 Now we are live with our webinar taking OER to the next level. I welcome everybody out there and I hope that you can use the chat to let us know from where you are listening and watching to us this afternoon. We're very, very happy to introduce to you today our initiative taking OER to the next level. As the name of the webinar and the initiative behind that is called European Network for Catalyzing Open Resources in Education. It's a webinar in the frame of the Open Education Week operated by the Eden Network. And if you have any questions during our webinar during the next one and a half hours, please feel free to type them into the question and answer tool which you find on your operation dials where you are actually. So I'm very happy to have this time to introduce my colleagues also later on. We are very pleased to have you here and I'm starting to share my screen with you. We are going to talk about the what we call Encore Plus project. It is the European Network for Catalyzing Open Resources in Education. We will tell you everything about it and the rationale behind it and the challenges which we try to solve. My name is Wolf Ehlers and I'm talking to you from beautiful sunny Germany today. The evening sun is out, the sky is blue. I hope that's also true for you. And we are going to have an overview after we are doing some introductory remarks and a poll to also take stock of your strong beliefs about OER, you as the community. We're going to have an overview of the initiative by Julian Grainley, the project manager from ICDE and Laura Ballasina. Then we are going to have an introduction into our quite new and we are very excited about this community model, the community model which we are going to conceptualize and implement across Europe in the next three to four years. We are going to have what we call an open corner. So we are really interested if you are listening on YouTube or if you are watching us as a Zoom participant. We are really interested in your feedback, in your comments, not just questions actually, also recommendations and statements like did you already look into this or for your purpose there is a best practice existing and that's to be found here. So these are the comments we would like to have of course also your questions but also the collegial feedback from everybody, the peer feedback. So that's the open corner moment of the webinar in the middle of the webinar and we're going to take stock of that a little bit to look at the chat to what's written. That's your moment to give us feedback and tell us your opinion. Then we are going to have the most lively and excited part exciting part of our webinar. That's what we call a chat show. It's a moderated chat show with four experts which we are having and these four experts will explain the four corners of the universe, the four directions. We are also going to speak north, south, west and east of our project. The four perspectives we are looking at OER from. Then we're going to have a greeting message from the project lead from ICDE, General Secretary Torren Gwelswick and Q&A session in the end to ask further questions. The participants of this webinar are all here listed. It's Julian Grayley, Laura Bralassini, Michael Crenshaw, Anna Farrell, Robert Farrow, Sylvia Baldiris, Tina Marie Monilion, Torren Gwelswick and Ulf Daniel Elis. So you will meet them throughout the webinar and without further ado, I'm now going to ask to start the first poll. We are interested in where are you actually from? What's your background? And secondly, in the second question, what do you really believe? So tell us what is your current background? Are you a student learner, an educational professional, including curriculum, design, qualifications or any other professional role in your institution? An institutional leader, including institutional policymaker or a policymaker from government, national government or European level? Are you a researcher in HR professional or anything else? So that's the first question. Answer please now to this question and then go to the next question. And here we are interested in your strong belief, you know, when you lean back and think about OER. Tell us, within the next five years, OER will reach its full potential and become the first choice as a learning resource for higher education and industry. I repeat within the next five years, within the next five years, OER will reach its full potential and become the first choice as a learning resource for higher education and industry. Tell us if you agree or disagree rather with this statement, you have five choices from strongly disagree to strongly agree. So please make your cross, make your choice and then we're giving maybe a few more seconds and then close the poll and have a look who's here with us and what are your views on OER. Thank you so far from the chat side where everybody introduced themselves from Dublin, Croatia, Italy, Germany, Colombia, Sweden, Croatia, Ukraine, Romania, Dublin, Ireland, Croatia, Latvia, Wow, truly international, Croatia, Iceland, UK, Romania, colleagues from the Merlot repository, Brazil, Croatia. So welcome to everybody. I think we can we can now close the poll and publish the results. So here are the results. I hope you can see them. I can see them. What is your current background? We have most of us are education professionals, including curriculum design or any other professional role. We do not have any policymaker with us. So that's why we need to improve, but we have some students. We have institutional leaders management from higher education institutions and other institutions and organizations, researchers, HR professionals. So welcome everybody. And now let's go to the second. I can already see just on a first glimpse that we are here preaching to convert it because most of you, more than about 63% are on the positive side with our statement, which means that within the next five year OER is really taking leapfrog and uptake in higher education. So thank you very much for that. And now I would just before I hand over to the project coordinator to the coordinator of the initiative to Julian Greenlee from ICDE. I would just like to tell you a little bit about how things came about and led up to Angkor because actually it was a three year process. So we are a bunch of organizations which were involved within the last 10 years, I would say. I was looking it up and listing it here into all major and minor and important OER projects starting from April in 2010, where we looked into quality or OER test where we looked into credentialing and stacking different OER learnings together. Power up, Lang OER, all probably projects which you might be familiar with and if not, go to the web and look it up. Look the results up. This is really the history of European project. The short history, not a comprehensive, not a complete history. So don't be annoyed if your choice is not showing up here. But the group of organizations with which we are today undertaking this initiative Angkor was involved in, let's say, the trace and the leading through the last 10 years of OER initiatives and has then decided to come together and to crystallize what is there into an initiative which is not looking into developing OER or which is not looking into creating new repositories. It is really a group of people which have been involved into creation, into development, into innovation. And now we are looking into creating a European network, a knowledge alliance in which we are sharing the solutions which are out there and leading them into broad implementation. That's really the purpose and we will hear more of that. Involved, of course, were milestones on the way. ICDE was doing a feasibility study three years ago on the question how can OER repositories globally collaborate in a better way. And then of course the UNESCO recommendation, which in the end I think was also the final decisive milestone to have this initiative