 I'm sure that Sarah has a chance to get to bed. She's joining us from Australia. Narenth is joining us from South Africa and Maha from Egypt. And as you can see from the map, we've got a number of people from all over the world and some of them even from my home state in the US. So in starting, I just want to welcome everyone to this session, which is the journey to social justice and openness and open and distance and e-learning. I'm very excited about this session. We've got a fabulous group of speakers who will be presenting today. And so I would like to start with Narenth Bejnat, who is going to be talking about social justice and open universities. Narenth is CEO of the Council of Higher Education in South Africa. And prior to this, he was Pro Vice Chancellor of the University of South Africa. As PVC at UNICEF, University of South Africa, he drove the digitalization OER strategies of the university. Narenth holds a master's degree from Durham University and a doctorate from the University of the Western Cate. Narenth has extensive experience in ODL, higher education policy, ICTs in higher education, business intelligence, planning, and quality insurance. He serves on the Commonwealth of Learning Board and is currently Audit Committee Chairperson as well as Deputy Chair of the Board. He's a member of the Academy of Science in South Africa. And in 2008, he was appointed a fellow at St. Edmunds College, Cambridge University, and simultaneously a research professor at OUUK. Narenth, I'm going to hand the floor over to you so you can start with your presentation. Thank you very much, Lisa. And hello, everyone. And a special hello to the co-presenters. And I want to just say what a pleasure it is to be part of this panel and also of this conversation. And I'm so pleased that so many have signed up for it. A special thanks to Lisa for initiating this project and for bringing us all together. It's fantastic. Now, my vantage point is that of policy, planning, and regulation of the systems level in South Africa. And as Lisa has pointed out, I've also had quite extensive experience in higher education, leadership, and management. And this is at the largest university on the continent, I think, UNISA, which has currently in the region of about 400,000 students. It's the largest institution in the country, among 26 publicly funded institutions. So the challenges of the global south, which are integral to the social justice imperative, are those of poverty and underdevelopment, small and underdeveloped economies, legacies of colonialism, which post-colonial governments in most instances have not been able to shake off. And they find expression or manifest in underdevelopment, back loads and infrastructure, general social inequality, and inequality in access to opportunities, quite pervasive poverty, and limited opportunities overall. And this is in spite of several decades of self-determination. So understandably, then, the logic behind development policy in many contexts rests on the premise that if opportunities for post-school education and training are increased and expanded and participation is widened, that the results will be positive and that they will manifest in enhanced skills, deeper democratic participation, the accumulation of cultural capital, increased economic activity, and greater prosperity of land, and thereby achieving greater social justice. So that's the logic behind this. Now I want to look a little at what the seduction behind ODL is a little more closely. So the expansion of post-school education and training systems is integral to development policy, generally in the global south, for the reasons that are just as fast. So ODL promises to overcome several developmental hurdles. Firstly, that universities and other post-school education and training institutions are very expensive to set up and to sustain. So it is understandable that open distance learning has been very attractive as a policy option, promising increased access at low unit costs. The second is that in large countries in the global south, populations are generally dispersed over quite big geographical distances, often rural, with very little infrastructure. But the attraction of open distance learning to reach students where they are without imposing a huge cost burden on the state and costs to often poor citizens. The third is that the, or rather the trouble is that the lower the resource base of the state, often the more rudimentary the technologies that are available, the infrastructure, as well as learning resources. And other consequences of large numbers with low units of resources, that there are fewer assessment opportunities, little mediation of learning, little interaction with other learners, and even with the institution. So generally, the quality of learning and ultimately the learning outcomes are deeply affected. And finally, these are all exacerbated by poor school experiences, where there's little cultural capital, which is the task of knowledge, which is generally taken for granted for successful university studies. Now, while we, sorry, while the use of emerging and new technologies have progressed in the developed world, there is often an enormous lag in the global south due to just an absence of resourcing or limited capital infrastructure backlogs generally because of the difference between the needs and the available resources to meet those. There are capacity issues as well. There's predatory and often collusive pricing of services that is a corollary of government in most of the developing world and lots of corruption. So that causes a loss of public resources through corruption. And we see it, it's a pervasive problem on the continent, and it's a particularly big problem in South Africa, which we tend to deal with at the level of state level. So while technology is an enabler, it can also be an alienator. So one of the major losses through open distance learning is having the society of other learners learning with and from each other. And of course, the motivation that comes from peer pressure in the learning process. And the digital era, of course, has ameliorated many of the limitations of older technology. But they are still huge accessibility infrastructure and affordability barriers. Now, I shift a little to the context where social justice imperative is strong. And this is often accompanied by material and other conditions which can defer the barriers. So the zeal with which the promise of open distance learning has been taken up often losses over the very real shortcomings and the barriers to success. And first among these is that those from the margins of society who are often poor, have low cultural capital, have experienced poor schooling, are technology poor, have little or costly access to the internet, often accompanied by studying through a medium which is a second or third language medium in the university, generally have a greater need for learning support and mediation rather than less. And paradoxically, they are required to undertake more self-managed learning and independent learning, which even students are coming from quite solidly middle class background struggle to perform in contact institutions. So that's Achilles' heel, I think, of open distance learning. He said, without the contact or with reduced contact, and in the global South, not having made strides in harnessing technology to create virtual learning environments which are the vehicle for learning support, accompanied by a diverse range of resources to support learning and cater for individual needs. So that's a big hill for us to plan. Lisa warned me when I've got two minutes left, please. This scenario that I've just sketched then is well illustrated in the South African context. So one third of the publicly funded cohort, which I've mentioned earlier in this council, just under 400,000 students are enrolled in our dedicated distance learning institution. And the recruits are generally the poor and the working class, those in rural area. So generally the marginalized in society, generally those who've come through really poor schooling and generally in need of the most learning support and receiving the least. And of course, political issues related to access to resources and access to funding are persistent issues and they've been destabilizing our institutions at least since 2015. And even though that challenge has been ameliorated, but it remains a constant threat and disrupts the academic program, creating an even bigger problem. So you've got students come with low knowledge base and with limited cultural capital, also then disrupting their learning. So ending up with even less accumulated learning capital to enable their success in later years. So it just compounds the problem. And then what it manifests in is low corporate rates and huge dropout rates, low pass rates. And that's pervasive in the system, but particularly for the often distance learning position. Now, it is clear that we must be more critical of the assumptions and premises on which we advocate often distance learning as a solution, especially in the global South. I know it's not of too much interest in concern perhaps for Europe, but the global South makes up well over three billion of the world's population. So any failure is gonna have an impact worldwide and the world economy and movement of people and so on. So I do believe it is everyone's challenge and everyone's problem to deal with. But the heart of it is that without the required investments in infrastructure, capacity development, the learning resource development, or the sharing of all of these, we may well be raising false hope and best, but worst, reducing legions of graduates who are not properly equipped for the 21st century world of work for the digital age, for entrepreneurship, and for leading fulfilled lives, because that's one of the key outcome from higher education as well. So in the global South, the rhetoric that drives the social justice agenda is that if we provide more education, there will be greater social justice. And my argument is that that is a simplistic equation. So it doesn't necessarily flow in this progressive logic that with more