 Perhaps we can start, I think, most of the people are in. Welcome to the sixth OER Dynamic Coalition webinar in the sixth month of 2021. Today we're speaking about a topic which is very near and dear to many policymakers' hearts. It's developing supportive policy for OER. And we're very fortunate today. We have a very rich number of colleagues who are here to speak with us. We'll be joined by Dr. Javier Atenez, who's from the University of Suffolk. And she will speak about how to catalyze open educational policies. And this will include an examination of the element of OER policymaking in the wider framework of open education policies. My colleague, Michelle Kenrow, who is the CI Communication and Information Advisor from UNESCO Dakar, will be presenting the work done by UNESCO Dakar and implementing the OER recommendation in the Sahel. It's there for the countries that are covered by UNESCO Dakar, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, and of course Senegal, and how the intergovernmental work is being carried out and the support for policymaking with the governments in this project. This will be followed by Dr. Sun Phuk, who is from the University of Malaysia, Sabah. And Dr. Phuk will be outlining the process for the development of OER policy for inclusive education and education for persons with disabilities that has been undertaken by Dr. Phung in Malaysia with the government address and how this policymaking, policy process has evolved and the different elements. So this relates also to the element of accessibility and how policy for OER, accessible OER, is an issue that is very important to address. And we have, we'll be filing our colleague, Dr. Catherine Cronin, who is from the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education in Ireland. We'll be speaking about a national approach to digital and open policy in Ireland and provide a national example. With that, I would like to give the floor to, I think we'll start with Michelle. Michelle Kenmo, who is our colleague from UNESCO Dakar. Michelle, the floor is yours. Thank you for the privilege of this presentation. I asked if Eleni could share her screen with my presentation. So, while she is doing it, I can already tell you that at UNESCO's office in Africa, we are engaged in the implementation of UNESCO's recommendation for the RL for a number of years now. And I will focus only on the actions that we have made during the last three years. Next slide. My presentation will be organized as it is. It will be a question of talking about the objectives of our actions at the level of the SAEL, of presenting a little the process that we have put in place until now at the level of the SAEL. And after talking about this process, I would like to focus on a few concrete actions, including the preliminary study that we had made in 2019, plus the specific case of Burkina Faso, which for me is in the case of school in relation to the engagement of the country in the face of the RL. And I will end with a brief presentation on the action plan that we have made for the free educational resources at the level of the SAEL. Next slide. So, as I said at the very beginning, our actions in the framework of free educational resources are inscribed in a straight line with the different actions of the UNESCO recommendation on the RL. And inside this, we are committed to working on the awareness of the importance of the RL. We think it is an important action, and I will tell you why later, to strengthen the integration and use of the RL in all areas of development at the SAEL level. I think it is important that I delay a little here to say that from our point of view, the RL can benefit from various sectors of development beyond education. That is to say that we think that a strategic use of the RL can benefit from innovation, benefit young people and access to skills, so that the RL is not specific to the education sector, although, as its name suggests, educational resources. So education shows that it is first beneficial to the education sector, but we believe that the freedoms associated with the RL, freedom of use, freedom of modification, adaptation, re-use, in relation to the free license that is given to free resources, that is given to free educational resources, make sure that we can do a better explanation of how the RL can benefit from other sectors than the only sector of education. The other action we want to take is to develop an expertise pole for educational resources. We are convinced that at the SAEL level, if we wish that the recommendation on the RL, that the integration of the RL can be a reality, we need to build an expertise pole for the region. And finally, among other objectives, our action aims also to contribute to the elaboration of political models for appropriation and integration of the RL. So we believe that the political action is particularly important to ensure that the RL can be translated, the recommendation of the RL can be translated into operational action. In the next slide, the process... I'm going to take a look at the process that we followed. When we started on the promotion integration of OER in the Sahel region, we started with a preliminary study. This study focuses on the governments, on public institutions, private institutions, university teachers. So we came up with a study that assesses the level of knowledge, appropriation and use that's made of OER. And also we take a look at whether there are strategies and policies in place on OER. So that's how we started. And I'll go into further detail on that in a little while. So that was the study. And then after that, we took a look at some of the results of the study for Burkina Faso and other countries that were... Well, that was a country that was setting up a specific university in Burkina Faso. And we invited the persons involved to accompanies in the process. And we did this in the context of my responsibility for the region, in other words, in the context of communication. And we encouraged the university to appropriate and integrate OER. So we've been working really on the case of Burkina Faso, including on the development of a national strategy on OER. So that was the specific experience of Burkina Faso. And after that, we