becoming a reality. Also with an aim to implement the UNESCO recommendations for a European sphere. We were walking and submitting proposals to the Commission on such an alliance in 2018, in 2019 and in 2020 we were finally successful and now here we are with the Angkor initiative, the European network for catalyzing open resources. And the special thing which is just put together here in one sentence is that apart from higher education we would like to see how we can also approach the field of business and enterprises and startups and innovation services around OER. That's going to be a main issue and you will learn about that more from today's webinar. So that's really what Angkor is about. And now I hand over to my colleague, Julian Rayleigh, and later also to Laura Valaceni, telling us first about the project in itself, the project logic, and then also about the visual story and identity about of Angkor. Thank you Ulf. Share my screen. All right. Angkor, my name is Julian Grandley. I, as Ulf mentioned, I am the project manager for Angkor as ICD is the coordinating partner of this Rasmus Plus project. I also work in ICD as a development manager. So the purpose of this bit of today's webinar is to give you an overview of the project and really what we are trying to do. And to begin with, I wanted to introduce the partners. So we are nine partners in this consortium. ICDE as international council for open and distance education. We are the coordinator. And with us in this consortium, we are with DHBW, Open University, UNIR, and Knowledge for All, UBEL, FPM, Canvas, and DCU. Now, you'll see that the partners are a good mix of both their NGOs, there are universities, there are also private universities, and there are businesses involved. And this is very important for the consortium and the project in general for our approach to work on both academic and business side of OER. And so the question is, and it's built on what we've just introduced a bit as well, is where are we or where are we when we started this project. So we had the UNESCO recommendation on OER and the need for increased cooperation to make digital open education a reality for all. And then all Europeans as this is also a European focused project. There is poor integration with ed tech in the education sector, low adoption of OER for skills building in companies and in the public sector. There's issues with OER adoption and implementation across borders. We're looking at differences in language, legislation, and also culture. And then there are many more. So to start with, in getting the feel and understanding of the project, we can start with the challenges, and then we'll move away from the challenges. We have addressed or we have identified five challenges that we are looking to solve and address, but these are projects. The first challenge is the fragmentation of the OER stakeholder communities in Europe. Lack of collaboration and interoperability among European OER repositories, low development of OER institutional strategies in European businesses and academia. Lack of an integrated European OER quality paradigm and quality assurance mechanisms. The last challenge is the lack of entrepreneurial innovative approaches and business models based on OER. You'll see how we are incorporating these challenges into the project when we continue. The question is, is there a solution to these challenges? We do think there is. Collectively, we are looking to solve these. So one way of looking at this or the way we want to see it is that Encore Plus is a coordinated European approach, strengthening the value of OER as a catalyst and multiplier. We'd like to see a move from series of individual OER initiatives into our European OER ecosystem. We think it's necessary to address and contribute to European and international policy priorities, stimulating innovation and businesses through learning and training innovation, supporting the modernization of higher education in Europe, including digitalization and bridging non-formal and formal education by advancing recognition of open learning. Alright, so based on that, we've identified some objectives. The five objectives that we are trying to reach with our project is to set up and support a sustained and well-mapped European OER stakeholders network based on well-connected higher education and business communities. Foster collaboration and connection of OER European repositories into a European OER repository ecosystem. Ecosystem is a keyword. Stimulate the integration of OER institutional strategies within businesses and academia. Establish an open, distributed and highly trusted community-based OER quality review paradigm and working mechanisms. And lastly, demonstrate the innovation potential of OER within business settings and promote successful OER business models. We believe there is potential for great impact through stimulating innovation in learning and teaching, to stimulate or make sure that there are better access to quality OERs, support for language and culture adaptation, local companies to gain access to quality training resources, innovation through OER, so creating opportunities for local entrepreneurs, companies at tech, enhanced local educational repository functions, and increased inclusiveness of higher education. This is the structure of our project in Erasmus Plus style. We have split our work into eight packages. The partners on the side, they can represent a lead or a co-lead. However, we are all heavily involved in all of the work. What you will see when we continue is the work package to create this ecosystem, so building the European network of catalyzing open resources in education. I would like you to remember the keyword ecosystem. And then our four topic areas, changing technology paradigm, the future European OER ecosystem, which is number three. Number four, strategies and policies for the European OER ecosystem, quality for the future European OER ecosystem and supporting innovation. So the last bit then would be to try to visualize the encore model. We've looked at the challenges that we've addressed or we've found. We looked at the objectives that we have with the project and what's called is the how. In the middle you find the encore catalyst network, which is the ecosystem. Around you find four circles. These represent the four topic areas that we believe we need to work on in order to solve the five challenges that I mentioned earlier. So the four main topical areas that we are focusing on in encore is quality, OER technology, policies and practices and innovation and business models. Now you see those five challenges hanging around the outer perimeter of this and in the middle we have an ecosystem. And so it relates to our logo and with that I will hand over to Laura. Thank you. Thanks, Juliana. Can you see the screen? Hello everybody. Let me introduce a bit myself. I'm Laura Baglasina from Fundazione Politecnico di Milano. I'm a project manager, but I'm primarily a graphic designer and my activities are focused mainly on the development of digital learning projects. You already had a little preview of our logo, but now I will make a quick description of it to do a sort of summary of what Juliana has just said. And I will try to translate the goals and the key points of our project in a visual way. So one of the most important challenges of Encore Plus project is the creation of community of circles. Indeed, the project is going to host a series of webinars focused on thematic events. And one of these events will be policy, so the institutional strategies for European OER ecosystem. Then we will have the theme of quality for the construction of a European OER ecosystem. The third theme will be the technology and then we will have the innovation and business models. Some of you may be familiar with these colors. Indeed, they are the same of OER commons logo, and we made this choice to make recognizable also the general theme of the