participation, there will be more skilled and successful graduates equipped for success and productive work, therefore more prosperity leading to greater social justice, because if you follow the logic and deconstruct it, that's what it can be distilled into. What I'm arguing is that we must look at the enabling conditions for success in open distance learning and in developing contexts in particular, much of the populace still has to benefit from basic technology related to water, sanitation, housing, and electrification, for example. And that certainly is so in our context in South Africa. Food security is a big problem as is nutritional diets. Infrastructure, backlogs, or unevenness of provision pose huge barriers to access to low cost digital technology infrastructure. And the resources available to the state are either limited or being looted or being competed for by other social development priorities. So these are quite intractable problems, I'm sure you'll agree with me. So the recent discourse on the forces of change that affect national development prospects, universities and business more generally is that of the Port Industrial Revolution. So some of the discourses of the policy level, what changes in the economy needs for skills and capacities, opportunities for business and employment, that the state need to develop and implement policy for is a big question. For universities, the big questions are, what does the Port Industrial Revolution passage for the future world of work and the kinds of qualifications and skills required for the workplace of the future? As a related question is, what kinds of employment are on the way out? And what new ones are emerging or still anticipated emerging in the future that universities need to make planning decisions about now so that when the need arises that the provision is already there. The general question is, what will this all signify for those caught up in old technologies who have not yet benefited from the first and second industrial revolutions, let alone the third? Let's not even talk about the fourth because there's so much to catch up on in the global south. So many people captive to really ancient technologies, first industrial revolution related technology that the hill to climb is quite steep in order to achieve social justice. So let me conclude then with a few other observations or actually related to global argument. So firstly is that open distance learning providers in the context of the Port Industrial Revolution have greater challenges to pursue social justice and that's really the point we just made growing with growing populations and declining employment opportunities for the lower skilled. So that's a particular structural problem in most of our context that large numbers of the workforce are low skilled or semi skilled or unskilled. So let's not even begin to contemplate what it will take to bring all of them up to speed to benefit from the Port Industrial Revolution. The second is that attention also needs to be paid to the likelihood that vast numbers of highly and complexly skilled graduates or the industrial Port Industrial Revolution can be produced in time to gain a comparative advantage. There's this constant divide between the developed world and the global south and the constantly in the global south playing catch up and never quite getting there. Because as soon as we get to a point where we think we've caught up the frontiers of development in the science, in technology and so on have moved way beyond. So it's constantly out of reach. The third is that, I can't understand my writing now for the global south, the key imperative is to look critically at what the barriers to success are and make the necessary investments in infrastructure capacity, development of learning resources, harvesting what is freely available as early art and ameliorating the systemic inefficiency among others. So that we push things across a very wide front. The fourth is that quality assurance is a very powerful tool to bring institutional systems, processes, modes of delivery and all facets of programs and the sharp scrutiny so that the required improvements may be effective. The fifth is that we must appreciate that low cost can mean cheap and ultimately valueless post-school education and change and we must guard against that. And then the very final point is that the pursuit of social justice done with all good intentions must not be allowed to result in swelling the ranks of the unemployed, the underemployed and the unemployable. Thanks. Indeed. Wonderful. Thank you Nan for your really insightful presentation. We've had quite a bit of activity in the chat and I'd like to ask you some of the questions that have popped up there. First question is from Anna Christina who was in a conversation with Maha but I thought you might wanna address this question as well. With the stress on paper qualifications and rejection of online qualifications in countries and here I'm assuming she means in the south or that are challenged by social justice which actually do have e-learning. How can this be changed that we don't stress as much on paper qualifications rejection of online qualifications? I'm sorry, I didn't fully grasp the question. I need you to repeat it. Okay. Anna Christina has clarified it further. Paper qualifications and rejection of online qualifications is being rejected in the global south in general. How do we change this? Sorry, paper qualifications are being rejected. I think you're saying for online. I think paper qualifications Anna Christina maybe you want to clarify that and Naranj you could just... I think she means that if you get an online degree in some global south countries like Arab countries these are not acceptable if we are not considered equivalent to a fixed degree. Yeah, I think that that is largely a matter of perception and it's also the lag in the cultural change that is taking place and has probably also already taking place in the developer but it's only a matter of time before that changes. Again, the South African context, for example, five or 10 years ago it would be unthinkable that people would do undertake a qualification online. And now I think that it's quite acceptable and the conversations that are happening at the moment about how can you select options from various different jurisdictions different possibilities for learning and craft that into a degree program. And even at the regulatory level where I work you're having the force to give attention to that making it possible for joint degrees and for fragments or elements of degrees taking from different institutions all over the world and crafting together a degree program. A lot of training for the workplace is now done online and that's becoming increasingly acceptable even as recently as five to 10 years ago that would be in a very difficult project for self to the public. So remember it's about how much of the population has been immersed in digital technology from the time that they have been born or grown up. Now we have a whole generation of youth who are coming into our institutions who have known nothing else but digital technology and with all the abundance of resources that come with it. So that has changed. I mean the student demographics have changed automatically. So I do believe that and that's for all contexts no matter what they are that is only a matter of time before they catch up because you can't stop or slow down the spread of technology. It's just that it's taking longer to get to some areas because of all kinds of barriers some of which I've mentioned. Now in the next question is from Jeanette and then we'll move on to our next speaker. Her question is of her comment many ODL students need nurturing to accommodate or overcome their legacy deficits. How can we harness technology to that end? This applies to any community that has the deficits being discussed. You faded out a bit towards the end. Can you please repeat that again? I didn't fully grasp the question. The question is from Jeanette who said many ODL students need nurturing to accommodate or overcome their legacy deficits. How can we harness technology to that end to help them overcome their legacy deficits? I've got you now. I've got you thank you. So I think the great promise of technology for that is to cater for individual needs. So you may have someone who's struggling with the foundational knowledge and the discipline whose needs are quite different to someone who's struggling with say academic literacy or numeracy who's struggling with some concepts for example. So the beauty of the technological possibilities that we have now is that you can have a whole compendium of learning opportunities catering for perhaps the most common needs and build that over time. So you can build online resources and learning experiences for students that cater for all of these because otherwise if you rely only on the speaking teacher you have to make assumptions about what the needs of the students are. So you're not catering for the individual needs. So students can then select from a menu of possibilities Jeanette and then you know, or they can be directed to the menu of learning opportunities and you keep building that catalog so that anyone having any need ultimately will have that needed rest. And that's really the great potential and possibility of technology. Which I don't think in our context- I just wanted to add that I think it also gives us a great opportunity to link learners to mentors. So I think for me I think the social learning that is so important for people to be able to connect with others to unpack what's happening and talk it through. I think there's just a lot of potential in the social learning even if it's mobile phone connection or just simple connections. But I think the sort of bringing in of study groups and regional groups sometimes you can form those actual face-to-face support groups around a common technology core. And I think for me and the research that I'll talk about later I'm particularly excited about the way in which the technology actually is enabling those sorts of social supports and community-based opportunities as well. And