felt that it was important to have a sort of action plan for the five countries concerned. I said that we were focusing on these French-speaking countries, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and Senegal. So that was our focus. And for those countries, we developed an action plan. To develop the action plan, we invited each of those countries officially through the UNESCO National Committee chairs to indicate focal points for OER. So that was done. Then we carried out surveys involving the institutions once again. And also through the focal points, we managed to get information on experience initiatives underway, past experience, everything pertaining to OER. Following the survey, we organized a series of consultation meetings with the focal points, not only to present the results of the survey, but also to come up with an action plan for the implementation of OER and the Sahel. So this, if you like, is the process that we've been pursuing so far. And the next step will be the implementation of the action plan. Regarding the preliminary study that you can see on the next slide, I really talked about the targets of this study. So the targets were academics, members of the government, and institutions. And we have been working specifically for Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Senegal. Please, could you put the next slide on the screen? Because I would like to talk about the results of the preliminary study. So the preliminary study made it possible for us to realize a few things. It was conducted in 2019. And the study showed that in the region, and more specifically in the country I've mentioned, so there was a trend, an upward trend, when it comes to the use of online trainings. And so there was a strong political will with the creation of dedicated universities for online learning. So that includes virtual universities in all of those countries. And for us, it means that there is a fertile ground for the implementation of OER. However, we have observed that with the creation of online universities, there was a poor integration of OER in the national strategies and in the strategies of universities, be it in Burkina Faso, in Mali, or in Niger, or even in Senegal. This was the case for virtual universities, but also for traditional universities. They had online training, but OER were not integrated in these programs. Free resources were mostly used. So in this study, we saw that there was a clear lack of policies to integrate OER in university programs. And also among teachers and academics, we have observed that there was a poor knowledge of OER. Many people were actually confused about the definitions. They were actually not able to make the difference between free resources and open educational resources. And there was also a lack of skills when it comes to OER. This is something that came out of this study. It was another positive element in this study. People who answered the survey said they were in favor of the integration of OER in their teaching practices. This is something important that came out of this study. Many people were actually ready to use and integrate OER in their teaching practices. When we asked why there was no real support for OER, when we asked what were the roadblocks for the use of OER and the production of OER by academics, some said, among other reasons, I will share you the report if you want. They mentioned the lack of incentives and support to academics and teachers for the use of OER. So this is a short summary of the results of this study. Next slide, please. So after the study, we started a discussion with the authorities of Burkina Faso. We presented the conclusions of the study and we were invited to support the creation of the virtual university of Burkina Faso. And so as part of this study, we created an awareness campaign for OER and there were a really good reaction to this. The university fully supported our program and for OER. And above and beyond the university, people decided to bring together academics also coming from private universities to develop capacities to use OER and to create OER. And we have been able to train about 50 university professors in Burkina Faso so that you can use, reuse and create open educational resources. And after this training, about 40 open educational resources were created. I don't have the exact number, but it was around 40. New resources. And so this sparked the debate. How can we make this momentum long lasting? How can we build on this momentum? And we reached a conclusion. We thought that there was a need for a national strategy on OER. So the ministry brought together representatives of universities and the greater public to work together with us. We supported them to elaborate a strategy. And so now I will talk about the main parts and elements of this strategy. So the strategy of the ministry for higher education in Burkina Faso aims at promoting and integrating quality open educational resources in higher education in Burkina Faso. And here I'd like to say that it is an OER national strategy, but that is limited to higher education. So this is the national strategy. But more specifically, it was really interesting to see which levers Burkina Faso wanted to use to have a full integration of OER and a successful integration of OER. So there was a first lever, public investments. And public investments must support equitable access to OER. And if you read the action plan, you will see which are the specific actions taken to support the integration of OER. The strategy is still ongoing. And the goal is to bring together all the stakeholders within universities so that they fully understand everything that has to do with OER. And there was a debate during the elaboration of the strategy. It had to do with copyrights. During the design of the strategy, Burkina Faso thought it was important to update the legal framework related to copyrights. This would encourage the creation, the adoption and the integration of OER. And this is a goal that we thought was extremely important because it creates a momentum. And an increasing number of countries will be able to promote and create open educational resources thanks to this. Finally, it was important to build capacities and