project. However, all these elements are strongly connected among them and their movement generate the idea of exchange and collaboration. There are other two very important themes of the project because we are going to realize a strong connection between already existing OER repositories. Moreover, they create a unique circle that can become an integral part of the dynamic ecosystem. And all these parts generate a circular movement that never ends. Indeed, we have not a starting point or an end, but we have just a dynamic flow. And this can obviously be a standalone symbol that can be declined into their four colors to better symbolize the single theme of the circles. But the logo in its complete part become the O of the word encore. And the O stands for open. That is the most important value of the project, our plus in a certain sense. I leave the floor to Ulf. Thank you very, very much, Laura. That was so nice, really so nice and to Giuliano. Thank you very, very much for this really wonderful graphic journey, actually, which you allowed us to take and to really explain and understand and embrace the spirit of the circles, where things come together in a perfect circle and circles are fluid symbols in which information are flowing around and are reaching every corner. So thank you very much for that, Laura. That was really, really nice. I think colleagues for a moment, for 10 seconds, maybe close all your eyes and imagine a Europe or a global environment. But we are now focusing also quite a lot on this European ecosystem. But of course, we are open to international collaborations and contacts. That's absolutely clear. We are not restricted to Europe with our initiative. But imagine with closed eyes for 10 seconds an environment in which you can reach educational materials in a transparent way and in an interoperable way, where you can hook into one repository or database and you can maybe reach out to other repositories and databases. That's what Encore is about. It's about an environment in which you find practices and you know who is taking care of what, which policies are working actually, who has made experience with which kind of policies to have a transparent overview of strong, impact-oriented ways, strategies, policies which work in organizations. Imagine an ecosystem of countries which are sharing and highlighting how businesses are starting to work in their HR departments for training and skilling purposes using open materials. That's what Encore is about and much more. You have already heard that we are having in the middle, in the O-part, in the middle part, the circle metaphor. Our project, while of course, OK, it is a European project, it follows the bureaucracy of European projects with work package and so on, milestones, timelines and so on. But while it is doing that actually, we are trying to look holistically into building a community reaching out to the organizations, the actors, those who are interested in open education and open educational resources. So we would like in the core of our project to concentrate all energies in the next three to four years on creating communities of practice. And we are going to create four communities of practice, four circles as we are calling them. One is focused on the issue of innovation, innovation through openness, innovation. We want to prove it, we want to prove the test, we want to show how openness can lead to innovation in education. Another one is on a new understanding of quality, moving from control to culture, moving from control to culture and community based quality understandings. The third one is about strategies and policies within institutions of the corporate sector, so enterprises, but also of the higher education field. So strategy and policy. And the fourth one is about technology, which is not really the term which justifies what we are doing. It's not about technology. It is really about creating a blueprint of how Europe can network its repositories, databases, open technology infrastructures for learning together. That's what we would like to create. And we would like to embed it into the circle work and invite you all from your angles, being it a critical one or supporting an affirmative one, being it divergent processes or convergent processes. We would like to invite you and have you participate either as core members, active promoters, leaders of the European movement on this, which we would like to see and create, or be it on the periphery, you're invited if you just want to lurk around and share information as much as if you want to actively contribute. We're going to run a series of webinars every six months, starting in about half a year, nine months. And in this webinar, they will be about thematically focused open moments, open moments where we invite everybody we will reach out to you. Go to the website which we have created. It's only a landing page today because we have just started with this initiative and we are already here with you, but we have just started with it. We have a landing page. Find the landing page. Maybe somebody can type it into the chat. Find the landing page and register if you would like to have more information on this initiative throughout the next years. We're going to have integration moments where all these four circuits and communities are meeting. We have seen three such big festivals of integrating knowledge, experience and creating the European body of open education there in a very new way throughout the next three years. So that's exactly what Laura told you. Innovation, policy, technology, quality coming together in a circle, creating the core element of Encore. That's the European network for catalyzing open education. We have now invited you to share your thoughts, share your insights, recommendations. I don't know if we have already some contributions, otherwise I will come back to that. I'm looking into the question answer too. There is nothing yet in there. Colleagues, we really would like your information and your knowledge and your inspirations. Tell us what you think about this initiative. Tell us if you know about similar initiatives and type it into the chat or into the question and answer tool. We'll come back to that later. For now, I'm going to introduce you to the next part of our webinar. It is the moment in which we start our chat show. What about Open? What about Encore? You will learn to get to know four main partners and four main topics. Michaela Schrenko, I'm always pronouncing that in the wrong way. I'm afraid, Michaela. Anna Farrell, Robert Farrell from the Open University. Anna Farrell from the Dublin City University in Ireland. Myself, I will be part. Now I'm going to hand over to my colleague Tina, who will moderate this and ask her, Tina, should I stop my screen sharing or leave it with that? Ulf, I think you can leave it on. That's fine. Hello, everyone. Welcome from my side also. