuff, it's about how we exchange these ideas, how we conduct trade, which really changed during the pandemic and we had to relearn that and how we develop community networks with each other. Now collaboration, which is the other side of the webinar. Well, one thing we learned and we're experiencing right now, we really like live events. Now not everything needs to be live. We can have videos, simulations, other content but live events are what draw us in. Live events are what challenge us. When we don't know what's gonna happen as during a live event, we're engaged or our minds are engaged in planning and anticipation. Will he follow the text on the screen or will he add live? We don't know if it's live and live events have us interacting even if indirectly to the other people on the screen and it creates what we call presence that knowledge that there's a person at the other end of the line. And with respect to collaboration, we're learning that it takes a community. It takes a community to learn, it takes a community to teach. We've already known that teachers need building and facilities and support staffs and all of that but when they're working with advanced technology like we're using right now, it's going to take an entire team. It takes someone to set up the webinar, it takes someone to manage the video displays and the slides, can do it online but as soon as you can do it online all by yourself but as soon as you get a little bit complicated and start working with multimedia while you're giving a talk, it gets more difficult. Even doing this with advancing the slides and talking to you. I'm trying to keep track of two things in my head. It gets harder and a community, a team makes it easier. So how do these come together? Well, sharing plus collaboration equal open community and there are some important lessons we learned during the pandemic about that. First of all, people have diverse needs way more diverse than we thought. They come from different cultures, different languages and have different abilities and that's not just true in Europe. That's true here in North America. That's true everywhere. Before the pandemic in traditional school we designed for the mainstream and hoped everybody else could adapt but when we switched to go online a lot of difficult issues surfaced and we had to address especially in North America but I think around the world built in or systemic discrimination. And we had to get past the idea that only some people are special needs and adopt the attitude that everyone has special needs. And finally, we learned that inequities harm learning. You know, coming together to learn at school in the physical school, the physical building mitigated in the past many of the worst impacts of poverty and disability. Because at a school we could all access books we could all access teachers and we could all find time to study away from the distractions of a home. A lot of people, especially in North America but again, around the world depend on school for internet access and for a good meal. And a lot of the support disappeared when we went online. People in need just vanished. So we've learned that we need to solve this problem of inequity and keep solving it even after the pandemic. That's my brief presentation. That's my cat Emma and I'm Steven Dennis. Thank you very much, Steven. That was very, how to say very powerful and I think it really showed how important the differences are and how important it is to take into consideration these differences. So my question for you will be, do you think that the use of open educational resources are how to say leaning the path, making seamlessly unaware that you have differences when you deliver open education or do you see the personalized learning really the solution for addressing these challenges which you just described? One of the things we discovered when we offered MOOCs is that when we allowed people to choose their own learning resources people didn't all make the same choice. People chose a wide range of different learning resources in different languages, in different modalities. Some chose to learn from text content. Some chose to learn from videos. Some chose to learn in communities which they sometimes even created themselves. And so I think that the real lessons we learn from open educational resources are not the lessons we learn when we try to use them and adapt them in our teaching but when they are used and adapted and shared directly by students and when they do that we see the incredible diversity of needs and interests but also too. And this was to my mind a key discovery during the time of the MOOCs is we've discovered that the richness of the conversation increases because people coming from different perspectives reading different materials have different things to say to each other rather than if everybody's coming from the same point of view and everybody's using the same resource. So that's the role I see open educational resources playing increasing the diversity and the richness and the fluidity of the conversation. Yes indeed and I quite like your idea of adapting so I think that's a key word which we'll all need to take into consideration or at least in the near future if we haven't done it yet how we can really make that adaptation and adapt to different styles of not necessarily learning but different styles of which comes not necessarily from different backgrounds or the digital divide and so on but we just want to be able to learn a bit differently each to each other and that's probably one of the key things for something. As we already discussed each of the presenters are going to share something about their ideas about the topic of how to share and reuse for the future of education and then we will have discussions and we also have a small poll for everyone and it's with my great pleasure thank you very much Stephen to invite now the next speaker who is Professor Melissa Highton who is a very close friend also of Eden all of them are being involved with Eden for many, many years. She's coming from University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom she's in charge with the teaching, learning, global platforms, virtual environment, technology enhanced learning and digital student experiences in the University of Edinburgh. She advised and builds up the strategy of this university. She was also very much involved in the movement to online and to open online courses in Coursera, edX, future learning obviously in Wikimedia. I quite like and admire the Wikimedia residents. It's always comes up with something quite interesting and with loads of experiences and information and as I already mentioned University of Edinburgh is very well advanced in the improvement and the involvement of open education. So, Melissa please. Thank you. I'm going to take a slightly different angle on open educational resources than what Stephen did. Yeah, it's a next slide. Thank