expertise. This is essential. Countries need to have qualified human resources to be able to create, adapt, and use and reuse open educational resources. They also made a commitment to gradually integrate OERs in higher education. And I do remember that the virtual university of Burkina Faso, but it will have to check. But I think that the virtual university was committed to creating a certification program for teachers for the production, creation, and reuse of open educational resources. I know that because of COVID-19, there were delays. I know that many initiatives have been delayed because of the pandemic, but there was a goal to create a certification program for teachers so that teachers through this program would be able to have access to the necessary skills to use, design, and use open educational resources. And I think it's a really good initiative. They were also planning to create a master's degree with a program fully integrating open educational resources. But as I said, because of COVID-19, there might have been delays. And I don't know if this project has been implemented, but we think it's a really interesting initiative. And another goal was to take into account OERs in the quality assurance policy. It is important because we're talking about open educational resources, but these resources are important for education and other fields, but we need to have quality OERs. This is why this is an important goal. Next slide. Regarding the action plan, I told you how this action plan was designed. We had focal points, which were appointed by countries. There were seven to eight focal points per country, representatives of ministries and higher education institutions. And so after the work done by focal points, an action plan was designed and created. It was the result of a collaboration that needs to be commended. We worked hand in hand with OER Africa, UNESCO. Everybody brought his or her own expertise and value. And this made it possible to really create this document I'm going to talk about now. So we started by listening to focal points to set up priorities. We didn't try to impose anything. We thought it was important for focal points to tell us what was important and to build on what they told us on their priorities to work together on an action plan to meet the needs that had been identified. So focal points have talked about the importance of building capacities of all the stakeholders. They were convinced and we agreed that it was important to do this. It was important to create a pool of expertise. It is essential to have expertise for the design and the use of OERs in the region. And here they insisted on the importance of raising awareness and training people. But it is also important to develop support policies for the integration of OERs. It is also important to encourage an easy and inclusive access to OERs. It was important to have inclusive forms of open educational resources. It was also important to promote and strengthen co-operations. These were the various work streams of the action plan. And now we'll talk about some of the actions are undertaken as part of this action plan. So some of these activities have already been started. First, it was important to write a white paper for decision makers. I don't know if the action plan has been shared, but focal points have said that it is important to raise awareness among all political leaders on the importance of open educational resources. And so we thought it was important to have a white paper. We also thought it was important to strengthen capacity and focus on focal points for advocacy on OERs. Because focal points need to have the right tools to do advocacy work on the integration of OERs at all levels. And then there's a question of mapping OERs and the open education and distance learning that exists in the region. We need also to come up with the handbook for procedures, a guide of good practices for development of inclusive and accessible OERs. And lastly, develop and propose guidelines to public bodies for different contracts to be placed for content production under an open license. I do apologize because I think I've considerably exceeded my speaking time. But I come now to my last slide. And I'd like to thank you for your attention. It's a question, two questions, but they're the same topic basically in both, in English and French. Have you asked what kind of incentives the teachers would like to receive and also how to motivate teachers to create, to share, to exploit the real certification certificate or the station. So it's a question of how do you motivate teachers? Well, this was at the very heart of the debate during the development of the strategy. There are all sorts of different scenarios that were considered. There's one where there would be a sort of prize given to teachers. Another possibility was to include OER aspects in promotion criteria for teachers. There are lots of different examples. I don't have the full list in mind, but we spent a half day over the total of three days to precisely this question of incentives to encourage the production of OER. It's a really substantive concern. There's no one answer fits all response to this. In Bokina Faso, there's this problem of a mechanism to acknowledge and recognise the work carried out by teachers in spreading knowledge. There are certain cases where this is included as one of the criteria for promotion possibilities. There are sorts of other ideas. I'm sure that this is certainly not an exhaustive list that we came up with. Thank you very much for having taken the time to spend with us. I know you've got another appointment. Thank you once again for your presentation. Dr. Dennis, the floor is yours. Thank you very much. Thank you very much colleagues for the invitation. I'm very pleased to be here today. We'll be sharing my screen. Please let me know if you can see it. This presentation is part of the ongoing research that I'm conducting with Leo Haverman. It follows up on a publication that we wrote last year about co-creation of open education policies. It looks at the policy landscape after we've been analysing around 300 policies in open education. Sir, basically, when we started working in the co-creation publication, we tried