that can also encourage localization of different Indigenous languages and local languages to help unpack materials that might be as we often have bilingual learners. So yeah, I think those are really good moves as well. Absolutely, indeed. Thank you, Sarah. And now I'd now like to move on to our next speaker today who is Mahabali who is an Associate Professor of Practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo. She'll be talking to us today about intentions and realities of social justice and open educational practice and giving us some examples to think about. Mahabali, I'm going to jump here to her biography is a co-founder of VirtuallyConnecting.org and co-facilitator of Equity Unbound. And she has interviewed on the Leaders and Legends of Online Learning podcast and was featured alongside 15 amazing women of the open movement in the Uncommon Women 2018 coloring book. She is an Editor of Hydebred Pedagogy Journal and Editorial Board Member of Teaching in Higher Education, Online Learning Journal, Journal of Pedagogy Development, Learning Media and Technology and International Journal of Education, Technology and Higher Education. She is a learnaholic, right-aholic and passionate, open and connected educator who tweets a lot. You can follow her at atbali underscore maha and she also blogs a lot. And I can highly recommend her blog which you can find at blog.mahabali.me. I will enter that into the chat so that for those of you that are interested you can follow her. Thank you so much, Lisa. Thank you for... Thank you so much, Lisa. Thank you for this introduction. Thank you for organizing this panel and a lot of respect for bringing all global South people on this panel. That's an amazing feat. And thank you so much, Naran, for the... Now I have to follow you and you've already been talking a lot about the history of the kinds of intentions of social justice that don't always make it. And obviously, Naran, you've been working in the field within the institution. I'm going to be talking about open educational practices which a lot of times happen outside of or adjacent to institutions but often claim to have social justice intentions and then the reality may be slightly different. And I have a sort of expansive view of what I mean by open educational practices. First of all, I just want to also know that my slides are open for commenting. So if after this session you want to post comments on particular slides, you can do that. The link is this big.ly-slash-edlw-mahalcaps. So I'm just going to copy that maybe into the chat as well. That's kind of difficult to copy. Anyway, if someone wants to copy that. Okay, so first of all, I want to engage the audience a little bit with this slide, which I use quite a lot if you've seen me present a minus sign up before. What do you see when you look at this? You just type that into the chat. What do you see in the writing? So potential. What does the text say? Diversity. That is an interesting response because people usually just respond to what they're reading. Yes, the opportunity is now here. Is anybody feeling different? I was like, okay. You need to seek opportunity demanded or opportunity is nowhere. Right. And I think with a lot of educational innovation and with a lot of things like social justice orientation of educational innovation, sometimes something will look like, oh my God, opportunity is now here. Let's use it. And sometimes it looks like opportunity is nowhere. There's no point in going down this road. This is a waste of everyone's time. And I think a lot of times the same thing, the same intervention might look for one group of people as having a lot of positive potential and for another group of people as being dangerous. Just yesterday in this session about AI and higher education, I think the facilitator, the moderator asked people to say one word about it and someone said potential and the other person said dangerous. It's the same thing. And it might have different impacts on different people and also depending on your viewpoint, which I think is important to consider when analyzing anything that we talk about here. So I'm going to try to sort of do that and bring in these different viewpoints about the same thing and look at the same thing from different perspectives. I'm glad you guys like the colors. I like the colors too. That's why I use this slide a lot. And my work in general on social justice and decoloniality is influenced by these people. Some of them are people who work with me directly. Actually, all of them are people I work with directly as well. But because each one of these papers, which are linked in the slide, goes about trying to apply these concepts in practice. It's very easy to read about decoloniality and decolonization of social justice, but to try to apply them and to say, how would this work if we tried to do it? I'm sure Sarah will talk a little bit more about Nancy Fraser's model of social justice. The idea of it is that social justice often is talked about as only economic or only cultural. Nancy Fraser looks at cultural, economic and political. So a lot of times when we talk about, you don't have access to the technology because you don't have the infrastructure. That's mostly an economic issue of maldistribution. That's the injustice one on there. But sometimes we're talking about, oh, this content doesn't exist in my native language or this content does not tell the story of my culture. And that's a cultural misrecognition. So that's the injustice happening there. And then the third way that an educational situation might have a problem is political. Who are the people who are making the decisions about which educational material gets funded, which educational intervention gets funded? Who's on the table? What kind of power do minorities have to influence decisions made? So those are three dimensions to look at a lot of things. And to remember when we're talking about social justice that maybe one of them gets addressed, but the others may not. And so the other thing to consider, which again comes from Nancy Fraser's work, but also Andrea Auti, is that when we come to address issues of social justice, we may not be addressing the root causes of the injustice. We might be making small, affirmative or ameliorative changes that sort of fix the immediate access problem, for example, but not a transformative solution. So this would be kind of like maybe instead of improving infrastructure in the country as a whole, providing devices to individuals, but not solving the infrastructure inequality. Something that's more transformative would then have a larger impact and addresses the root of the injustice. But the other thing to keep in mind and as someone from a country that receives more in funding for our education and other kinds of reform, is that the reform can produce negative effects or can be quite neutral for certain groups of people. So it might work for one group of people, but be negative for another group. That's also important. And so context is so important here when talking about it. The other thing to keep in mind and I don't need to talk maybe too much about this, but the fact that coloniality continues even after colonialism has officially ended. Now, there's neocolonialism, which we can talk about later, but the idea is the impact of colonialism still continue in countries that are post-colonial right now. And that people from colonized, previously color-aligned countries still internalize a lot of those dimensions of ways of looking at their own selves, their self-image and what they imagined to be. And when Narendra was talking about the Fourth Industrial Revolution and I was thinking, is there some other way for people from post-colonial countries to rise up and progress in ways that don't follow necessarily the path that the West has put for us or the path of the world? Can we develop some other path to our own progress that might meet our own needs which might be different? So one of the open educational practices, and I haven't actually had a slide to define open educational practices, but I'm just gonna say this real quick over here. Sometimes open educational practices are defined by the use of open educational resources, the adaptation, the remixing, and so on, and the creation of them. But I think there are also open educational practices that are more about making use of the open web and focusing on the processes of how do we benefit from the open web to interact and communicate with each other, between educators or between educators and students or among students. And so virtually connecting is actually one of those that does not use OER at all. I don't know how many people who are with us today have heard about virtually connecting. Maybe we can just type right quickly. So Susanna is saying, Leo Haben says there are lots of definitions of OEP and the strength and the differences between them. I agree and I think it's quite alright that there are different understandings of it and I think the understandings evolve as the technology and the society changes to keep up with the technology to make good use of it, right? So virtually connecting is something I co-founded. As someone from the global south who is a woman who has a young child, it's quite difficult for me to travel to conferences and it was getting quite frustrating that I was missing out on that cultural capital. Those social conversations, the social capital you develop in conversations with networking, right? I can't be part of those conversations. I don't mind missing the presentations themselves because a lot of times the slides are available online or the paper or book chapter you can find a lot of times open access. But the traveling to conferences, those social conversations from which a lot of project ideas come and collaboration, those don't usually happen normally. So what virtually connecting is, is that we connect people who can't be at a conference with people at a conference and we sit for like half an hour or 45 minutes to have a chat with them. That was definitely the first time I spoke to Lisa in a synchronous video conversation. And so the intention of virtually connecting is obviously to