 Good afternoon. I want to say that I've done just loads of terms. I haven't just my first time doing live at the OER conference on this new platform. So it's very, very exciting. So I won't waste any time because as I said, I'm delighted to introduce some very good friends from Dublin City University there, to Arnafaro James Brunton, Amy Costlow, Katrina Nihay, Matthew Waters, Adon Farley, Kleena Olihan, and Alexandra Sharna Cove. And as I understand, I think it's Kleena, Arna and James will be leading off. So open course, open textbook, hashtag, open teach. So we'll start away. Thanks, Tom. Thanks for that lovely introduction. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the session. As you can see, it's a bit of an army of a group, this presentation. But I suppose it takes a community for this project to have been so successful. So today we're going to talk to you about the open teach project, which was a funded project in Ireland funded by the National Forum. And the aim of the project was to create resources and supporting materials to help people learn to teach online. The website is there and the Twitter handle as well. So if you feel like tweeting us or having a look at the resources, please go ahead, I'm going to share them in the Discord channel later on as well. So it was a big project team. The project ended in May 2020. Ooh, May 2020, I'm going to say, but I'm guessing. But it was a project based in the open education unit in DCU. So it had a couple of different phases. We started off by doing a needs analysis talking to online students and online teachers about what they thought made for effective teaching online. Then Katrina did a massive literature review, which is a great report called teaching online is different. Check it out. Then using those two pieces of information or data, we started designing the course. And we used a couple of different way methodologies. We used ABC. We used design thinking. We piloted resources, got feedback, ish rated. It turned out to be a short Moodle course, which was open and online. And it also produced some digital guides, which were also openly licensed. Following the first run of the course, which took place deep in the pandemic in March 2020, we created an evaluation report. And then the final step, which isn't on the slide, is what's happening right now, is the creation of the open textbook. So here are all the outputs in one beautiful picture. There at the top one there is the course. And you can see the different reports. And on the far right, we have the open textbook. So just some data I put together recently for the National Forum. And I thought it might be interesting. This is the kind of impact as of February 2021 of the Open Teacher Project. So you can see there are huge web traffic, lots of Twitter activity, all the videos from the courses, from the course around YouTube. The teaching online is different report, the literature analysis 31 citations as of yesterday and 5,900 reads on Research Gates. So huge, huge interest in that report. It was very timely, I suppose. And you can see we've had two course runs and over 1,000 participants, 200 completers, which isn't bad for an open online course. James, I think you're going to take this slide. Yes. And just someone was asking about, you know, a link, basically, because it's hard to put links in any of the chats that are clickable, OpenTeach.ie. If you go there, you'll find all the resources and reports and lots of good stuff. So when we were putting this course together, we used the ABC curriculum design online learning design or learning design approach. We found this to be really effective for doing so. We got together, we were facilitated by a colleague from the Teaching Enhancement Unit in DCU, Claire Gormley. And in about half a day, we went from just a bundle of ideas about what this course could be to knowing, okay, this is what it's going to be. This is what its scope is going to be. This is what we wanted to be. We wanted to be a realistic, doable course for busy academics. We wanted to be online. We wanted to be flexible in terms of engagement expectations. And we wanted to focus on these real core elements of online learning, social presence, facilitating discussions, collaborating online, live online teaching and supporting students online. And we wanted to kind of give them basic pedagogical knowledge, give them like the basics, and then get into a scenario to really contextualize it. And of course, it had to be online, because both how else were you going to give people a flexible course, and how are you going to give people the experience of being online learners, which is really useful for learning how to facilitate other actual online learners. I think that's that. I think that's it for that slide. So what we ended up with was, as Orna said, this Moodle-based course. We ran it for the first time. What month was that? Yeah. So yeah. And I mean, this is the thing. No project plan survives contact with a global pandemic. So we started preparing this pilot as a small scale, full on sort of facilitation course. And then the pandemic happened. And everyone in the world turned into a brand new online learner, not just our kind of principal target for this project initially, which were part-time adjunct faculty who often don't get the same opportunities for CPD that other people do. But all of a sudden, everyone in the world thought this was the exact course for them. So instead, we ended up with about 450 participants. And we just had to rapidly adapt our facilitation model to try to facilitate those more Mook numbers than small scale report numbers. Do you want to go on to the next slide? And it went very well. So we ran the course over a couple of weeks and