you. Because I'm going to again, I've used the same title but really thinking about the questions how can we harness OERs? What problems can OER help us resolve? And how does it support our core business? And what I'm going to talk about is just some snapshots of case studies of things that we've done at Edinburgh this year that we've only been able to do because we have invested in OER as a big part of our business. So if you're on to the next slide. Thank you. So this is a MOOC but this was a MOOC about COVID that we launched during the pandemic quite early on. So it's a free online short course, et cetera. But the, and it got 50,000 learners from 200 countries very quickly because it was about how to work in critical care. So it was actually aimed at medics. So this was not, I mean, this was the public but it was the public who work as medics and nurses and frontline healthcare people. But the reason I mention it is because we made this MOOC out of materials that we already had as part of an online master's course in critical care. And because of the work we had done on those materials originally making sure that all parts of those were open licensed. So there was no third party copyright in those materials. So previously we had used them for a closed course within just the University of Edinburgh, a master's course the MSc in critical care. But because of the work we had done to make sure that all of it could be open licensed and could be shared. It meant that we were able to put this MOOC up on to future learn without having to revisit any of the copyright that was in the materials. And to me, that's what open educational resources is about. That's where you get your return on investment because the time you've spent when you birth the materials, when they're born digital if you spend the time on the licensing then it means that the institution can use and reuse in lots of different ways. That's where I see the return on investment. So this slide explains about obviously we put it on future learn which is the UK MOOC platform. We got 50,000 learners. And of course the thing is we now have the names of all of those learners. And so more recently we've been able to contact them and ask them whether they would like to take the online master's course in critical care. So we can use it as a feeder and hopefully get some of those people. And the geographic reach of that course was considerable. So we've actually managed to attract to our university some people who would not necessarily have found us before. And the video that is linked from the slides which yes, you don't want to watch right now but you can watch because I'll share the slides is a video about the MOOC. But the video is made by McGraw Hill who are a big publishing company. And one of the reasons, well, so they made this nice video about our MOOC because they wanted to be associated with us on the fact that this had been such a great open educational resource. And in fact, they gave open access to some of the readings that we needed from them. So did Elsevier, but McGraw Hill really saw that as an advantage to them to be aligned with our open educational resources MOOC which is not something that publishers always do. Okay, next slide. Thank you. Okay, so this is another part of how we use OER. So we produce a lot of MOOCs at University of Edinburgh and particularly at the moment we are producing MOOCs that align with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. And this is part of the institution's commitment to helping Scotland and more widely meet those goals. And all of these MOOCs are made as open educational resources. So all of the videos that are included in the MOOCs, all of the materials in the MOOCs, obviously on the platforms, they're available open to large groups of people, but the materials in the courses are licensed as OER. And so they're available to share and adapt. So if anybody would like to take any of the materials from any of these courses and use them more locally and make changes to them or teachers want to use them, that's absolutely fine with us. So, and of course, one of the sustainable development goals is around open education. So these are open education resources so that's sustainable development goal for, but delivering so many of the other sustainable development goals. That's another way in which open educational resources bring benefit to the institution. And the next slide. Yeah, so just to say that this is partly about where we make the materials available. So the sustainable global food systems, for instance, all of the materials, we make our MOOCs available in at least two places. So one on the major platform, and we work with FutureLearn, Coursera and edX, but we always make sure that we also make the materials available on our own media hopper platform so that people don't have to go to the MOOC platforms because those MOOC platforms have got different rules and sometimes they have different models where you need to actually subscribe or pay actually now to get onto the MOOC platforms, but we make sure that we keep a copy, we also put all our stuff onto our own platform and we use Kaltura for our media hopper platform. Kaltura is open source and that's also an open educational resource. And we also write about what we're doing on our blogs, which are WordPress, which of course is open source and is also an open educational resource. And the blog post that I've highlighted here in case anybody wants to go and read it is about, this is a blog post by the MOOC production teams reflecting on how they approached the task of making open educational resources to support the UN Sustainable Development Goals, particularly the Sustainable Global Food Systems MOOC because this is one of the ones that they made during lockdown and their production. So the business this team is in is a media production team and they would usually have done most, they are videographers, they're film, they're filmers. They would usually have gone out and about and got lots of footage and done lots of trips and gone to places and filmed things, but because they were locked down they weren't able to do that. But so they had to change their practice so that the promotional materials, particularly the trailers for all of these MOOCs were made reusing other people's materials. And this is what's important to the University of Edinburgh is that we don't just publish our own materials out as open educational resources, but we consume where other people have made their materials available. So we take as well as give. And the very generous gifts that people make when they license their materials openly and they may not know how it's going to be used, but we are a consumer of that. And what it says in this particular blog post is a reflection from one of my learning designers that he was saying that our use of community source stock footage, and he means open educational resources has increased