make that difference. It's a social justice intention originally for people with economic problems or social problems or health problems that do not allow them to go to conferences. But at the same time these are still, you're still keeping conferences as something important. You're not, you're challenging academic gatekeeping in one form of by the way, even though you're at the conference we're still going to be able to talk to people who are there. We're still going to be able to be part of those conversations. But on the other hand you're also saying, yeah, conferences are still important. We haven't decided that we're not important anymore. So the purpose is to address the economic aspect. The cultural and political aspects are a bit trickier because it's not always going to happen. So what we realize is virtually connecting can have a negative effect if we always invite the most high profile people to be our guests. And so we're sort of amplifying already powerful people and their voices. So it's a social reproduction of their power. But we can be careful and try to invite women and minorities and people of color and early career scholars to be our guests and then to have those voices become amplified as well. And then on the other side the people who attend a virtually connecting session are often women minorities in the global south, early career scholars or graduate students who don't have funding. But if they're in this session and they're unable to have a proper conversation with the speakers then maybe it's a neutral type of thing as if it's broadcasting. So what we try to do is we try to sort of help them get used to speaking encourage them to speak so that they have a voice in there. So that the presence of a minority person who's not at a conference goes back and influences the conference itself. So it's sort of transforming the conference then. It's not just more broadcasting towards the minorities or towards the marginal groups that it's going both ways. And Sarah saying sometimes people who are in this session who are on site enjoy the reflecting back with others and they're benefiting as well. It's not just a give thing. It's a give and take thing happening. And so one of the things we've been talking about is intentionally equitable personality. And it is that you're being hospitable to people sitting in a room together. But you're not saying everyone is welcome and just assuming that people will be welcome just because you've told them they are welcome. It's about trying to keep in mind the needs of the marginal and try to be more hospitable to those who have less access. Okay, so we were just today Sarah and I on Twitter talking about this article from this website called Take Equity where they were talking about those farthest away from justice. And that's who you need to work with on equity. So it's not about making something available to everyone. It's about can you make it available to those who haven't heard you for the past minutes. Oh no. Is it okay now? Oh no. Is it getting better? We might catch up over some of the lag maybe. Am I still breaking up? I need to keep talking to know if I'm breaking up. Ooh. Okay. I'm going to turn off my camera. Okay. I turned off my camera. Hopefully that will help. Let me know if it's helping. So one of the things to keep in mind is okay, so I was talking about intentionally equitable hospitality and that we need to address the needs of those farthest away from social justice. If the very farthest away from social justice for whom virtually connecting makes no difference is people who don't have internet at all. So if someone has no internet at all, they probably won't be able to participate in virtually connecting on a lot of open education because a lot of it is synchronous. So they would lose out on that but the sessions are recorded and they could watch them later but then the impact is neutral because they're not watching, they're not participating. But for people who can make it some of the ways we try to be intentionally equitable to marginalized people. First of all is that we try to invite guests that the remote participants are interested in. Not the ones who are on site want to amplify but the ones who cannot be there want to hear from. The other thing is to intentionally invite people who are minorities both as guests and as participants so for example when we see that someone notices virtually connecting is going on we invite them specifically by name because minorities a lot of times when you say everybody's welcome don't realize that they are included in that everybody. They're used to not being welcome versus white men, they always feel like they're welcome. They assume that you're inviting them when we say anybody. And then other things we try to do when we're inside a session when we try to make it possible for different people to type if they can't talk to encourage to make sure that for example that a white man dominating the conversation doesn't get that. So we can be hospitable but we need to stop sometimes a white person or a white man from hogging a conversation and that is the way to be equitable to make sure that everyone else has a chance to speak and things like that. And also we spend a lot of time with people who are early in their careers or not used to this kind of space to try to get them used to it so that they're comfortable speaking explain to them what this is to try to invite them several times in a row so that they become more comfortable with it. So that's one of the things we do and still we realize that not every session will be like that and some of our volunteers are better at this intentionally equitable hospitality than others which is why we decided to give it a name to write a paper on it so that we can help people be more intentional about what they're doing there because it's not something you're used to doing probably outside of this context. Another thing very quickly I know I don't have a lot of time very quickly two things that I think can be used for social justice or not. So we often think about Wikipedia as a space that is democratic anybody can edit but this really means those who can afford the time those who have the digital literacy even though it's actually quite easy now that if Wikipedia a few years ago was needed Markov language I think and then people understand the standards for what counts as credible knowledge and what counts as credible knowledge about biographies for example requires pretty hegemonic standards of what knowledge is and so you know a lot of minorities in the world and minority cultures don't have the documentation that counts as credible for Wikipedia and therefore it's quite difficult to get indigenous knowledge by indigenous people to count on a place like Wikipedia. So who polices those standards and the majority of editors are white male and what does that mean for the kind of content that becomes most that exists more on Wikipedia or is fuller on and so which knowledge has a priority what's more prevalent if you speak more than one language if you pick up a politically contested type of article you'll see that the stories are quite different in the two languages but obviously people who speak one language will only see that language they won't see the other side of the story because Wikipedia requires this consensus but there are ways to resist that so there are feminist and local editathons and hackathons that focus on creating more material about women or more material they're local to particular countries but the standards and processes are still there so you're sort of maybe dealing with the cultural aspects by creating these but the political like who decide will not happen until there are enough minorities and women who are leading in all these spaces in Wikipedia even when the CEO or the top person is a woman but a lot of the people who are doing the actual work are not women not minorities the third thing I wanted to talk about is collaborative annotation I don't know how many of you are familiar with this I mean there are different tools obviously that allow for this the one I use the most is called Hypothesis and this has a lot of pedagogical value because digital annotation in itself has pedagogical value like if you ask your students to read an article and annotate it and then annotating it collaboratively and openly have the advantage of people seeing each other's annotations responding to each other and talking to each other on the sentence and paragraph level of an article so it has that pedagogical purpose but in terms of social justice there was Audrey Waters a few years ago talked about how she didn't want people to annotate her blog and she put up some code to prevent that because she said this is my space and if people start you know abusing me on this on this space with hypothesis she won't be able to remove that so it was an added layer of something that she preferred to have removed and ever since then a lot of people have been more sensitive when they come to annotate something they take permission from the person even though they don't need to so but these are ways in which it could be negative I once had a peer-reviewed article of mine being annotated and I was worried about a particular troll who might have been starting to put really negative comments and it would be completely outside of my control but then this kind of space thing you know something like collaborative annotation which I think is social justice-wise is mostly neutral can be used in a social justice orientation if in something like marginal syllabus where for example they do one thing which is pick articles that are about social justice or written by minorities and annotate those and announce those so therefore you're amplifying those voices and then the other thing would be they used to do it like in a one hour thing and that was sort of time zone hegemonic and then they said no we're going to make it over like three days so that more people are able to participate and therefore you're improving the you know the extent of diversity of people who can participate in something so I think I'm almost done for time and I just want to say how can we