did an evaluation at the end. And the feedback that we got was extremely positive. The people who took the course reported that they, well, first of all, they gave good feedback on the course design, which was useful. We had a couple of things to tweak after that. But the actual course design got very good feedback. They gave good feedback about how the course helped them build confidence about teaching online. And this was both because they got to see things from an online learner's perspective and because the course gave them ideas about, you know, how to form strategies for engaging students in synchronous and asynchronous context or online context. And then also it helped them to develop new knowledge. That's like the bits where we were giving them just full on straight, here's some basic information about online pedagogy, online teaching techniques. And then that being contextualized in scenarios where they could talk through and talk with others about that stuff. And then the only other thing we haven't put on that slide is it helped, it helped them build a community in that MOOC to help show them how getting people into a community online can help them learn, can help them learn from each other and help teach each other. Back to you. Thanks, James. So that's the project which is finished. And then the next phase, I mean, we've always been interested in open textbooks. We've been talking about them for quite a while. AIM in particular is very keen on open textbooks and has done a bit of research on it. I know Tom as well. And one of the reasons the idea for the open textbook came about was that sharing Moodle files is really hard. Katrina, do you want to come in and tell a little bit about the problem there? Yeah, essentially a lot of the materials were developed using H5P. And there were a lot of embedded links. And the particular version of Moodle that we were running didn't allow the redirection of those links once you brought them into other Moodle platforms. So we tried a few workarounds. And essentially, anyone who wanted to use this would have to upgrade to the latest Moodle platform. So yeah, it was problematic. So it's one to remember that H5P and those don't use relative addressing in their links. Thanks, Katrina. Yeah. But I think one option we also you thought of was we could publish it to Moodle.net. So we may still do that. Or we might rework it slightly formatting-wise. So there's less of that linking problem. But the big solution then was to make an open textbook. Because this project is all about openness in terms of sharing. Every single thing we created was creative commons licensed from videos to H5P to the reports. And this was a lovely way of bringing all that together. And also I was thinking about the long-term benefits of having it in this format. So we got a press book license very generously given to us by Rebus. They ran a bit of a project during March or April to help people pivot online due to the pandemic. So we got a lovely pro press books license. I talked about the why already. And now we'll talk a bit about the how. So one thing that became very clear when myself and Matthew and Kleena and Adon and Alex began trying to turn this into an open textbook. So that's where the other half of the team come in. Reverse engineering a book from a course and reports and blog posts is not as straightforward as we might have thought. So it very much was an exercise in backwards design. And one thing that stood out to me is after we'd imported all the content and had chapters and things like that and it looked pretty good is when you read it the language in a course is different to the language in a book. So you know the rewriting the kind of contextualizing that maybe it is more implicit in a course and needs to be more explicit in a book. So here are the kind of stages we went through creating the book planning obviously because we love a bit of learning design. So having a look through what was there and remembering what was there and thinking about how to fit it in. Looking through that we had a lovely blog post series following the first course run. So there's about 15 or 16 blog posts from participants and from different facilitators. So trying to capture those views as well. And then the reports themselves we had lovely quotes from students and lovely quotes from educators. So trying to integrate some of that material. So again we started just bringing it over creating chapter headings experimenting with formatting and design and layout. Some of the team had experience with WordPress some not. So you know there was a bit of getting up to speed. And then a kind of a second cycle where new content and new rewriting and rewriting was happening. So where we are at the moment is at the review and edit kind of stage. It's almost there. My plan had been to present fully beautiful and published today but that plan did not happen. So Kleena is going to tell you a little bit about what the press book platform is like to work on. Over to you Kleena. You're on mute. There's always one. Thanks Rana. So as Rana mentioned some people in the team had used press books word press before but I was one of the people that hadn't used it before. And I think this is important to mention because I did get up to speed with it really quickly because I found it was quite an intuitive platform. And the reason for that is when you look at the screen here you can see the dashboard and it has the table of contents in there and then the settings all along the side. So it is clear and simple and one of the good things about it is that you can have multiple administrators. So Rana added us all to the book when she set the the shut up and we're all able to use at the same time. We sectioned it