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm an academic researcher at DHBW, which is the organization that Ulf is also representing today. You've already heard a lot about our project in terms of content, in terms of the idea of the communities, the vision where we would like to reach in about three years from now. But community is also about people, which is why I have the lovely task today to introduce you to four people in more detail, which are behind the project, which also all of them have a really strong connect with open education and open educational resources. So I would kindly request Michaela, Anna, Robert and Ulf to come together as a panel. Just one second. Yep. Where could we do it in that way? Okay, sure. That's fine also. So we've heard a lot about the vision. Now I would like the four of you, Michaela, Anna, Ulf and Rob, if you could just briefly share a little bit about what excites you about open education and open educational resources. What is your personal connect to this topic? After all, it's about community, it's about the people and it's about the passion that everyone in this project has and hopefully also all of you listening today who we might be able to convince to join us in one of the circles. So, Michaela, would you maybe like to start? Hello everyone. Just for the record, Michaela, we're getting there. Michaela, sorry. No problem at all. So I'm here with the Knowledge Crawl Foundation, but Tina has said to make it personal because yes, I also shared this belief that it is personal and I am passionate about this. So my connection to OER has been going on for quite some time now, almost 10 years. It started with the videolectures.net repository, which I'm still part of, which is the largest scientific video repository. From that on, we are moving on to UNESCO with the award for doing that work that we did and from the United Nations award, it came back. And through that, we also had the privilege to participate with OER recommendation, which was already mentioned today. And of course, through all of this content, open educational resources, we also applied some projects and I'm here in the form of someone who should talk a little bit about technology, but later. So I'm just going to skip to my personal, I've been thinking about what would be my personal passion about it. And I think it's very simple and very much used in our communities. It's just improving access to knowledge. Really simple. That would be my mission with all the work that I do. Thank you, Michaela, for sharing your background and your passion and your expertise and also your strong belief in OER and open education. I would then move on to Rob. Rob, what excites you about open education and open educational resources? Hi, everyone. I'm Rob Farrow. I'm a senior research fellow at the Open University in the UK. And I've been doing open education research and working on different projects around open education for nearly 10 years now. And before I started doing ed tech stuff, I was a postgraduate philosophy student. And I see in open education a sort of continuity with some of the themes that have interested me ever since I started doing philosophy really. Like normativity, autonomy, creativity, modernity, reproduction in society, communication. So some of these things that I've been interested in philosophically for a long time are quite sort of apparent in the field of open education. So I'm interested in OER as a route towards social justice to facilitating new forms of collaboration and interaction. And also as a way of holding a lens up to our existing educational systems to help us understand what might be working or not working very well. Because it's a point of departure, a point of difference to our kind of traditional systems. Thank you very much, Rob. Is there one strong belief you can share with us? Yeah, I think it's the idea that OER provides a focus and an avenue for social justice and alternative practices and critique. Thank you for the introduction, Rob. And we're hoping to hear a little bit more about how potentially Encore Plus can support in implementing those visions that you just shared and just a little bit. But for the time being, Orna, could I please ask you to briefly introduce yourself and share a strong belief about open education and open educational resources with us? Thanks, Tina. Hi, Orna Farrell here from DCU. I was just trying to think back to when I first started encountering openness. And I've arrived at about 2008 when I started experimenting with the open source platform Mahara and also previously Moodle. They were my first kind of experiences with the open platforms. But since then, I became involved in a few funded projects, one in particular, the student success toolbox where we created OERs. And that was kind of where I started to develop an interest, learned about Creative Commons licensing, even just the idea of an OER. And that was funded by the National Forum, which is a national body in Ireland. And I think James is also on the call somewhere. That was his project. But that's kind of what piqued my interest. And in terms of beliefs or strong beliefs, I think is the word you're using, Tina. I think my philosophical beliefs are that knowledge should be open. And that's why I think they were open education and OERs resonates with me. I believe in access to education. I believe in equality. And the more open our knowledge, the more possible it is for people to access that knowledge. And I don't really agree with the idea of locking important knowledge behind paywalls. So if you're going to create something, why not make it open so that others can benefit from your creation? So true. Thank you so much, Orna, for sharing. Ulf, last but not least, what excites you about open education and open educational resources? And what is your strong belief you would like to share with us today? Well, I'm a real user of open educational resources myself. I hardly create my own teaching materials anymore, any longer. And I also produce with my students essays, podcasts, film clips, which we then share into the open. So that's what connects me in my everyday practices. But what really got me going was 10 years ago when I understood that with open educational resources, you can also start to think about not just opening up the resources, making them available under Creative Commons licenses so that others can use it, but to also open up the educational designs, the educational scenarios. And so that was back 10 years ago when we created this concept of open education practice. And that is really something where I am very passionate about open education practices basically meets to open up your education design. So to allow your students more and more to decide on their learning pathways and on their learning methodologies and even on their learning objectives in the frame, maybe what you can let's say justify as a university. And at the same time doing that while using open educational resources and producing open educational resources. So these are learning environments which are really empowering students and supporting them on their pathway to autonomous learners for the future. And that's what really excites me there. So open all the way, Ulf. Yeah, thank you so much for sharing. Ulf, maybe we'll continue with you right away. You already mentioned that you, for instance, want to move from control to culture when it comes to a community driven quality concept for OER. What is the idea at ONCOR as part of the ONCOR Plus project of how to tackle this or achieve this? Yeah, quality is a multi-faceted concept. When it comes to open educational resources and quality or open education and quality, it is really, really difficult to find hard, clear criteria because open educational resources are by nature used in different education contexts. And it depends on the fit of the resource, the target group and the context, which makes the quality in the end of the day. So there are no generic quality criteria which have an education impact. Of course, there are quality criteria which have an impact on the media, the interoperability and so on and so on. But on the education, the learning, really, that's very, very difficult. But what we can see and that's the new approach to which we would like to explore. What we can see is that there are communities out there which are around, situated around repositories, around not always repositories, but sharing hubs. Sometimes these are not repositories, but just groups of colleagues sharing things on a server in a faculty. So they make their materials open. And in these communities, there is one thing existing which in a way leads into this kind of beneficial sharing with each other, where you give feedback, where you improve, where you share, where you reuse, and that's the issue of trust. So in these communities, there is trust. And we would like to, let's say, reframe this concept of quality and infuse it and charge it with this concept of