to redefine what open education policies are. For us, a regional and regional guidelines regulation is a strategy that seeks to foster development and implementation of open educational practices, including the creation and use of open educational resources. Within this definition, we see the role of the government institutions to allocate and orchestrate activities to increase access to educational opportunities and promote educational quality, efficiency, and innovation. Sir, when we think about how to drive, how to catalyze open education, we need to think about several factors that enable or can derail policy development. Sir, we think, and looking at the literature, we have understood that all policies need to catalyze cultural and organizational change at the institutional level at least. But they need to be driven and focused in social justice, social inclusion, equity, and diversity. And we think that the way to promote and to drive the adoption of open education is not just to create the policy, but also to promote the adoption of such practices in the educational sector, mostly at university level, so our A2 sector, is to co-create policies with the affected people. So with the stakeholders, including students, librarians, learning technologies, academics, teachers, anyone that may be affected, directly or indirectly by the policy, to create opportunities for recognition and progressions for those to participate also in the co-creation process. So everyone feels not just part of the process, but also empowered by the process and has this sense of co-ownership. If we look briefly at how the state of the art, how policies are nowadays, after analyzing all 300 policies, we can see that all open education policies are still thin on the ground. All the policies tend to be OER focused quite a lot. OER in general could be also textbook. And some policies include practices that relate to OER, but also to a wider range of practices. So we basically, through some research and also following out the work that we did also with Fabian Ashim many few years ago, we're looking at the type of policies to be able to analyze what's going on in the landscape at general levels. So we have dedicated open education and OER policies. So policies are just driven and focused in the production of OER. ICT policies that have a component of OER or open education and OER. Educational, so wider educational policies that have a component of open education. And there is sort of OGP Open Government Partnership-driven policies. So it's policies that come from national action plans or national commitments. Then we have seen quite a lot of open policies with a component of open education that's mostly come from open access and open science. And then there is quite an interesting number but I think they're developing even more labor market policies that also come from the vocational sector. That are policies that have a strong focus in the development of skills for the job and labor markets using and catalyzed by OER. So a bit of the analysis of the policies by region, most of the policies can be found in North America and Europe and there are of course some in South America, some in Africa, in Asia and in Louisiana. Although when we look at the scope of the policies, most of the policies we can see it's dedicated to open education and OER policies, but also educational policies with an open educational component. And all in within this educational policies, also there are learning policies, digital learning policies, digital learning policies that have a component of an education. And then we can find open education embedded with the open science and open access policies. But if we look by region how they're spread around in the U.S. or mostly North America, so U.S. and Canada, except for Mexico that it's kind of slightly different. Most of the policies are driven by the need of creating open textbooks. If we look at the North America like U.S. and Canada landscape, it's quite driven by the creation of text and there are different levels of policies from legal bills so created by the different Senates in the country to institutional policies that target the same issue, the creation of textbooks. Europe is more based in OER in general so most of the policies from the European side are based, but interestingly South America has a strong collection of open educational practices driven policies. So for example, this is the example of the universities in Brazil, the work that Telameal is doing and also University of La República in Uruguay are doing so these are two key examples for the region. When we look at the policy infrastructure we can see there is a sort of a pyramid of layers of policies so when you try to build policy at the institutional level you have to be supported where it needs to be grounded by international recommendations so that's the work of what UNESCO has been doing, the Commonwealth of Learning, the European Union but also civil society like a global open knowledge international creative commons and spark. These organizations give you the infrastructure and the guidelines and the recommendations on how to effectively create a policy but then when you look at the different levels in different countries you need to look of course into the educational strategic priorities in each country so the pent of the socio-economical issues in each country in each region it can be easier or not easy to catalyze open education policy and that can also drive the interest for institutional priorities so when there is a committance between national and institutional kind of goals and aims the work that the international organizations are doing to provide the documentation it's what the broad kind of a solid base for the development of cohesive and sustainable open education policies part of the study that we're doing here we're looking at the distribution of open education policies so we can see that the most common they're driven by priorities so as we said in the case of strategic priorities from country and institution level we can see that's OER policies they are like the most common and driven by priorities and open education practices policy it's driven by priority but it's least common then we have open