off. We're all doing different things. So kind of spent the process up because you're all able to use it at the same time. And I think one benefit of it is that I had preset options. So that would be kind of the style and the theme and that sort of thing. But it also had preset text boxes and these text boxes came with suggestive heading such as learning outcomes and examples and that sort of thing. So it was really pumped in good pedagogy but still keeping it very customizable at the same time. One thing that we noticed was that the formatting could be a bit finicky but overall we do think it turned out to be a professional looking resource. So then we're going on to the features and content types that we use. So on the screen here there's a screenshot of a video that we used H5P and then some takeaway resources at the end of each chapter. So it was great that we could hyperlink in there. Well one of the main things that stood out for us was H5P because as mentioned we are avid users of H5P and H5P was used throughout the original online course. So it was great that we could upload those into the press book. We could edit them within the press book. We could create new ones in there if we wanted. So it just gave us a lot of a lot of leeway. So it was great to have that functionality. Another thing is that we could embed YouTube videos directly into the press book. So there's no messing around, not to much messing with HTML or anything like that. So it's quick and easy. Then we had the there's also a media storage section. So media libraries everything's just in there readily available to reuse and there are other plugins that we didn't look at too much but they would definitely benefit others. So overall so many different content types can be used. We used to really to make it more engaging and interactive because although it is a book it's an online book. So we see what we wanted to distinguish between being a book and a course but still keep that book that book and element. So you know using press books it was clear that it was an open source ethics is at the heart of press book and I think that I think that's clear. So back to you Orna. Thanks Kleena. And we're on to questions now but if I have time I would like to demo the book if that's allowed. Just even flick through a chapter. Do I have time? Well we don't appear to have too many questions. Bar can the Moodle course be exported for remixing? So if you if you just I think you've sort of answered that if you can answer that quickly then just give me a quick demo. Sure yes so the long and the short of it is yeah you can you can export an entire backup file but as as Katrina mentioned the problems with the hyper the linking happen and so the option the other option is to publish it to Moodle.net so that's that's an option we still intend to explore. Just to add in there that we had also created document to go with the Moodle backup that indicated where those links had to be changed so you know you won't have to try to the whole thing they're there and ready for you to change. Yeah that's a good point. So just get in touch. And we have shared it about 20 something times already it's just that we realized after sharing it a few times Katrina people were people were getting frustrated. So I give a quick demo of the book and if that's cool for a minute or two a kind of a completed looking chapter. So one thing that's also very nice is you can you can export the entire book as a PDF a very nicely formatted PDF and you can also publish it as an e-pop you can get it into the Amazon store there's all sorts of stuff that is possible. Does it say all that when you do that as the PDF although it removes the videos and the H5Ps it does give you the exact type of link for you to type it into the web if you want it so that's a really good feature. Yeah I like that too Katrina I was looking at that on the PDF so so there is there you can see there's some of the embedded H5P all the interactivity works and again another so you can see about the video and we have added some new stuff I mean there's a couple there's new paragraphs about things like the pandemic context drawing on some really nice work that's been done over the past year that we may have you know wouldn't have had in the original course and and also using things like these lovely diagrams are from one of the reports the the teaching online is different so I think we've taken the best bits out of the whole project and brought them together. Does anyone have any questions about about press books or why we're where we're having a look? There's a question there from Louise Drum yeah I know I know I've got a sponsor what would be the pricing and we can use it the free version Louise for free but you can't have the embedded H5P and but I think the costing is around $150 for a pro version if I'm right it's not it's not very expensive at all and and as I said we got these free licenses from Rebus we appeared to have gotten multiple book licenses like I didn't realize. Don't tell them that but it's it's I do I think when we were doing the training for it with that group that were that initiative through which we got these that we got access to this facility they were saying something about like regularly to sort of bring in press books and use it it's more of an institutional decision like I think it can be a bit tricky to you can't to just go get one or am I am I remembering? No you can buy an individual one you can buy an individual one James but they do seem to want to go on more institutional arrangement I'm pretty sure Goalway have just done that very thing if there's any Goalway types around I think they're they've just yeah Goalway are using this a lot rolling us out for a lot of their