from about 20% to as high as 90%. So basically that meant it was possible for those people to continue to work and complete the tasks that they needed to do during lockdown because of the wider community of open educational resources that we were able to draw upon. So thank you to anybody who licenses their materials as open because we were able to use them as well as licensing our own as open. So that was kind of my headline, which was that we really harness the value of open educational resources when we embed it as part of our business and make sure that all of our materials are licensed as open educational resources so that we can consume our own, consume other peoples and share our own. Thank you. Thank you very much, Melissa, very insightful. And I quite like this idea that what you shared with us is that the return of investment because I'm somehow in the same position in my university and also here in Romania, I'm trying to advocate as much as possible for education. And one of the first questions and the first issues which I faced is that why I put so much money, so much resources, so many staff hours and so much equipment in producing this and then to give it for free for everybody. And I say, yes, that's the point because your return on investment comes later. If you make it right, you can reuse it in different formats, in different modes, to different courses, then other colleagues will be able to use it. And I keep saying, if a community can do it, then we can do it. So how you managed to convince the University of Edinburgh about this and how you plan the strategy for doing this because I know it's not easy. I suppose I have always been very clear that it is just part of the infrastructure for us. I insist that our materials are licensed openly. I think we know that this is not, this is not a large enough part of our content for it to be giving away the crown jewels. It's a very important part of our content that allows us to use and reuse. I mean, this is the thing, if we have to move our materials from platform to platform, which we do do quite a lot as new platforms come or if we want to update materials and add them to other courses, it really the time that you would spend having to go back and figure out where all of the third party stuff came from the first time, that's more work. So if you just design from the start, design for open, which I think somebody, yes, Verena has said, intentionally designing for open. If you start with that position, then the materials are just much higher value and yet you give them away for free, but they're because you can reuse them and we get all kinds of value from them in the institution. Yes, indeed. Thank you very much. I see a lot of questions in the chat. You can also ask questions in the Q&A session we'll take them and we'll try to answer to them later on after also Alistair will do his presentation. So thank you, Melissa, for this. And it's my turn to present now Alistair Krillman, who is a very close friend of Eden. He was also in charge with Eden Map in the past and he's coming from Lino's University in Sweden, where he's working as a specialist in e-learning and he's a leader on open course of university teachers and works quite a lot on building and inspiring people how to use open educational resources. And he's a committee member also of the Swedish Network for IT in higher education and has a very good blog, which I'm pretty sure everybody reads and accesses corridor of uncertainty and he's very active also on Twitter, as well as Melissa and Steven. I need to say this is a highly active Twitter group which we have around here. So Alistair, please. Okay, thanks Diane. Yes, it's a quick sweep here and I wish I could have seen the Melissa's and Steven's before I might have changed the way I approach this but I'm gonna be able, you could say I'm a little bit negative here but I'm sort of trying to show that we need, we still have a long way to go before so the open education will save the world. Yeah, hi Melissa from an old graduate of Edinburgh University back in the Ice Age when dinosaurs were on the earth that was 1980. So I remember it well. Anyway, there we are joining the dots. Why do I say that? Well, let me just get the slide to move forward which there it goes. Yeah, I think OER has got a lot of dots at the moment but we're not so good at joining them together. There's a lot of initiatives going on there's a lot of good work going on but it's not being harvested. It's not being sort of, we're not joining. So that's one thing I'm talking about. Yes, we have enormous potential for access, inclusion, flexibility what I think Melissa was showing there there's enormous potential in this and it's being used. I'm very impressed at the, how Edinburgh University and very envious about how they're working there. It's part of the system, it's wonderful. We're a long way from that in Sweden, I would say. We have a global community. We have all of you are part of that. You're all enthusiasts and interested in open education and various forms of that. We've got licenses, we've got repositories, practice policies, research, we've got a lot of it. All the dots are there. We've got lessons from above, there are more dots. I mean, there's big organizations where we're getting pressure coming from the likes of UNESCO, European Commission and so on. So what's the problem? During the pandemic, we have had an explosion, an avalanche, whatever word you want to use that sounds impressive, resources all over the place. In a way, we've almost drowned in them. I've almost been scared to look each day because someone else has produced an enormous resource guide to teach him online or learning online with guides and videos, you name it. And you felt sort of, oh my goodness, I better do something myself. We've been sharing via social networks, fantastically creative Facebook groups amongst others in Sweden where we've had teachers from different institutions sharing their work, sharing ideas, discussing with each other in an open climate that was just not there before. That has happened during the pandemic. It's been a catalyst to a more sharing community at least here. However, it's been very spontaneous, very uncoordinated. Again, the dots are not being connected. How do we move up a level with all this? Things to be resolved, we're an awful long way from mainstream but maybe we don't want to be. Who knows? Do we really want to save the world with OER and open OEP and so on? Or should we focus on those who already know it, use it and want to develop? It's still very hard to find relevant resources. I've meet lots of teachers who say, that sounds great with OER but I can't find anything. And what I do find is irrelevant or I can't use it. It would take so much work to redesign it that I can take something off the shelf commercially. The commercial resources are convenient. So that's what we use and we're used to using