trust. We would like to find in Europe communities and assess and explore the way they manage to build trust. And we are very interested, if you know of such a community out there now, hearing and listening and viewing us, where you say, yeah, that's a good example. They have good quality resources where I go because I trust them. I know them and that's a good experience. And we would like to try to learn from that, how to build that, in a way, technologies of trusted community sharing. And that's what we would like to understand and so extract from the community. That's a new way we would like to propose to the community. And if one was to join this circle relating to quality, what roughly would that look like? Or what would I get out of it if I joined the circle? So if we're thinking about the audience, they might wonder, okay, so roughly, how does it work? Basically, what you would like to take out of that is we're going to have open workshop meetings. In this open workshop meetings, we're going to present and assess good practice examples from across Europe. You would learn to know people who are actually involved in quality work in open communities and from open education resource communities. You would take away conceptual, let's say, conceptual value for your own work as a researcher, as a policymaker, you would be informed about which policies on quality, or which policy environments, conditions on quality do work. As an institutional leader, you would probably take away ideas of where you can steer your institution in order to create a high quality ecosystem of sharing cultures within your institution. And as an educational professional, you would learn, and I think that's actually what I think is the most important group of people, you would learn how you can enter into trusted conversations, into trustful and trust-building conversations with your colleagues in your department and how others are doing that. I think this is what we are looking at really in our circle, in our open group. But the agenda to be worked on is really to be defined by those who are there. Great, by those who are interested in the topic. And just to reiterate once more, it's an open group and it's open to anyone, no matter what background you have as such. But you believe there's a specific relevance for people with an educational context in a way. Okay, so Ulf, you spoke about certain repositories, whether they're actually technical or more on a smaller scale within certain groups of colleagues. Michaela, what do you see as the important challenges and a potential contribution from Encore Plus side when it comes to technology topics? I think the challenges that we also tried to solve beforehand already with our projects, namely that would be the extra gun project which Ulf listed in his initial list, is the questions of multilinguality, cross-domain, a search, cross-cultural search, and connecting, basically connecting OERs in this kind of cross way. So technology does have a potential to optimize this. And actually I'd like to refer to a question that was posted by Paola, I believe. I think that it can support the integration of existing network of OERs. That's something that also could be a challenge in the sense of connecting with the intent to make it grow, the community and resources. Of course, there's technical challenges everywhere. You look, there's also solutions, but based on this long-term understanding of the learner's interactions, there's much work to be done in looking at and also judging, not just developing solutions, but seeing what is the proper solutions from the point of ethics and so on to do some recommendation systems to again improve the scalability of OER. So I think these are the challenges that are addressed within Anko. Great. But is, let's say, the tech community mainly for techies? Or is it open to everyone? I think this is the main reason why anyone can join, because anything that we developed or researchers that contributed this are first of all needed to understand OER. And the technology is supposed to be supporting. And you are not a teacher, a learner, is not expected to understand technology, but it's hugely valuable to get impact from the point of UX and learning experience again. So absolutely not. We are the more diverse, the more interdisciplinary circle this would become, community this would build the more progress we could make. Great. I couldn't have said it better. Thank you so much, Michaela. And that's exactly also what our project stands for. We're like a big group of interdisciplinary and very diverse backgrounds. And that's what really adds the value. So to everyone in the audience, please do consider contributing your insights, either now in the chat or if you say, oh, I think the circle concept sounds interesting, please do keep me posted. Do let us know. Orna, what does all of this look like in a bit more detail when it comes to policy or strategy? What is all for us hoping to achieve there? Which challenges will be taken into consideration? Thanks, Tina. So in a way, similar challenges, but a kind of very patchy policy and strategy landscape, some pockets of big engagement in higher ed and other educational contexts. But the difference with Encore Plus to possibly other or previous projects around open education is the focus on business. So in the policy work package, work package four, we're going to be first of all doing some desk research around what policies and strategies exist already in both the education and business context. We're going to be launching calls for examples of good practice from business and education. And we're going to gather those examples. And then the kind of final big outcome will be a set of policy guidelines for business and higher ed and or possibly two sets in fact, because they're quite a quite two quite different groups and quite different needs in order to support them to develop their policy and strategy around open education, OEP or OER, whichever term we're using. So I think there's a lot of people here from the educational context here today. It's people from the business context, I think we're really reaching out to. Someone here is up to cool open education practice in the realm of business. Sign up, tell your friends. So I think that's kind of the key, the key bit in the policy arena. We're building on existing policy already as well. There's the open up Europe framework. And then also obviously the UNESCO framework as well. It's a matter of gathering that together, analyzing it and coming up with a kind of new map slash framework that will support the ecosystem that we want to build. So if I have a bit of expertise in the field or any practical experience, I can basically also chip in the circle and add my five cents to it and kind of shape the policy and strategy topic for OER for the future to come, correct? Absolutely. And with policy, you know yourself, the more consultation and participation, the better it will represent the needs of the group. So bottom up rather than top down. Great. Thank you so much, Orna, for sharing a bit, a few more details. Encore Plus is still at the beginning. We recently launched the project, but it's great to already hear which direction it will be heading in the future. And I hope you're all excited about what we're sharing today. Last but not least, Rob, what about innovation? We've already briefly touched upon this topic, but what do you think innovation looks like and how will it be part of Encore Plus? Thank you. Well, obviously, OER themselves are an innovation and they're a kind of response to the innovation that was copyright. So we're always kind of innovating, we're always kind of developing new approaches and new technologies. But the thing they always say about innovation is that it happens in silos. So the question is how do we take innovations from their sort of natural environment and spread them more quickly throughout the whole ecosystem around