educators. Can I just ask Ornith I think it's really interesting what this difference between a book and a course and the language of that and I don't know what it's even a question for you if to talk a bit more about that I find that really interesting or maybe a question for our participants as well as to what what they think is the difference between a course or a book or if you're looking for something what do you need do you need a course do you need a book do you need both which which do you want if you had to have one I suppose you have a course but is like a book a secondary thing is it something that a student can take away with them more easily afterwards is it less disposable maybe than a course has it got more sustainability longevity I think that's a nice aspect to this project it's living on in the book because the project is actually over but we're still here talking about it's a really nice thing if people are off doing other things but still connecting us up so I guess maybe a book is kind of like a a more long running thing that was my thoughts Eamon the sustainability thing you know I think the Open Teach course in itself when it was run particularly the you know initially it was very interactive course so it was a course that you were kind of there for it wasn't really something you took necessarily just in your own time or lots of elements of in your own time there's a lot of interaction on it which of course you won't have the same with the book I think I think it's it speaks to the different life stages of a project you know we never would have thought of an open textbook at the start that wasn't what this was about but when you're in the dissemination stage then at a certain point it becomes this really useful way of disseminating the information to other people and like I think that one of the strengths of this project is the bare bones of it are super flexible you can turn it into that really rich small group highly facilitated course you could also augment it and what we ended up kind of doing you could turn it into a MOOC and have as many people on it as as possible you just have to take some of the highly interactive stuff out of it or you can turn it with a lot of effort into an open textbook and say here it is in this highly highly pick it up and take it away format yeah Gabby is saying as well exactly what you're saying James she's saying it's it's it's a it's an unplugged type of resource you can take a witch of it at wi-fi or whatever you can download and keep it and Louise is asking about versions editions can you update the contents of the book what about taking the content oh yeah live the same as a WordPress site Louise that's what's so interesting like you just turn the edit button on you know I know you can do versions as in you know copy the whole book and do version two that way as well but it's a it's you can use it kind of as a living breathing place I mean I know Tony Bates with his his was one of the first open textbooks I saw he's he's created an entire version two but it's very flexible yeah actually just want to draw attention to clean the land and BC campus if people haven't come across there I think you should definitely check it out there's a whole host of stuff there to do some great great work there in in BC campus and that's where we got a lot of the ideas but like we spent some time looking at other open textbooks and having a look at how they were put together and there's the one thing I'd say it's fair bit of work I mean I don't know Aidan how many weeks were you working on it yeah again that was one thing we probably didn't kind of realize at the very start and took a few of us to get going but again it is a very nice tool to be using as well and very clean infrastructure but then it's a lot smaller things as well as making sure your color coordinating certain aspects so let's see if learning outcomes here should always be the same color and a lot of those kind of smaller things that did take a bit longer in the end but it was a good challenge to be working on very good that was a nice shout out um so as anybody else are we happy enough I think that's really good I think it's it's certainly a good lesson there and I think Aidan or I mean it sort of does follow the question what point does a course book or a book book you know it's not that was a an interesting thing but certainly in terms of longevity um and um what you call it you helped Tony oh very good came to Susan they helped Tony very great that book and say if you haven't read it it's it's brilliant so any other final points from people or any of the any of the team want to just give a final shout out to anything I think it's a it's a great piece of work great to see so many people getting involved and I think as I said the only thing the hardest question of all our when's it coming out oh very soon Tom very soon no it is it's in the final stages so it's kind of a bit of editing um so I'm hoping in the next month or so but but you know yourself but listen thanks for having us it's been a lovely session and thanks to everyone involved in the project um at all its different stages of the life cycle so it's lovely to be here at the end of it telling people about what happened rather than the start of it absolutely so uh okay Christina I don't know what happens there because I mean the thing about it is we have a fabulous person in the background Christina who's doing all the work and making us all look really good and that's sort of so I'm literally so yeah round of applause for everybody very much for the applause for for the team and for Christina as I said I just get to to open up every now and again but apart from that I'm doing all the easy bits so uh this is very good to see on