rethink open educational practices but honestly any educational practice so that they're able to address social justice within practice and taking in mind all of the different contexts for which our you know our intervention or innovation is going to apply how do we ensure parity of participation of those who will be affected how can we give them a voice and a space to participate on their own terms not on our terms so we're virtually connecting because I'm the co-founder so there's already someone from the global south who thinks a lot about these things but we try as much as possible like most people who are with me the person who co-founded it was a graduate student who was unaffiliated at the time a lot of us are all academics a lot of us are unaffiliated and all of these and then we have someone from Iran person who has visa issues so she can't go to many countries and the more we have people who are like that Great presentation insights I particularly like the comments about intentionally equitable hospitality something I hadn't heard before a couple of questions from the chat the first is from Suzanne but do you bring the conference experience in reference to virtual connecting virtually connecting do you bring the conference experience to those who cannot be there or does it become something else I think you kind of answered that in your presentation but maybe you would like to expand on that Suzanne actually knows Suzanne actually knows because she's been one of us but I think it's the important thing to say I think we ended up creating something different and parallel to conferences I think you're right it's not so much it used to be that we wanted to bring the conference experience to people but it became this other thing that happens with conferences parallel to the conferences and I also had a question I finished reading Robin D'Angelo's white fragility book and I'm just wondering how can we become more aware of when we aren't addressing the root causes of injustice and how do we deal with white fragility because that's definitely an issue when I think about the book burnings that are happening in the United States and the protests about whiteness so this is obviously a big question to ask me but I'm going to try I think one of the one of the key things is to first of all surround yourself by people who are different from you who are minorities and to have lots of each kind of minority so I didn't understand I'm in the context where homosexuality is not something I deal with every day I didn't start to become empathetic to for example the issues related to homosexuality until I had about five homosexual close friends who I was talking to on a regular basis not talking to them about their homosexuality it's just they become part of my social circle that I talk to all the time and it just became more natural for me to sort of understand that and the really important thing is to listen because it's very difficult to listen to view points that are different from your own especially if they will actually make you part of a villain and you need to understand it's not about you personally but as a white person or whatever but that it's a it's a general thing but it's a systemic thing right and to be aware of the different layers of it at the systemic level or the micro level so things like microaggression if someone trusts you they'll talk to you about them but it's not something that minorities will always talk about explicitly with someone else the other thing though I think is that a lot of minorities or marginalized people will there are two ways they would express dissent one of them will be very aggressive and it's difficult to listen to but you need to try to listen to it the other way is to try to sort of talk about it gently so that they get listened to but if you don't listen closely enough you'll miss out the criticism there so it's sort of a balance of trying to both listen carefully even when it makes you angry or upset or hurt so that's the addressing the white fidelity part I guess and the other one is when you doesn't hurt you need to look very closely to try to understand what it is they're actually trying to say I don't think that really answers your question I'm familiar with Robin DeAngelo's work but I haven't actually read that book so I should definitely read this one okay we're going to move on to our final speaker today who is Sarah Lambert and she'll be talking about open education on the road to social justice Sarah is from Deacon University in Australia and thank you Sarah for being with us at this very late hour in Australia she manages a $5 million program of student equity projects and services including equity innovation grants for the benefit of future and current socioeconomically disadvantaged learners at Deacon University previously she managed open education programs and partnerships after a career in technology enhanced learning including executive member of the Ostra Australasian Council for Online Learning and she is a board member at Horizon AU report a proud feminist equity ally and first in family member to go to university Sarah's recent research explores how online education programs can be reconceptualized as social justice actions to widen education participation for underrepresented learners and communities she's currently the chief investigator on a national scoping study of open educational textbooks at social justice in the Australian context and is co-editing a social justice themed special edition of GIME with Laura Chernovitz from the University of Cape Town an issue that I for one am very much looking forward to reading when it is published so please go ahead Sarah that introduction and and Naren for your presentations and I have been really enjoying getting into the vibe and it's interesting we've started off talking about open education with a view of open universities and ODL and Mahas brought in some really practical social justice actions in terms of our open practices and I think so I'm going to finish up talking about courses open educational courses resources and MOOCs about which my recent research has been focused and so that will be the land in which we dwell for the next little while and so I recently in response to a question from esteemed European researcher Aris Boskert about what needs updating in open education I said I think there's been a critical turn in open education and that ideas of social justice and decolonization for student and social benefit have refreshed what we mean when we talk about democratization of knowledge in open education and I think for a good while there democratization of knowledge was primarily thought about in terms of putting free stuff online for everybody and in particular putting free high status university stuff online for the rest of us who were missing out and I used to think that too and I even put some free Australian higher education stuff online for everybody at one time but actually my colleagues and I were working in an original university with strong links to the community and so we instinctually did something a bit different to the big brand MOOCs but I might return to that later if we have time so I think what Mahav has given us with her definitions of social justice and phrasing and what the implications are for decolonization really timely and there's definitely been a conversation happening globally around this which is really interesting because when I first began working in this area it just it was really not possible to talk about those things and the conversation about putting things free things online for all was just such a huge discourse and it has definitely changed so within this critical turn if I pick a couple of key timelines and I am talking particularly I think about this digital chapter of open education if we look at 2002 that first UNESCO OER announcement and definition and it has a phrase in the text by and for the developing world and I think in the light again of what we've heard from both Narend and Mahav it's important to powerful social justice words but those were not the words that ever really got cited in that critical text I think if we jump forward to the yellow bubble to 2012 when the Paris OER declaration came out it was a kind of a little bit a little bit more look not much has changed here I'm getting a bit impatient we really need to be doing this social justice OER and it's quite a strong social justice based text there but again that component of it that talks about giving a little more to those who have less those are further from justice as Mahav said that again didn't much get cited and in the middle in particular the Cape Town Open Ed declaration was very technology forward and innovation focused and so this was a space where there was a lot of hopeful going on but if we wind forward to 2019 and 20 there's definitely been a reality check a real assessment of the evidence a sense that you can't keep talking up the potential of something what is really holding us back and maybe we need to rethink and take stock and I think in this last window too there's been an increase in global inequalities and that really sharpens people's focus and certainly in Australia we have increased homelessness and people on the streets and it's something you wouldn't think we'd have had a lot of it and we've had a lot of defunding and it's really in education and social services it's it makes educators sit up and think what are we doing this all for so there's definitely been a shift but in this middle patch here there was what I call the MOOC mayhem the promises and the over-optimism and the we will have education for all and shortly thereafter world peace and it seems a bit crazy from the perspective now but it was a big thing right it was enormously optimistic time and and then I think if you see the little bubbles underneath there was a lot of frustration as that did not rapidly emerge at all and indeed some very different things happened and I also just acknowledge that while there was this kind of hype and then a crash happening in some parts of the world other parts of the worlds were just getting on with it and not perhaps making the western