Europe? So some of the things we'll be looking at is to try to understand and describe innovation with OER, how it's happening, what's transferable about it, how other people can recreate something that someone's been able to do. So part of that is developing a framework for evaluating innovation in an OER context and that's a tool that we're planning to share with the community to use as well. But when we do identify interesting cases, what do we do with them? How do we share them? What's the right kind of communication around them? And in a way, we want to be the kind of lightning conductor so that when something interesting is happening, quickly we can share the right message around it and help other people to potentially just implement that sort of thing in their own context. But it's more than that because it's also the changing mindset that accompanies innovation. So how do we create a community around this circle of innovators who have an innovation mindset, who want to try new things, learn from each other's experiences, but do it in an open way, in a collaborative way, rather than the traditional competitive way. So I think that for us to more fully understand exactly what the value propositions are, we need to encourage people to share and to mutually arrive at a kind of improved understanding of the potential and the application of open educational resources. Great. Thank you, Rob. We still have a few minutes left for our chat show. I think, did anybody hear something that they would like to react to, that they heard from your peers right now? Yes, please, Ulf? I think that what becomes apparent is that really, and how my colleagues who are leading these different perspectives on OER and us as well, really becomes apparent that we would like to facilitate what's already happening out there. And through facilitating, through collecting, through gathering, through looking at it and making it available to everybody in the community, it's going to create a whole new quality. Openness is not going to mean something shady and vague. It's going to be pulled into the light of clarity in a way and being able then to use it in a clear and trustful way. Plus, and that's going to be really interesting and probably you can see that also, we are one initiative, one framework, and we are going to work together on these cross-cutting issues also between innovation and quality and technology and policy. And not just, so to speak, focus them in a separate way. It's going to be really, really exciting. Plus, we're going to do that in an open workshop like where everybody is invited really to join and learn and participate in the discussion. Thank you all for underlining once more. It's not about reinventing the wheel, but it's, as you said, about bringing together what's already there and building upon it. I see somebody in the chat also agreeing that yes, absolutely yes. So I think you hit a nerve there. Oh, and thanks, Heila for sharing some links in the chat also. Great, thank you so much. I think maybe once more call to everyone in the audience. Now you've heard a little bit more. If you do have suggestions of projects we should look at, any experience you want to share. If you want to give us a brief feedback what you think about what you've heard so far. If you have an opinion on our logo, please do let us know. Feel free to post in the chat. And otherwise, shall we move on to the second call then? Yes, let's do that. Thank you very much to the colleagues for the different perspectives now. Thank you very much, Tina, for moderating in such a good and lively way. Very, very good. And we have prepared one more poll now. And the question to all of you, we have a growing number of participants still. Some are still joining, which is good. Think about these circuits which we discussed now. Think about the circles. And think about which would be your most interest, which in which circle would you be most interested to join? That's what the next poll is about. You can also have several choices and tell us what would be your interest, your most interesting theme. So which circles would you be most interested in? Is it innovation through OER? Is it institutional policies for OER? Is it a new community-driven quality concept for OER? Or a blueprint for a technical framework for OER? Or several of these choices? Let us know, please. While we are waiting, we have two questions in the question-answer section for later on so far. So no, three actually, no. So if you have more questions or comments, as I said, we are also looking for statements, comments, peer feedback for what you have heard today. Encouragement. Criticism. So let us know there. And we have much more feedback, really a lot of rich feedback. Also links and so on in the chat. So thank you very much for that. That's really, really great. So Tina, I think we can close the poll. I don't know how many people have participated. I don't see that yet, but we will see how the interest. So innovation is the top priority for most of you. Innovation through OER, very interesting. Rob, you will be happy to hear that. Institutional policies, then a new community-driven quality concept. I'm happy to hear that. But I think that the main message is that there is interest in all of the four topics. And that's really good to see. So thank you very much. I'm just counting actually how many people have participated. 73 have participated. That's a lot of our participants. So very interesting. Thank you very much. As a moderator, I am moving on to the next step in our, I'm just shuffling my slides. I'm moving on to the next step in our webinar. Thank you again for the chat show participants, our colleagues, our experts for the different streams of the initiative. And thank you for taking part in the poll. I'm moving on now to the next, and that is to hand over the word to Toran, the general secretary of the International Council for Open and Distance Education, to give a greeting from your side. So Toran, over to you. What do you think about this initiative and where would you like to, would like it to go and to steer it, actually? Thank you. Yes, I will start with a brief introduction of ICD to the ones who are new to us. ICD stands for the International Council for Open and Distance Education, and we are a global membership association with members in over 75 countries across all the world regions. We have advocated and facilitated for inclusive access to quality education for more than 80 years through various technologies and methodologies. We're also an NGO in former consultative partnership with UNESCO, which means that we are committed to the 2030 agenda for sustainable development with particular focus on the STG-4, which is about inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong learning opportunities for all. And goal number four is unthinkable without increased access to education through flexible study provision, adaptive learning methods, supportive technologies and proper infrastructure, which is what ICD members aim to further develop and improve every day. And open education and OER is through the UNESCO OER recommendation that was adopted by all UNESCO member states in 2019, an important cornerstone of the sustainable development goal four. So with this background, ICD's vision is to achieve the potential of open, flexible and distance learning created through our members, partners and learning communities. And the EncorePlus project fits very well with the ICD's strategic goals and prioritized activities for the coming years because it seeks to investigate and build on the potential of OER when it comes to policies, quality, education, new technologies and innovation and entrepreneurship. So this multi-stakeholder approach is at the very heart of the project. It is to connect and develop the value propositions of OER and open education for both academia and the industry and private business. And in the spirit of