them. They're always there, we've got licenses to use them. It's just too much hard work with OER. You can object to that but I think a lot of people, they say that's a problem for them. There's also an even linguistic coverage. There is a massive shortage of OERs in Swedish because the circle hasn't really started. Tons in English but many languages don't have very much OERs even if you wanted them. And nobody's starting because nobody does it and because it's a circle there. So I think you might recognize that. We also have the problem that most people who really need open education don't know it exists and can't access it. We have enormous amount of the population of the world who have no internet access. They have no electricity. They don't have running water. There are enormous potential here but they don't know it exists and they are unable to get at it. And that are we creating resources for those who already are privileged anyway? How far is this, you know, dropping down, you know, going down into helping real social inequalities? It is in many cases but I think we've still got a long way to go. And there are two sides of open nowadays before I get into the darker stuff. Two sides of open. You have an open space, a park. On a bright sunny day, you can have a barbecue. You can play ball. You can run around. You can play with your children. But would you do that when it gets dark? The wide open space has a darker side where it's threatening. It's not a place you want to be at night. You don't know who's in the shadows. You don't know what's going on. And so in a way, a lot of people see openness as a little bit like that. It can be very positive but it can also be very dangerous. And that's why we need to look at layers of openness. We need to sort of find the level of openness you want to work on in this particular environment. In some courses, you cannot be open. It's just not possible. It is very dangerous to be open, in fact, and to go public. I'll take up that in a second. Other times you can be completely public and completely open. But we have to be able to negotiate for each situation which level of openness we want to adopt and which is appropriate with the students and the subject we're working with. And then of course, this is from Audrey Waters. Maybe the questions are unending. What in the earth do we mean by open? It is a very, it's a dangerous word. We talk about open washing as we do with green washing. There's a lot of things that seem open but aren't open. How open are MOOCs nowadays? You know that one. But I mean, a lot of these questions are coming from teachers. And what do we mean really? And there are many, many interpretations. There's no time to go in for all that. The barriers are numerous and at the risk of kicking in open doors. Yeah, there's a fear and safety aspect. And that's more true nowadays than ever before. There are many teachers who work with subjects that they can't afford to be open because if you're open, the trolls come in. And there are teachers working in fields where there are death threats. There is net hate. And being open opens you up to attack. There is fear of plagiarism. There is fear of being misrepresented, of being re-edited and then presented saying something you never really meant. Many see a loss of prestige and that by giving things away, they will lose somehow their status as teachers. I'm not sure about that, but it's a fear that I meet quite often. The perceptions of quality is another matter that is this good quality. Can we trust this resource? Of course, there are good arguments about against that and saying how it does, it actually enhances quality. But many teachers are worried and learners are worried that something I've found that's open, can I trust it? How do I know it's good? It's very time consuming to work with open resources. It's confusing to understand the licensing and what the ins and outs of Creative Commons licenses of creating metadata and so on. And that means there's technological expertise. You need somebody to help you if you're gonna create a repository or put it into the repository correctly. And the new phenomenon that's not from this source that I cite at the bottom, political pressure. Many countries in the world are reverting to rather authoritarian rule and they are getting involved in what schools and universities should and should not teach and are beginning to interfere in what is taught and how it is taught. And that is severely restricting openness in ways we had never thought possible. So from resources to practice, we need built-in reusability and that came up in the chat just a few minutes ago. We need to actually build that into the resources so that they can be reused and that they are valid for other purposes. Too much resource, too many resources are only one-offs and they can only be used by that teacher at that time and they're useless to anyone else. Building in metadata, so it's searchable, there's still an awful lot of resources being produced with virtually no metadata. No one can find this and no one can link it with anything else. And that means we need people or organizations who can curate these collections and make them searchable and make them link to other related materials. Licensing is the creative common system, the best system for licensing open content. I'm not sure. We have a lot of teachers who produce them with open licenses, but they choose non-derivative as a condition because they don't want their videos tampered with and they're afraid of that. We need institutional commitment, which you have at Edinburgh, but it's not present at many universities. And I think really we need to be looking more at open pedagogy than open resources because let's share practice rather than resources because that was the hit during the pandemic. Teachers were sharing, how do I teach to this bit? How do I teach to this sort of session? How do we, yeah. How do, that I think is something we need to develop. Open sharing the way we do things rather than the content. And finally, a little quote from Björk, which says a lot, I think, a little bit about Scandinavia as well, but are we trying to organize freedom? If we have openness, maybe we should just let it, let's be open, let's be open in our own ways. And should we try to frame it into some kind of organization? Are we being a little bit over ambitious here? And with that, I will hopefully within the timescale stop sharing. Yes, thank you very much. You've done very well and I quite like that even that you are such a strong advocate of open education and open educational resources. You took the devil side here and you raised the note of caution. So, and thank you very much for doing this. I know from the past when I needed to be on an Oxford debate on the side of not liking online education, that it's not that easy when you believe in something to be able to say convincingly, what are the issues which we face? And I