media that's for sure and still today sitting from the perspective of Australia which is very close to Asia you know each MOOC event I go to that talks about what's happening here with digital credentials and international you know accreditation and so on I still no one talks about the Swayam platform or the Chinese platform there's a huge numbers of learners that we could be linking to if they even wanted to but you know there's an under talking about some of these major developmental uses of MOOCs that don't hit the mainstream media but that's starting to become more talked about and this notion of you know we want a more regional responses we want localized responses we don't want a colonial knowledge is definitely definitely changed so I think it's a much more real time and a much more in some ways positive time as we are starting to get a feel for some things that will work and what really doesn't that we ought to give up on so that's not a bad thing in my opinion oh dear I'm having a slide crash here there's a quote has just been wiped out by the wonders of technology but yes so I think there was a before this is period of emancipation so openness will emancipate learners you know there will be change but I write in a paper that I think that's a red herring and we were definitely caught up in what Penny Jane Burke refers to as a regime of truth where the stories we tell each other just keep perpetuating about what openness can do and what openness can change and I think after a while it really becomes an echo that many of us can't believe and so the critical voices speak into question the potential when is the rubber going to hit the road and so in terms of MOOCs there's a case study there I'm afraid to say some of my slide graphics are crashing here but I'm going to pull up my own version locally and at least read you the figures here so in terms of this openness, addiction to openness and putting free things online in that MOOC mayhem phase what happened is we invested in the already educated and the relatively privileged and I crunched some numbers recently to really to really look at how much we did that with our openness rhetoric and so basically we had about 34,000 MOOCs made between 2014 and 2018 and then if we take a number out of the sort of average development cost in the paper from Holland's and to Tali then if we say 100K per MOOC then we're looking at 3.4 billion dollars invested in the already educated and the relatively privileged and that was not what we said we wanted to do and it's the opposite of that economic forms of justice and redistribution to funnel that much extra investment which was really come about on that at least partially on a rhetoric of education for all and we ended up with a massive investment in the already educated so this has made me reflect a lot and has been in some ways what stimulated my own research in the last few years because I really wanted to understand how we could have hoped so much and then did so little in that particular period of time and what we can learn about that and one of the things that I reflect on from that time because I myself was very hopeful as an education technology practitioner I wanted to believe that that openness would do that and I was working from a regional university where widening participation for regional students was a real need and I think in Australia there's a great difference between what happens in our metropolitan big cities and what happens in the rest of the country. I feel this is similar in some ways to Europe but I'd be really happy to have some clarification from the participants as clearly that's not my space but I think that this notion of hope you know of hoping for things there was a kind of aspirational regime of truth to use Penny Jane Burks they're the stories we tell ourselves so about that power of openness but to place one's hope in an undefined openness is I've reflected I think it's futile as what Freya talks about as raw hope and that he says is the hoped for is not attained by dint of raw hoping just to hope is to hope in vain and what we have to do is act intentionally and so I think some of those words that Maha used about the intentionality comes into play here because what we really need to do is we need to augment our hope and our critical understanding that this putting things online free for everyone this sort of free being an economic redistributive moment you would think you know people who have less we give them free things it sort of logically feels like it should do a lot but that free stuff drifted upwards to the already advantaged on the whole in that early phase of MOOCs in any case so we critique but we still have our hope but we need to act on our hope and so what Freya talks about is this critical practice between hoping and the critical imperative and then acting and so using what you find in your critique to drive action further and that produces the change and for someone who's you know really struggling as I think we are with inequality globally I hang on to this and remind myself that we can each of us in our different locations I think use the tools that we have to be more intentional and as Mahas talked about that with intentionality about who we address in our virtually connecting I'm talking about the deliberate design so the design for justice for those who are experiencing injustice and that means you need to understand really who is experiencing that injustice in your local area in our place it's often the regional learners absolutely experiencing greater injustice and so this is where I posited from theory a new definition for open education wanting to bring it back to that 2002 and 2012 hoped for place of open education being an actual social justice act being part of widening participation and so the definition that I proposed was based on phrases three principles of social justice that Mahas really succinctly nailed so I'm barely going to touch it at all because that was such a great description but the redistributive as a principle of giving back the economic overcoming some economic injustice the recognitive that recognition the justice in recognizing identity and different cultures and different languages so recognitive justice representational justice is that having voice to speak that political not only to speak but to be heard and to be effective in that space and all of that together is really needed to address the social and educational history of exclusion and so once we think about those three different principles it makes us think more clearly about how we can address each of those slightly differently in the work that we do to produce courses that sort of gives you a bit more of a laser like focus rather than thinking of just the free stuff it's like what else can we do you know what how can we make that how can we recognize the learners how can the learners see themselves in the materials we produce and that would be a great place to start and so again with gratitude to Mahaa for this translation which was a lovely moment for me the definition here I'm suggesting is open education is the development of free digitally enabled learning materials and experiences primarily by and for the benefit and empowerment of non-privileged learners who may be underrepresented in education systems or marginalised in their global context so you know for people in Europe all of the countries in Europe are not equally powerful are not equally developed are not equally statused there's a lot going on there and the same you know within the states of Australia would be the same so thinking more locally about who is in need of that I think is some powerful ways of thinking rather than thinking of everyone as if we are somehow magically equal and so to return to this Freya and his pedagogy of hope and how can we in these difficult times when we have gone through economic turmoil and the global financial crisis is not that long and the ripples are still moving through in Europe in fact that's we felt it in many parts of the world but we're wanting to help overcome that with our open education we want to hang on to our hope we want to be hopeful but we don't want to be hopeless either with our actions so I guess what I'm suggesting particularly in this educational higher education space hope needs evidence and this is what again drove me to undertake a study a major systematic review of MOOCs and I asked do MOOCs contribute to student equity and social inclusion and undertook that systematic review and it's published in computers and education very recently after a long long period of review to say and it is called open access so I wanted to just touch on some of these hopeful moments because they suggest that social justice oriented educators, institutions have continued to invest in MOOCs to do exactly these kinds of social inclusion and student equity moves all around the world including in Europe I think funded often through the Erasmus projects and in response to the GFC and again dealing with regional and inter-sort of regional socioeconomic disadvantage and needing to up skill and get up with technology and letting that trying to build economies moving forward and so I did a graphical abstract they said I should, I did, there it is I don't know was it time well spelled I'm not sure but I've just suggest that the systematic review studies were, you know, reasonably well distributed globally it was not as skewed towards North America and Northern Europe as many ed tech studies there was just over 50% in other parts of the world including in both North and South of Europe which is great in fact 17% of the studies were from Europe there, policy as well as practice types of reports and the MOOCs there, they're talking about definitely free online resources but also face to face study groups or additional forms of support some at in distance mode and some in blended mode. We're talking about learners with low skills, low confidence, low levels of previous education but aspiration by the bucket load and strengths and determination and resilience and and that's often how we talk of learners in this widening participation research spaces is the strengths that