openness, the EncorePlus project aims to engage and connect with relevant actors and projects also outside of Europe. Because we truly believe that the key learnings and outputs from this European project may be replicable in other regional and cultural contexts. So this is why we invite all of you who have an interest in open education and innovation and entrepreneurship with OER to connect with the EncorePlus project and more specifically our engagement circle, which has been introduced now. And you might simply do that by signing up for interest on the project website, Encoreproject.eu. The link has been shared in the chat. And make sure to register today. You will receive updates from the project and invitation to engagement events in the coming months and years. This is a three-year project. So with that, do not hesitate to take contact with our project manager, Juliana Grandley, or myself should you have questions, suggestions or inputs from other relevant projects and resources that the Encoreproject should know about and take into account when building the European ecosystem for OER. And I've seen that many of you already did so in the chat. So that's great with the support and the engagement. So with that, thank you very much. Thank you very much, Terron. Very, very good. Yeah, I really can only reiterate and emphasize that we are an initiative to reach out, to integrate and to network together, just like Terron said it, and that it's really the core of the issue to improve access to quality education and to improve social development to improve the situation. Yeah, we are now at the end actually of our webinar, but we have promised that we are going to take some questions from the audience and Tina, tell me, do we have questions actually? We do all. Actually, we have quite a few. I've collected them for you in a document just to make it a little bit clearer across the Q&A and the chat. Can you see those? Otherwise, I'm happy to help out also. So let's go over them and see if we can answer them collectively and see who's going to. How will you handle the problem of motivation of teachers to use OER? How will you handle the problem of motivation of teachers to use OER? Who can answer there? Who has an idea? Anna, maybe, Michaela, Rob? I don't mind having first go of that one. I think one thing that often happens is educators are not that receptive to the idea of OER because it's just one more thing for them to try and do when they're already very stretched and they feel very time poor. So one way of approaching this is to demonstrate quite clearly how OER solves problems for educators rather than saying this is like this extra thing that everyone has to do on top of their other job because I don't think that gets you very far with people who are already quite stretched in their role. So then it becomes a question of how do you get the communication right? How do you get the messaging right so that they quickly understand what you're trying to say and the benefits of OER to them? But it helps to target those kind of messages at very specific stakeholders. So one thing I think we'd like to do in this project is establish those different groups, how to communicate with them and how to get the messaging right so that they see this as a positive thing from the start and something that they want to do and they see the benefit of. Thank you. I heard a little bit ago on this question about this motivation, acceptance uptake in teaching teachers' motivation. Sylvia, what is your opinion actually? I know that you are in this field very much. Thanks, Alf. OK, my name is Sylvia Valdez. I'm from Colombia and in the other part of the world in this moment. I'm convinced that teachers are very interested in improving also the teaching practice in order to provoke a really good learning in their students. So I think this is the main motivation of the teachers but we need to communicate with them as Rob mentioned. What is the way? Because in many cases the problem is the teacher don't have the tools to co-create, for example, with other teachers, OERs or they don't have enough knowledge about where are these tools and how to use them. Learn is also a really good way to engage the teacher. I mean, in this way you go to obtain learning for you to improve your teaching practice. I think this is a good way to engage the teachers. Thank you very much, Sylvia. It's also an interesting story. When I was a vice president of my university I wanted to start an OER initiative between our nine different campuses. It's a huge university and I thought that would be a good thing to do and nobody wanted to do it actually. It was my first experience, not my first but it was one of my experiences. The interesting thing was that in schools and I talked to the people about sharing their resources they were not very fond of doing that as an OER but they told me actually that they are doing that already. Many, many occasions and examples were surfacing where colleagues were sharing with each other. This colleague was that colleague with the other five colleagues of the and they had a server sometimes and one school even had the whole curriculum so to speak, mirrored on a server where they were feeding in but they didn't do it in the open. They did amongst them. I was learning that OER acceptance is also about an institutional creating an institutional sharing culture. I think this is an important issue for motivation and building acceptance. We have another question. OERs from Hillary McQueen the last question was by the way from Godfrey Charny which I know Hillary McQueen OERs are expensive to create is that perhaps barrier to trust and openness? I don't know. Are OERs expensive to create? Is it a cost issue there? Michela, what do you think? I'm picking out people now. Well, in my experience there's OERs created just about all the time everywhere especially in the new conditions that we found ourselves in. People had to get creative and there's so much content and the content needs to be shared. There's a genuine need. So I would venture a guess that they're not expensive to create. I think that more the bigger issue is about raising awareness still that would be I think that the barrier to the trust and openness part as we always in our experience speaking to educators and learners seems to be some sort of guarantee of quality that I would say that is a barrier to trust and openness and bigger uptake. The perceived quality is a big barrier. And the fear that there is no what people call accreditation or certification or something like that which is a concept which is often not really applying when it's used. But there is a fear around that. If I use that, is it really first rate is it really of value to me? That's a fear and we need to tackle that. Rob, please go. Just on this idea of the cost of production I think when people first move towards OER then there can be a slight inefficiency because they have to learn what is this open licensing about how does all this stuff work maybe they have to start thinking a bit more about assembling resources then if they're already using stuff that was just in the textbook it's not passed that bit then it's a lot more efficient and also the more OER that's out there the more there is in the commons then the more efficient and the cheaper it is to produce resources but the key thing is that for both proprietary and open resources it's really a matter of quality how much it costs and how much time it takes to put it together the higher the level of quality the longer it's going to take to do something but essentially there's no real difference between putting stuff together with open resources or non-open resources and the activity is the same but when we have a well-developed commons and when we have ways of software and platforms designed around making this whole process easier the further we get into this the easier and the cheaper and the quicker it should be. So we have