quite liked so much the idea what you said that those who don't need mostly the OS they don't know they exist. What we can do for that? Obviously we run webinars and so on, but basically do we really reach the grassroots of educators, those which are the bottom line of not? It's very difficult, but there are signs. I mean, I saw an interesting, an experiment where they had solar powered servers that the mini servers that they loaded up with open educational resources and took out to schools. It was in, I think it was in Kenya, but I might be wrong or Uganda. And they took them out to rural schools where they didn't have electricity and they didn't have internet. And by using digital devices with Wi-Fi, a local Wi-Fi they could all access those resources and use the digital resources without electricity because they had solar power and without internet. Is that realistic really? And is that what they need to learn? I don't know, but that's one way where they can be used. I think we can also try to focus on we need low bandwidth solutions in many countries. And an awful lot of OERs are high bandwidth and they are expensive, high definition videos are not going to help them because people can't see them. So that we need to look at low bandwidth solutions. There's nothing wrong with, again, downloadable content. When you have access, download it and then use it. But I think we need to work more with that. Do we need more local on the ground help there, facilitators and people to work with that? Yes, indeed. I think you faced quite a lot of information in the last year and it was so difficult to be able, I mean, for everybody, not necessarily for one of us, how to put this into context and how to be able to really make it deliver. And I quite like that already in the chat, Steven is trying to answer to you Alistair and everybody. And I like a bit of a spark of a debate. But we prepare a poll for those which are now following us in Zoom and I'll read out the questions also for those who are following us on YouTube and you can answer just by numbers if you would like. So the question one is, are you using or used open educational resources in your learning or your teaching? And if yes, how? And you can answer with no and then yes at bibliography, yes as a course, lesson or modules, yes as activities, yes as to develop new skills, yes and I'm a creator and a co-creator and I'm reusing OS. Obviously you can answer to all of them or to majority of them because it's a multiple choice question. And as I said, those who are following us on YouTube, you can say how you are using OS if you are using them. The question number two is what do you consider is the main problem in adopting OS? Again, a multiple choice, not enough information and no training for how to use a creator OS and do not know if my resource is aware. I face also this quite often sometimes and do not know where and whom to share and obviously licensing. And three, do you consider open educational solution and OS as open educational resources and practices as part of the education ecosystem? And the answers are no, not really. It is difficult, maybe, yes, but it's challenging and yes, it is our best solution. I will just leave for another one minute the poll open in Zoom and please everyone who can please answer to this. And I would like just to highlight one or two comments and questions and especially one from YouTube is coming from Albert Schramm from the University of Maryland who very well pointed out one of our core beliefs that you need to design learning resources intentionally from the beginning to be open. And this is one of the things which we need to look into all the time when we are thinking as educators or as technology developers or instructional designer how we are doing the things. And it's not easy, but it's doable and we can all do it. And he's also mentioning that he's University is one of the doing a lot of for us and using them in their online camps. And I will close the poll very soon and I will kindly ask the Eden Secretariat I thank very much for supporting us to pick up all of these websites which Steven, Melissa and Alistair have been sharing on chat and to post it also on YouTube for our watchers and viewers there. So I'm ending the poll and let's see the results and I invite each of you to pick one question from the three speakers and comment on the results. Steven, would you like to go for the first one or Melissa or Alistair who wants to go to the first result? You'll see it now in the screen. So I answered, I'm a creator, co-creator, we're using OERs and I think that's, well, it's clearly the majority but really I don't think that there's any best answer there. I think any use of OERs, whether you're creating them, using them, whatever is a good use. It doesn't have to be in a course, it doesn't have to be in a program. I watch a lot of free videos on YouTube just because I'm interested in the subject and it's not part of a formal education and it usually falls out of our discussions about OERs but boy, it sure is widely used. Okay, question number two, Melissa maybe. Yes, I think I actually struggled with this because I don't know what the main problem in doing it is because we try very hard to make, to lower the barrier and in all the institutions that I've worked in and I don't know whether this helps. Alastair mentioned the fear that some people have when they are teachers that they will lose their status or they'll lose their materials. I mean, I've worked at University of Edinburgh and University of Oxford and University of Leeds and those are all high status institutions where high status colleagues and very famous lecturers all take part in publishing some of their materials as open educational resources and in fact, Edinburgh and Oxford are two of the largest providers of open educational resources in the UK. So if it helps anybody to be able to say that other people do it, please, I'll happy to give examples. But I think the question about whether it's too difficult in the licensing and copyright is a good question. And actually it's because the way I do it at the institutions where I work, I make sure there is a support service and the support service offers training about the licensing and about how to create and use. So I think it's all very well, you asked me earlier how you get a university to do it. Well, partly I just make sure that my university is doing it but I have a policy and the policy is supported by a service and the service includes people who can give you advice and help. And that means that any colleague who wants to know or has a question or isn't sure if they're allowed to or thinks it might be too difficult has a person that they can talk to. And we run regular training on creative commons licensing explaining all of the different options. And mostly it's about having a conversation with colleagues about what would you be comfortable with, what would you