policies they're very very common and driven by priorities in the case for example the excessive cost of textbooks in the US and in Canada and the other one is digital education policies which we have seen a boom of such policies that now include open education and this is something that Dr. Cronin will show you later because part of the work is what we're analyzing in here is digital education that have a strong component of open education although in the other side we can see that they're driven from mandates so basically what the founder tells you that you have to do is open access policies they're quite common and some of them and this is some of them to work the Jema Santos Hermoso from these communities has been doing to see where is open education within open access where is where it's happening in that in that era so it's mostly open access that has component of open education these are mostly coming from mandates and the least common are open science strategies even though UNESCO launched a series of it's launching a series of recommendations on open education on open science they had a component of open education and then least common are OGP derived policies and labour market policies what we what we suggest in our research for institutions mostly at the institutional level and this is based on the creation standards from open government partnership how to drive and how to create policies we understand that we see there are three key components collaboration bench learning and engagement so if we seek about collaborating with institutions with governments with experts it's easier to drive a policy and to validate the need of a policy in a context bench learning means to learn from others so learning the activities and they would practice doing comparative activities to see what have worked and what hasn't worked before creating the policy and engage stakeholders I think this is key and stakeholders anyone that needs to have a voice and will be impacted by your policy in the end of time I will just briefly show you which kind of we consider there are the key elements of policies when you're thinking how to catalyze how to create your policy of course you need to consider copyright the policy coherence that your policy is in line with your national strategies with institutional strategies and also with internal strategies like open access and open science but then you don't have a three layer of openness in your institution that will never be able to touch each other so they will basically compete for funds you need to think about pedagogy innovation when you're thinking of how to create a policy but also inclusive design learning accreditation and diverse access to knowledge so it's a bit of the colonize the curriculum as well one of the key elements for us is considering capacity building a culture of openness but also provide funding for open education if you want to have a successful policy you need to invest in open education otherwise policies can fade quite easily on the impact of the policy the policy can never thrive when there is no funding to support the development of open educational activities in general and of course think about open infrastructure so if you're going to have and you're going to create an ER and you're going to deploy an ER think about which platforms will you use and also how the data privacy and access to information of the users of the platform will be managed so it's important to have components of open infrastructure and data governance for the use and production of open educational resources so very briefly we have this map for co-creation this is something that we've been doing using in workshops and helping institutions and people to think about what is the best way to co-create a policy and we for a project that we did with UNIMED many years ago we created this open education policy canva so it's accessible and I will share the link of the presentation as soon as I finish so where you can just download and bring it to the institution and start thinking how to co-create a table, who to bring in and how to design your policy and yeah that's from me and I'm leaving you with relevant readings and if you have any questions please contact me through Twitter or just send me an email Thank you very much Dr. Atenius I just wanted to point out thank you very much for a really bird's eye view of the field and of the activities going on I just wanted to point out one thing and the next my question you brought up data protection data governance and I wanted to just point out that there is something kind of interesting there are a lot of interesting things in the recommendation but in the policy section the last point of the policy section and the recommendation is about data and privacy and as well I'm not sure that when it was put in there they were thinking about open infrastructure but I think there are different aspects that are there and it's interesting that you would bring it up it's rarely addressed in the discussions lately but it is something which is going to come up more and more Thank you very much I think there's a question here but I'd like to just go on and Dr. Fung is the next speaker if I could give you the floor we will ask that if you could just make sure that we have 15 minutes if we could take 10 minutes each or so for the next then we will go on perhaps 15 minutes over the hour I hope that's okay but we have one question here that we'll come back to afterwards thank you so much I'd like to give the floor to Dr. Fung Thank you, Janet and also greetings to all the Pendelius members in this group so I'm here to share concealing the experience that we have in Malaysia developing the inclusive open educational resources policy yes now it begins actually in 2018 somewhere in September where Mr. Joe Hiro Naka when I met him in Sri Lanka for UNESCO seminar and he was relating concealing the Jujjana OER Action Plan and the need to incorporate the need of people or person with disabilities so we have a talk and that was how the seat was implanted in me and I went back to Malaysia and I gather a group of OER practitioners from the different universities in Malaysia so we gather together on the 28th and 29th of March 2019 okay to come up