they have that we can leverage and when your road to education has been bumpy we tend to find students have a lot of grit and a lot of motivation and a lot of resistance too to what has the difficulties and I think what Yosso talks about as resistance capital is something I feel personally and my path has been rocky I tend to be a pusher back rather than a and that can help in an educational space as well in terms of advocacy but there's other forms of capital not just cultural and that's I do like that about Yosso's work experience capital is another one any case I won't get into the figures there, sort of in the abstract of the paper but definitely open technologies there but proprietary technologies too it really didn't matter the status the legal status of the platform or the resources it was the intentionality of what people wanted to do with it if they wanted to enable particular sets of disadvantaged learners then they could turn their mind to what that really would look like it also identified some gaps I was I guess a bit disappointed that with the MOOCs topics doing so much in the IT in the tech area and the STEM area that even in the studies that I reviewed that seem to have some interest in in equity did never track the progress of women in those courses and women in STEM under representation is just a global phenomena so there's a challenge for researchers of any STEM MOOC to at least have a look and then if we see what is happening there might be some motivation to address that under representation and what it means so being a bit provocative here but you know don't reuse the reuse the rhetoric of reuse being a success factor we've had for a long time I think there's a number of voices questioning if that is really the the magical component in OER content it can be risky in terms of that colonial reusing from one context into one that doesn't make sense of course it doesn't have to be I'm being a bit provocative reusing within the context might be handy and save someone time but there's just not a lot of evidence that that actually happens a great deal so in my studies the ones that succeeded they designed from scratch with particular learners and their needs in mind and that's this cognitive justice piece of recognizing what is needed that is particular and local I see you I see who you are I see what you need and we can you know design for that rather than the mysterious anybody and designing with representatives of the actual learner community that representational justice piece where learners can or learner representatives of the community that are trying to be enabled are actually participating in the development of those programs and or sometimes the support of them as well and I think that was it was less prevalent but certainly effective when it happened so I find I found a great deal of hope from from what was happening in the study the other thing that emerged as well is the power of community partnership in the MOOC and the ODL space so rather than thinking about just your technology partnerships and your technology platforms who are you partnering with in your community who have that outreach who have the connections who understand the context and development of many of the successful MOOC cases some in distance mode some in blended mode often had a community partner so getting into that recognition of what the community needs that recognitive justice piece was happening practically in the context of an existing community partnership and then I think from that recognitive justice start point that would often be the beginning of a iterative development cycle that would lead to a more representational justice where those community members were actually more active in the course development and it makes sense if you get to know a community you see their strength you see their skills you know that you want to engage them so the move from recognitive to representational justice through community partners was something of interest that I thought had some potential as well and I think within that move it often allowed for a more sustainable MOOC model so the use of community partners for the support component can help with the sustainability so I found those and I hope I'd love to hear if anybody has had a crack at any of these things in the comments it would be great to hear if there's more recent local examples and so I found that whole experience very hopeful and I found the study suggests that we should not consider MOOCs are dead and indeed the numbers of institutions who are signing up are still gross which is amazing and not all of them want to be making money off postgraduate micro-credentials so many do not all of them so I think that I think that this suggests that there is a viable practice of using MOOCs as a widening participation in a social justice action to various degrees that the principles are engaged but the free component is the economic and then this recognitive and representational are discussed in the way that the communities are involved there's one in particular that that I actually have open in a window behind me it's in a rattle paper from Jean-François Colas Peter Slip and Muriel Garrett Domingo so a great European example I'm going to post the direct link in the chat in just a minute but this was a study on the effect of multilingual facilitation on active participation in MOOCs and they had they dealt with different language groupings in the online and they had synchronous and asynchronous mother tongue language conversations around the English content and it's just a fascinating study of recognizing the learners language and culture and helping them bridge into difficult new material for teacher training of ICT in different regions of Europe so I found that one particularly fascinating and it was certainly the first time I'd heard of this multi lingual facilitation and also a schools network was part of this so the community partnership backdrop was also part of that process so there's a bunch of school teachers in the schools who were offered this program and that's the jest that you're going to have actual physical groups of teachers signing up probably in the same schools so there's the kind of possible layer of community local face-to-face chats happening with the teachers in their local schools then you've got a virtual network of same language teachers talking together as well as the bigger cohort so quite a fascinating design so so just to finish up I was so fascinating that systematic review study and all of the amazing examples that it brought forth that I've gone on to do some additional work synthesizing synthesizing out a conceptual model so I've got another paper and review that leaps off that data again and synthesizes qualitatively a six critical dimensions model of open and online education and that little picture there is sort of suggesting that inclusion and equity can be at the heart of your cohort and that there can be skills and materials and purpose and autonomy and support and that study is as I said I hope to get that paper out soon and get some feedback on that and see if it might also spread to other context but what I did find in undertaking that study looking at the role of technology in particular was that it was not enabling it allowed people to get started of course the free technology but it did not assure their progress or success in any way but what that technology did was grow or amplify the other dimensions and by focusing on technology design as an amplification for those other dimensions I think we again foreground the inclusion foreground the equity foreground what it is that is particular and local and needed and again I found great hope in that and I hope that others will also find hope in it. Similarly with our GIME open education of social justice special edition really so excited to see new writers writing from different regional locations talking about their widening participation in social justice initiatives so bringing those voices forward in a publishing formal sense I think I'm really keen to if you like correct the record the academic record of what open education is possible of away from an entirely sort of technocentric and innovations rhetoric not entirely of course I'm overstating but there's a strong dominance of that into a this critical turn of open education for which there are many people in open education open universities in the north and the south so it's not for me this is not just a global south moment but in the regions of the north where there is inequality between main centres it's still I think a powerful driving need for us to come to grips with these kinds of principles and elevate what is possible for us to do when we design with intention and I think that will be enough from me thank you Sarah you said you wanted to be provocative and I think if you look to the discussions that are happening within the chat area I think you'll find out that they have generated a great deal of discussion a great deal of interaction amongst the participants so you have been provocative I look forward to looking back there are a couple of questions the first one is from Suzanne but I'm not sure if it's more of a rhetorical question where she asked about developing world is this development according to what and to whom Suzanne maybe maybe you could write something in the chat about whether that was a question you want Sarah to address I do have a question that is directed to you specifically Sarah from Franz Joseph mentioned open and proprietary technologies do you think open source technologies have more potential to address open learning because if we want to spread open learning widely a cost factor has to be kept in mind as well I have a kind of I think open source technology there's certainly open platforms we're very grateful to have and I think there's a huge difference but again how they're used if they're used intentionally and we invest in those intentionally and we can use them for these forms of cognitive justice I think we can go somewhere but of themselves open source platforms are somewhat prone to the white IT guy moment in fact there has been a massive sort of conversation