not be comfortable with this much happening, this kind of things happening to your materials, et cetera, et cetera. And most people choose the most open licenses at the end of those conversations. And a question that's always worth asking them when they're doing this training is, where do you use materials from other places and what kinds of things do you find challenging about that? And so you manage to unpick all kinds of crazy ideas about how if something is public, that's the same as open so you can just use it. And if it's on the web, you can just take that. And if you've bought the book, you can just scan the images of the diagram and use it in your teaching. So there's the actual discussion about open educational resources actually ends up unpicking a whole bunch of stuff where a lot of faculty have really crazy ideas about how copyright works in general. So I would say that that again is a good investment for a university to make in having training about copyright. And if it's training about open educational resources all the better, if you're not offering training about copyright, you've got some crazy activity going on behind the scenes. Yes, I can really go there with you if I can. Let's go for question number three before commenting extra more, Alastair, please. Oh, that's it, I'm trying to answer what's been coming up just now. I mean, yes, I'm sort of arguing a little bit against some of my own beliefs at this time, but it's because I hear these arguments from teachers all the time. And one experience I have is that when we've got legal experts to come in and talk about copyright issues, we all come away more confused than we ever were in the beginning and terrified that we're not allowed to do anything. So sometimes it depends which legal experts you invite in and you're never quite sure until you've actually heard them what angle they're going to have. So it hasn't actually helped having that type of training. We've maybe picked the wrong people, but it's been the teachers have gone away saying, I'm not doing anything, I'm just locking down. So it's been actually the opposite effect. That, I think the question three about being sort of part of a solution, I think yes and no, I don't think it's not the ultimate answer to everything. It is part of many solutions. There is no one, openness is one aspect which is very important in education. But not everything has to be open, not everything should be open. And we have to recognize that there are different layers of openness and we have to be able to negotiate them. And I think the training that we need is to understand these different states. And instead of thinking that just simple openness will solve our problems just by putting, I used to think, if you'd asked me five years ago, maybe I was more on that side. I was super enthusiastic. I'm now a little bit more worried about the way technology is taking us. Yes, I think sometimes a note of caution is something which we all need. And sometimes it's very good to have somebody who will tell you, okay, just be careful here or pay attention to that and so on. Thank you for that. Yes, Alastair, do you want to say something? Another point is that I think when Melissa was talking, you were talking about the sort of high status aspect. I think what you find is that the more secure people are in their position, maybe the easier it is for them to be open. And many of the people who are worried about openness and not sure about sharing anything are the adjuncts and the people who are on six-month contracts and don't know where they'll be in six months time. And they're a bit cautious in sharing things that they may need to use somewhere. They have fears about that. And they're not sure about the value of them sharing whatever they create just now. And there may be a bit of employment insecurity there. Yeah, that might be a case. And I would like to move up tiny bit now the discussions and to bring something which I saw in the chat. I think coming from Conchetta, Conchetta Artino if I'm right, about student co-creators, which is a subject which is very dear to me. We've been adopting this for many, many years in my university, Polytechnic University of Timshara and I am a big fan of involving students as co-creators and making the learning assignments anything of the activities and projects which they want to do as much as possible open and as much as possible reusable for the future generations or for other students or in other courses. And Melissa pointed out very well here in the chat, I'm just trying to pick up something that they're using student interns as open interns. And I think that's a brilliant idea. And I think that's also hardness of this collective intelligence and empower the students on really feeling that they are part of the educational system and they produce value for their university. Steven, you pointed out quite a lot of debates and trying to answer to some of Alistair's, how to say ideas, not necessarily his but the note of caution which he was trying to bring up and so on. And I quite like the idea that you pointed out that what success looks like. How do you define success in education or in open education, Steven? Yeah. And I think this is an important point because often the use of open educational resources and sharing a collaboration generally to bring us back to the main theme of the webinar the success of this is depicted very much from an institutional point of view. And to be quite honest, I don't care one wit about the institutional point of view because the whole purpose of this isn't to make institutions better or more profitable or to create return on investment. And it isn't in order to make professors more comfortable or more secure in their position. The whole purpose of all of this is to enable individuals and community to learn. And a lot of the criticisms that Alistair has come up with not just today, but in his columns over the months and perhaps even extending to years are criticisms of the way open educational resources and open learning roll out. And these problems come up from my perspective as I read this, these problems are created by the institutions rather than the concept of openness in general. And I much prefer a, if you will, more free and easy attitude about this. And it begins with the very concept of who produces OERs, who produces open resources or open learning generally and what is it for? And I think anyone can produce an open resource and everyone should feel encouraged to do so and nobody should feel required to do so. And if we get these things out of the way, so like for example, don't make it an assignment, right? Or don't make it a requirement that somebody shares something openly because then you run into all kinds of problems. But don't make it a requirement that they not share, right? And when you make something, a requirement that you not share this is, again, it almost always comes from this