with the first draft and we also consulted the chair of UNESCO chair for OER and there is a prof Rory who happens to be in Malaysia at that point in time so he was there also to give us a very good guideline and on top of that we also have Diane Chambers and Diane Chambers is one of the authors for this particular book called Learning for All guideline on the inclusion of learners to disabilities in open and distance learning is also one of the main guideline that we use in our drafting of our OER policy so we work on this first draft we got it ready and after that we came we had a workshop and that is where Mr. Joe Hironaka came over from Paris to Kuala Lumpur and there we gather all the OER experts as well as the main key stakeholders which means from the Ministry of Education the personnel were there from the Special Education Department also NGOs related to people with disabilities were also with us so all in all as we went through until January of 2020 we actually came up with this particular policy next slide please so I'm just sharing with you the chronology of events that took place so again on the 29th of March that's where we met with our Professor Rory McGrill and Ryan Chambers actually met with us online by producing some videos and sending to us to relate her sharing in this area of inclusiveness then after that we had the workshop at Pullman where face to face at that point in time we could meet so all together we were reviewing it very intensely and there were a lot of suggestions and recommendations that were incorporated to become the second draft so the second draft was later on re-compiled and it was sent back to all the OER expert and key stakeholders that were with us in the workshop okay so you went through the second draft then later on you know more suggestions came in then there was the third draft so we continued to go round and round with these OER experts as well as the key stakeholders group do remember that the OER expert group at that point in time Malaysian national level okay then we had the fourth draft where the core OER expert group you know the first group that met with Professor Rory McGrill okay that is actually the core expert group so we look into it again and we incorporate all the suggestions accordingly next please we now bring it before the international reviewers so that is where afterwards I'll show you the list who are they for example Cable Green from Creative Commons was involved the okay after the look at it then after that with more comments coming in then we have we sent the sixth draft to all the public universities there are 20 Malaysian public universities okay so and all the relevant NGOs that were involved with the workshop as well as those that didn't attend the workshop so we sent it out to the whole nation more suggestions came in and we have the final review of the draft by the core OER expert group again and there upon we incorporate all the suggestions and we submitted that to the Ministry of Higher Education so if you ask what was most important I think that is where Dr Atina was mentioning considering the need of co-creation and indeed we didn't use the term co-creation but we knew that the relevant key stakeholders must be with us so that is where the Ministry of Higher Education they were very important so they were with us from the very beginning the council for head of e-learning of all public universities in Malaysia we have 20 public universities so all the public universities the e-learning head were represented here so that was very crucial then we have also the Malaysian Center for e-learning it's called myself under the Ministry of Education so the President was also there and of course we have from the National Human Rights Commission of Malaysia to Hakam we also bring in the Department of Social Welfare Malaysia where there is a department concerning persons with disabilities so they were there represented Special Education Division and we also have the Association for the Blind of Malaysia we have also Malaysia Federation of the Deaf the autism group were there okay so they were represented Malaysia Education Technology Division were there I'm going to just show you this was co-created I used the term by Dr Atinaas it was co-created by the whole scope that are related that are relevant so of course the chair of UNESCO Professor Rory was involved okay and then we have Dr Sanjaya Mishra who gave me a lot of input because when we started we started Dr Sanjaya actually in 2017 did come to Malaysia to prepare a guideline a template on guideline of preparing OER so I was involved directly there and we stand also upon the work of the Commonwealth of Learning okay Keeba Green was involved in the reviewing Sanjaya was also involved in the reviewing okay and we have very strong critique and we adjusted accordingly we are also from Canada Juta who is an inclusive design expert Dyer Chamber continue to support us okay the preamble to the National Iowa Air Policy of course we have the National E-Learning Policy we have our Malaysia Extension Blueprint the Copyright Act Commonwealth of Learning towards National Policy Guidelines and all the relevant documents fit into to support our work next slide please and these are the seven main constructs of the policy and even this policy you can get it also from JNAP a copy if you ask about some challenges now what happened was that this particular policy was developed for higher education institution now it was presented to the top management and the top management looking at it found that this should also be shared to research and training centers across all other ministries instead of just the Ministry of Higher Education so because of this in 2020 we have a whole cycle you know of sharing it to all the other ministries okay and we have more input so now it become an expanded version so this is ongoing it was only this afternoon okay that I was also involved in briefing the top management in the higher education ministry okay and then this is the process that they is given by the Ministry of Higher Education and they say that there will be further workshop upon this then the Ministry of Higher Education will look at it if it's endorse then there will be a Cabinet Ministry's