another question which I would like to take from, where is it? Delma Rocha and it's about the enterprises and companies, the private sector and maybe Rob you can also talk about that a little bit the question goes like that what to do so that the companies that dominate the market and the production of software and hardware worldwide have a better attitude to the fact that humanity needs to be connected virtually so let me rephrase it also a little bit the question is clear but let me also rephrase a little bit into this direction to ask a question how are we going to work on this issue to make this OERs a real value perspective to companies also not just higher education? Well, in some ways there's some similarities with what I was just saying about explaining the value proposition to educators I think in the case of businesses just like educators they care about time they care about money these are things that we know OERs can make a difference to and can help with commercial businesses tend to be more focused around a sort of competition model and they tend to be less inclined to share anything that they think could affect their business advantage so different messaging in a way they don't have to share they can just make use of open resources in developing their own training materials or something like that you can do that within open context so I think there are differences and different modulations in terms of how people can actually be involved with this kind of initiative and being open isn't just one thing everyone has to now do it this way so the thing that interests me is how do we empower different stakeholders how do we give them to see that openness is a way for them to empower themselves to power greater freedom in what they do I'm not sure we've perfected that yet but I think that that is the essence of what I think anyone would find appealing here's a way to give yourself some more power and to sort of extend your reach I think that matters to businesses if we can just show them that it's a clear way for them to save time or money then I don't see why they wouldn't be interested thank you very much anybody else who wants to have a go just raise your hands and then I'll turn to you other than that meanwhile I'm going to take another question maybe on a I don't know if you have an idea on this one which I haven't yet read out but I'm going to read it out what about the tacit knowledge the experiences the tacit knowledge from course design open course designer delivery what about that actually how to let's say share that and step into that because it says here that has a large impact on the successful use of resources yeah that's an interesting one actually because yeah if you're going to repackage or reuse or remix something that you're taking you would definitely need to have a bit of knowledge of course design and maybe have some information about the design maybe even framework behind a resource I don't think it's I have to have having remixed something quite recently myself from one thing into another thing I think would be no harm but I think you'd have to impose design models on people I don't think that's really in the spirit of the open kind of movement but maybe it would be a nice thing to have in the metadata you know this was designed using the ABC learning design framework where you know that might help the person reusing having a better understanding of how to then adapt to their own context so I don't know did I answer the question Ilf I feel yes but I also would like to look into the other colleagues do you have another idea to add thank you and we have another one also with the view to the time I'm progressing there from my perspective trust is number one priority both in business and academia cooperation and collaboration will definitely benefit everyone yet how do you plan to deal with a possible copyright violation what kind of strategies could be applied to prevent copyright infringement things I think that's maybe also an answer which a question which goes into is true and is directed at the business field I can imagine who has an idea from you colleagues on that who can I pass that how to deal with possible copyright violations well I can have a go I mean essentially copyright violations dealt with by copyright law and open licensing just sits on top of all that and in a way if you don't want to be found in violation of copyright only use open licenses and you will never be in violation of copyright assuming that everything is licensed correctly in the first place and the person who applies the license is the right person to do that then it's pretty hard to get done for copyright violation as long as you abide by the terms of the license if you're very worried about it just go for cc0 or something like that or public domain no you can't be there can't be any violation of that copyright there is no copyright on it so so yeah I can see how it's definitely been like historically the fear of copyright violation has arguably been a barrier to innovation in teaching because when people put their stuff together lots of people are using copyrighted stuff even if it's just an image from a google search or something and they haven't got time to check it they don't know about databases they can go to for copyright free images so what ends up happening they don't share those things they only use them in a very select number of people and that means that it never enters the public domain for a wider use so one way sort of strengthening the commons is to educate people around how open licensing works how it can be used to protect you and your own works because I think that's the sort of reassurance and as you say all about trust that's the kind of that's the sort of situation we want to get to really so people feel confident using OER so thank you very much Rob thank you very much all other colleagues we have we are actually now really approaching the end of our webinar I don't want to keep you over time so we have three minutes left on my watch yeah it has been a pleasure to have you here this afternoon this webinar has been a real collaborative effort and I would like to thank all my colleagues for being here and weaving your ideas into this what has now been the encore webinar and I would also like to thank all of you participants to ask questions and to engage into the chat I would like to reiterate Torrance requests to go to the website and register if you're interested because you can very soon be invited to learn more about the circles the communities which we are creating for the next three to four years for the next time being we're going to take care of these different questions and perspectives and we would really like to meet you with your experiences and in a way create value through creating the network the network the European network of catalyzing OER and open education so thank you very much to my colleague Tina also for organizing and pulling strings in the back and moderating the chat show to Giuliana, to Laura for creating this visual story also for the project to our four chat show guests to Torrance, to everybody in the Eden community who is our host and who are the people watching us today thank you for making this happen I'm going to share then the final slides with you which are really the outlook on what's going to be next we are part here the open education week of Eden the 2021 open education week and tomorrow at 5 o'clock tomorrow at 5 o'clock is it true tomorrow at 5 o'clock we're going to have the next webinar so if you're interested come and log in it's about online educational courses on cultural topics helping the creative industries reinvent itself during a crisis and it is the network of academic professionals of Eden which is offering this so thank you very much to everybody and have a nice evening and see you around on Openness, on Open Education Open Educational Resources and let's be in touch thank you very much