institutional perspective. I put in the chat, for example, and I've run across this many times, I'm looking for my comments so I can read it precisely. It was about lawyers, I can't find it. Oh, there it is. Don't ask the lawyers what is legal. They will say nothing is legal because that's the only way to avoid risk. And that's a really important thing to understand the perception of risk on the part of an institution which may have millions or hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank account is very different from risk as it applies to an individual. And even the perception of fair use is very different. A person just using some content for something that they're sharing, not making any money, not making a production out of it or an institutional basis out of it. They've got much wider reign than an institution that charges tuition, that restricts admission to classes and is making resources that maybe they share them but very often you have to pay tuition to someone in order to see them. You know, your scope is much narrower. So I think let's talk about open learning without talking about the institutions and see what we get. And then let's talk about the institutions as dealing with the special cases where additional support is required or some organization is required. You know, this idea that all of our learning has to be sliced and diced and flaked and formed and put out there by an institution is a ridiculous idea. And we have the technology now that we don't need most of what the institution provides us with. Yes, somehow I agree with you that learning happens anywhere and we learn for the entire of our life and either it's structural, not structural, informal or not formal, learning is good and it should happen and as much as possible being open learning. Obviously, when you are in an institution you don't really have that much freedom and it's not always easy. And as Alissa pointed out- But you do have freedom, stop saying that. You have lots of freedom, you have tons of freedom, you just don't use it. I mean- Yes, we have the freedom of going outside. We work for the government, right? If any kind of organization would say you don't have freedom, it's the government. But in fact, I have wide latitude if I'm not scared to use the freedoms that I actually have. So right off the bat, don't cultivate this climate of fear and you don't have freedom to do things. You are citizens in a free country. All of you, you do have freedoms. Yes, I need to say I agree with you up to a point, up to a point of work in contracts and the things which are in the regulations of some of the work in contracts. But as I fully agree with you that you can always find a way and I'm there. I was in a very tied up institution in the past and I was in a very low rank position and I founded a way to share the resources and the things outside and nobody questioned me but I haven't used the name of the university the one I was doing it. I only use my name and that's it. And they couldn't argue with that. So that's probably the way for everybody. I would like a tiny bit. That's what I did. Yes, I know. I would like to discuss something about the future because the entire idea of this series of webinars and of this webinar is what do we want to do for the future? How we reimagine the next education level all the times after a crisis or after something happened the things change. It has been a shift. Is it a major shift? Is it a paradigm shift? Do you really think that the universities and the schools will change but basically we look at higher education system here? Quite a lot of the higher education and very large and well-known universities have built up think tanks or have done external evaluation come with new strategies and trying to reshape their education system. What do you see the role of open education into that? Alistair, let's see. Oh, I was waiting for Melissa there but I'll make it brief and I'll be interested to hear her comment because she's doing much more with it. I think I don't think we should be bothered about so much how open it all is. I think the focus is on community and the focus is learning in communities and that we need to give our students that exposure to learning in communities and sharing with each other and seeing what level of openness we gain out of that. I think the key is sharing pedagogies of openness without being too worried about which license we're gonna put on it or which repository we're gonna put on it. The main thing is getting collaboration as a way of learning would be a nice angle to take but as in everything about the future who knows anything can happen. And that's the beauty of future but let's try to build it up. Melissa, what is University of Edinburgh planning or strategy already thinking? Well, I do disagree. I don't think community and sharing and open are the same as open educational resources. I do think it's about licensing and I think we have to have rigor around that because I think just referring to open education pedagogy as being sharing ideas about how we teach and we should be doing that but that's not what open licensing is about or what open education resources are about and I think that's open washing when people think that just anything that's shared or anything that's public or that as long as we talk about things we're doing open education that's where everybody gets very confused. I do take quite a hard line on the fact that it's not an open educational resource unless it is openly licensed to be reused and so I do think that the open educational resource licensing is the absolute key the infrastructure that we need to continue to support and I support that in every aspect of my university. So instead of just focusing on just one thing I make sure that we have a good chunk of our media open licensed. I make sure that a good chunk of our online courses are open licensed. I make sure that it is in the curriculum and we do set it as assignments and we do have a Wikimedia in residence and he does work with people all across the curriculum doing assignments in classes and the students who get involved in those open educational resources activities with the Wikimedia in residence for instance are doing kind of activity that is unlike and transformational for them when they write articles for Wikipedia and then watch how those articles are engaged with by the public. And then we have a dozen university courses where they are doing Wikipedia activities as assessed work in the curriculum and we have whole courses where the students make OERs. So for instance, we have a group of there's a module in Geosciences where the whole module is to create learning materials for schools and from the moment that they start the task of doing making the learning materials they do it from an open design perspective. We teach them about the kind of licenses that they're going to need to use and where they're going to need to source