happening around open science and open data and open source with large numbers of women actually really having had enough of some pretty poor misogynist kinds of behavior in the communities that actually develop the open source software and so I think that's been critiqued for many years both academically and practically and clearly hasn't been addressed so I think that we have to be very careful with suggesting that open source communities are a safe place and if we can't make those safe I think then they're not really going to be a great solution to scale up if we're basically scaling up unsafe spaces for lots of people so it's also not going to generate the best work right but it's going to generate the contributors providing their diversity and their best work and all their great problem solving so it's actually going to also hold back ultimately what open source can do and the whole innovation project so I think we need to avoid a simplistic open equals great in all parts of open education including open source but if we can take on inclusive education guides inclusive principles there's inclusive event guides coming out if some of the open source communities because embed those in their codes of conduct and start to actually walk that talk I think that those platforms would strengthen attract such a great and more diverse set of voluntary actions of people who wanted to be there and do great things with them so I think we just need to take a reality check and address that issue before we kind of thrust that as a solution does that make sense? Yeah definitely I have a question for all of the panel members we don't have much time left so I just like to each perhaps to address this question in terms of the European context why do you believe the issue of social justice is an important one for Europe? So can I just start very quickly because I think maybe because we're all from the global south a lot of what we were talking about was social justice across borders but within any one country if we look at the intersectionality of the population there will always be people who are of a different socioeconomic situation there will always be gender differences of course differences in gender different different contexts there will always be minorities there will be immigrants there will be people with disability so there will always be in every context your own minority groups and within each country who they are and how much different they are from each other will differ I need to look at the combinations of things so the immigrant woman versus all those kinds of differences that you look at there will always be people that are different And the regional and the underemployed these are huge numbers of people and I think that if we don't listen to those areas then again we lose cultural richness there's issues of language and culture in Europe dying out in parts which I think is really sad and again there's that loss of tradition and strength Indigenous knowledges how you might define that that traditional knowledge base if we don't capture and start taking that on board again we lose out overall you know again there's a sort of a net loss so whether or not you want to take an ethical view that we should do it for the people who are excluded which we should but also we all benefit when people can make a full contribution with their diverse cultural background so I think there's a a win-win when we really include all of our regional, cultural, sub-cultural, multi-cultural layers of which you know Europe has many Naranth did you want to add if I may come in and make two points the first is historical much of the global south has been colonised in the past we are still many decades later dealing with vestiges of colonialism and the pernicious effects on the colonised nations and given the inequalities in the poverty and in the conditions with the lack of resources and so on because most of the resources of the global south have been planted during the colonial either and you know there's all kinds of evidence for that and you know how the distribution of economic of wealth and of economic opportunity shifted and changed dramatically during the colonial either so there is a model I think a model argument to be made that you cannot ignore the challenges and the problems of the global south I think that for the future there's another kind of argument and that is with the growing population with growing population worldwide and the interdependencies we have it's one world it's not divided with the global north that has a closeted protected space in which it can thrive while the rest of the world can be left to its own devices because the degradation of the planet in particular and water resources of the soil and so on has an impact for everybody you know and it's going to impact on all of us so I think it's in everyone's interest that we uplift the global south and bring them to benefit from the advances in technology of the goods of the the various industrial revolution when everyone is prosperous or at least reasonably prosperous has a basic amenities of life they are not degrading the environment through ignorance not degrading the environment and you know mortgaging our future lack of opportunity and lack of resources so therefore it's in everyone's interest in my view that we do right for everybody help uplift everybody so everyone can prosper and we have a sustainable future that's a big challenge Anna Christina has one question and I know we're over the time but I'd like to throw it out to you perhaps you can give a brief answer to this question if there's time in speaking of the global south and including social and including social inclusion not exclusion not only from the physical south on the map and culture would that be considered as cultural appropriation cultural appropriation is a particular thing and this is where representative justice can help avoid that risk so this is white people writing black history is not a great thing so I think we're past that moment and so moving on to giving black people a space to tell black history that's the representative piece for sure I think in the recognitive piece what I'm writing about and the losses that are informing me are talking about recognizing the strengths in people who are different rather than just recognizing and pointing out that they're different and then wanting to use their stuff for example take on their culture and so on that's not the good stuff but if you can think of recognitive justice more in terms of recognizing the strengths that learners have with their different backgrounds of interpretation and it doesn't imply that you're going to be culturally appropriating their knowledge at all I wouldn't merge those two ideas together I suppose and this is one of the difficulties of doing a short presentation without lots of academic links and definitions as we scoot over some of those differences there but I think in the writings it is clearer Naranda Maha did you want to add to anything that Sarah said? No I have no response to that as much as it's an important question it's definitely important in the First Nations space absolutely and a huge conversation happening in Australia at this minute but I'm not sure Canada as well but I'm not sure in other parts of the world but yeah we don't want to speak on behalf of others if we can just step back and let them speak instead but you have to know that that's a thing right you have to name it naming that as a thing that you can do helps you do it and that's why I love those three principles I suppose as a way of helping change thinking and conversation it's not the end there's other things to do but I just find it a useful thinking and therefore acting tool If I may come in I don't think it's useful to silence any voices especially any voice that can be an advocate or an activist I think we require all of the critical voices so if we become exclusionist if we begin to define people into and out of communities and voices we may just be doing ourselves a disservice so for me it's more important that anyone who has an insight into the issues whether it's theoretical or from the tactical experiences and so on I think that the more voices we can bring to the debate and to propose solutions the better for me that makes the I think though I think there's a really nice value in making a difference between representatives and allies and I think that can be quite powerful to name yourself like for myself as a white woman as an ally of people who are of colour I'm not going to speak for them but I will back them and give them space and so that's an ally role and I think that's a useful distinction but yeah contribution all of these contributions make a difference they're just different but we've come to the end of a very insightful very engaging very eye-opening I think webinar today I want to thank all of our participants most especially I want to thank our presenters for your wonderful presentations today which will be made available on the Eden website so thank you very much and a big round of applause for our presenters especially for Sarah who is here late into the night to participate and I just want to say once again this topic I think is very relevant to us within online and distance and e-learning open and distance e-learning because we have an ongoing quest to continue and to ensure that ODEL continues to be accessible and available to all presenters today have really given us the knowledge the insight, the examples that we can take back to our institutions and to our classrooms in a good way to help make this happen so thank you again for everything that you've done and as I said the webinar recordings will be made available on the Eden website and one last point our annual conference will be held next year in Timassara Romania from the 21st to the 24th of June and we hope that you can all come so thank you very much and thank you to the Eden moderators too for helping make this webinar successful thank you very much for your support both on the front and the technical and for also the goodwill of all the presenters in our collaborating it's been a really positive experience thank you