Memorandum and they will be presented before the Cabinet and they hope that by November it will be launched so this have been the experience that we are moving on and it is not a completed job yet we did it for the higher education institution but the top management feel that you need to be brought in to cover all other ministries so this is where we are at the moment thank you thank you very much Dr. Fung this is impressive work and as you can see this is it illustrates very soundly the examples given by Dr. Atenes also of the value of collaborative work and it's addressing a very important area that is to date I believe not addressed I think this might be the first policy and inclusive OER in the whole world it's really impressive and it's a very long process congratulations we'll go to the questions there are a couple of questions but we'll go back to it but I'd like to give the floor to Dr. Cronin Dr. Cronin will be providing an example from Ireland on the development of national approaches to digital and open policy Dr. Cronin the floor is yours thank you so much can you see my slides yes we can see them thank you so much that's great and thank you for the invitation to join you today it's been so stimulating so far so thanks to all the speakers already in going with the aim of this webinar the title captures what I'm going to speak about it will be generally digital and open practices and policy in Ireland but with the focus on the open and the policy so really briefly I work for the national forum for the enhancement of teaching and learning in higher education we are a small publicly funded academically led body and our remit is to lead and advise regarding the enhancement of teaching and learning in higher education we are we're a neutral body so we this is how we describe the community that we work with and that we collaborate with and that's all who learn so all students all those who teach so not just those who are defined as faculty lecturers on all kinds of contracts researchers who teach librarians who teach postgraduate students who teach all institution types as you can see there and basically our work is really done through collaboration with students and staff and all who shape policy and practice in higher education in Ireland and this again this is just final description of just the national forum I would say I could sum this up by mostly saying that we push our work primarily through communication and collaboration so we aim to lead enhancement of teaching and learning but we do that by continual communication and engagement with the sector and kind of following and tuning into the needs and priorities of higher education sector we conduct research we write briefs and insights and reports we manage funded projects quite a number of funded projects which is allocating government funding targeted projects and as it says here on the slide we work openly so one of our tenets of how the national forum works is that we aim to model openness and support openness and I'll obviously say more about that and just in terms of positioning our work in open in terms of all of our work we have four strategic priorities which are listed on the slide here and our work in open really is in the teaching and learning in a digital world strategic priority but it cuts across all of them so I lead the work in that area teaching and learning in a digital world so it's all of our digital and open work but our work is really collaborative across our small team of about 12 to 15 people at any given time so given that wide remit that is a challenge in terms of what we try to accomplish in the area of open education but it's also an opportunity because Ireland the Irish higher education sector is relatively small so it's about 30 plus institutions and the national forum our team has I can genuinely say we have personal relationships with all of those institutions so yes you can look at some of the challenges we face but we also think that we have some opportunities to do work nationally which is where we see our open education work so we don't just look within the sector of course we're informed and driven by kind of a broad international policy context so there's the UNESCO recommendation on OER the call to action last year of course these are just a few examples of some of the international policy frameworks and these policy frameworks you know we rely on for example they explain like a commitment to the development of open open education and the importance of open access policies for publicly funded resources which national forum funded resources are and of course you know a wealth of really excellent academic and related literature that we rely on also to inform our work so you know the open education policies work that Javier just described work by Laura Terniewicz and others at the University of Cape Town about open development and open education and OER and OEP Tannis Morgan about has done work around getting to open at a closed institution that's been really useful for us Virginia Rodes it's her work on the praxis project with others so these are just a few examples there are many but that's the broad we try and be informed by what's going on globally not just in Ireland but within Ireland we both seek to inform and then are informed by our work so for example our higher education authority has linked digital transformation to an increase in open access to research and resources so that's instrumental to our work also other documents which are cited there point out the importance of again open access policies and repositories for publicly funded resources we also feel that it's really important to link our work with approaches and initiatives in the whole area of open research open science and open access again we're a small country these are small teams of people but I can say that the open research movement and embedding in higher education in Ireland is more mature than the embedding of open education maybe this is true everywhere it's certainly true in Ireland so for example most institutions have an open access policy but hardly any have an open educational resources policy yet so we're trying to work hand in hand with groups like the national open research forum to piggyback on the