all of the diagrams or they're going to need to draw them themselves and all of those things and their projects result in packets of learning materials that are because the other thing we teach them about is the Scottish school curriculum and so the university students create packets of open educational resources that can immediately be used by teachers in the Scottish school curriculum. And then we put those into places where we know that teachers in Scotland are looking for learning resources. So again, I don't think you have to make repositories. I think what you have to do is figure out where the audience for your open educational resources is already looking and make sure that you put your materials there. So in terms of strategy, I like to try to do all kinds of things. One of the things that is new for us at the moment is we're making an open textbook and we're making that it's fundamentals of music theory and we are employing students to help to do that. We're making it from materials that we already had as part of a MOOC and updating them and turning them into an open textbook. And again, those students are learning not only about open educational resources and Creative Commons licensing, but the first task was to go and research all of the different open book platforms so that they could understand what the difference between those were and then make a choice as to where they wanted to host that book. So I really think that we have to take a strategy across the institution to think about open educational resources, but it does need some focus and rigor so that it doesn't just become teaching and everything that everybody just does and just talking about it because I don't think that's the same thing at all. Yes, in a way I agree with you and I have a very specific question just to continue this idea. For the next academic year, for example, what is the main strategy? What's the focus of obviously in the idea of open of the University of Edinburgh? Well, we're continuing with all of the things that we normally do. We continue to produce MOOCs. We continue to produce online courses. We're getting into open textbooks. We continue to have a Wikimedia and in residence. I don't know, that's the wonderful thing about open educational resources is quite often new things grow up. It's an incredibly creative area to be in. Last year we spent a lot of time on witches, the witches of Scotland. This year we have a wiki sorcerer working with us and that we're really looking at getting stuff from our archives and collections out onto wiki source. So I don't know if that answers your questions, but we will continue to do all the things that we do. We have hundreds of thousands of open educational resources published from the University of Edinburgh on our platforms. I'll put the link in where people can see some of them, but the numbers of Edinburgh colleagues who are choosing the Creative Commons license is increasing all the time. Yes, indeed. And I think one of the major things which universities and also higher education institutions and large organizations can do exactly like Eden is thinking, being perceived as them. If you start doing something, keep doing it and keep enhancing and doing it better and better all the time and learning from what you've done in the past. The future of education, of higher education, how do you see it, Steven? So I think the first thing that's going to happen is everybody is going to try to go back to normal as soon as possible. That's my prediction and I'm standing with it. I think maybe in the fall, perhaps if it's the fall when the pandemic is officially over, they'll say, we're all going back to normal. It's all going to be the way it was, because we loved that. And there will be a significant pushback and reaction against the stuff that we've been doing during the pandemic to put learning online, to host Zoom calls already. There's this whole Zoom fatigue thing. People have forgotten about meeting fatigue because they're having Zoom fatigue. Or traveling fatigue. Yeah, well, you see, this is what's going to happen, right? Everybody will push back, will have in-person conferences, in-person events, in-person classes, and then some time will go by and people will realize, wait a sec, this wasn't so great. I had to travel all day on three separate flights to give this half hour presentation and I didn't even get a full half hour. Why did I do that? Or, you know, we all had to come into the central office for this staff meeting where the managers just stood there and lectured to us for an hour, you know, and pick your own scenario, right? So I think gradually we'll say, well, why don't we go back to having these meetings online? Why don't we hire a person who works remotely? Why don't we have the option to have classes online instead of in-person, you know, for any of our classes? And we'll, you know, what will not go away? You know, it's not the practices and things that we did in a hurry during the pandemic. It's our experience of using those and actually getting kind of used to them after a year and then going back and that comparison is gonna be the really important thing. I think that's quite an interesting perspective, Steven. And I would like to challenge you on that, but I don't think that I have enough argument at this moment. I really hope probably this is an internal belief which I have that people will learn from the lessons and will try to do it better. And as we approach the end now, I would like just for one word, one single word, each of you to say what do you expect in the education in the future? One single word, please. Who wants to be the first? I want to work. Okay, Steven, to work. Free learning. Melissa. Quality. Alistair. Oh goodness, I'm stuck. Change. I really hope that with Eden and being online together, we will be able to build up changeable and quality and free learning in the near future. Thank you everyone for watching. Please join our next Eden webinar on Thursday, the May 13th, who is a webinar doing together with the Project Childs Day. And our next online together webinar with the same topic about time to change, but looking into pedagogical change and the teaching practice who is going to be led and moderated by Mark Brown is going to be on the 25th of May. I need to thank very, very much our speakers and presenters today. Melissa Hayton, Steven Downs, and Alistair Krillman. And please, everybody stay safe where you are and keep learning, keep being open, keep using and creating open educational resources, practices and tools and join us in the next Eden, a conference, Eden webinar. And I would like to take a photo, everybody, so have a look into the camera, nicely and smile. This is going to be public. And now, thank you. And this is the end. Thank you, everyone. You will be able to find the recording online on YouTube and also on Facebook and Twitter. See you next week. All the best. Bye, everyone.