conversations that we each are having and build on existing skills and understanding and infrastructures around open so that we can each contribute to furthering one another's agendas but that dialogue we see is really key for our work so what is the national forum work before I talk about what we're doing in the area of policy I will say that the first of the five actions in the OER recommendation is about building capacity and obviously you can't just jump to developing supportive policy so we see this as foundational to all our work and we have built on this a little bit and we use we draw on work by Helen Betham and just where she uses Nussbaum's work around capabilities and the capabilities approach and they have the concept of digital capabilities so we've used the narrative about building open capabilities across the higher education sector as kind of a foundational building block for our work and Helen Nussbaum's definition is that capabilities are created by the combination of a person's abilities embedded in the wider social, political, economic and educational context so for a national organization like ourselves that means engaging in supporting individuals but also the institutions and organizations and the sector as a whole influencing national policy so that we are supporting individuals developing their capacity but also supporting the development of those broader context within which that development can happen. So how do we do that? The first is that all national forum funded projects are required to share their resources openly and this simple, powerful requirement initiates so much of the work that we do so that opens up all the conversations to what do you mean by openly license? How do I openly license? Which license do I pick? So we've developed a series of OER and OAP guides and an online resource there's a link there to the online resource that we just released in March about really developing OER and OAP and to enhance teaching and learning and we're also about to tomorrow in fact launch a national resource hub so that all of the growing number of openly licensed resources that are developed from national forum funded projects but also more widely can be shared because they're shared in institutional repositories and project websites and so on but we have a searchable hub now which will be launched tomorrow and that will be available on the national forum website tomorrow. We support open professional development the national forum developed a professional development framework to support the professional development of all who teach in Irish higher education and we've been developing over the years I mean I think it's over about 30 now courses and much attention hadn't been paid in the very beginning to open licensing of those courses but we made a commitment in late 2020 and into 2021 that all of those courses are going to be openly licensed and they're now available on an open courses website and then in terms of policy itself again our capabilities work is very much entwined with the policy work we have an existing national forum guide to developing enabling policies for digital open teaching and learning which supports institutional policymaking in that area there's a new version to be published in September and we've been having ongoing conversations to feed into that and while many current issues in digital teaching and learning are around digital topics such as lecture recording policies, virtual classroom policies online assessment policies particularly in the past year we also bring to people's attention the importance of OER policies and perhaps updating their IP policies to support openness and we try in our work to bring awareness of open to the broader area of digital teaching and learning policymaking and to discuss how open practices and the open web affects and is affected by digital policies and that really needs to be built into the policy development process in the broad area of digital and we have a lot of attention for people around digital policymaking this year so it's important we think to add that to the conversation so then there's we aim to provide overall sectoral leadership we liaise with national partners in the area of open education and open research but there's particularly since March 2020 and you know since the pandemic came upon us you know there's a growing amount of activity across institutions in Ireland I would say greater awareness and attention to open so I don't mean to say that all of the work that's going on around open policymaking in Ireland from the national forum so much of it is in collaboration with institutions so there's an open scholarship community at the National University of Ireland in Galway Dublin City University just launched a go open set of support resources for their staff there's Technological University Dublin just launched an open teaching and learning repository so you know we think that's really important that kind of localised support and we aim to provide the national strand of support and again feed into the community so we see all of this work as an opportunity for conversations it's very much a work in progress I don't mean to as the previous presenter said you know this isn't all tied up with a bow this is all work that's going on we speak so I'm grateful for the opportunity to share it I'd love to continue the conversation and learn from all the people who are here today the presenters and the participants so thank you very much Thank you very much Dr Cronin I see that it's in fact it's interesting that you say that that you can't jump into developing policy because there's actually a lot of some I would say there's a good number of activities where people hear of a new concept and say great let's make a policy now but in fact there is an issue you have to be able to have the capacity and to understand the concept and I think one I'm really sorry that this has we don't have as much time as we would need for this topic but I think this is the beginning of the discussion and what's really rich about this this development in your presentation and that of the previous speakers is that how wide this discussion is and how diverse it is and how complicated everything is and how much entwined all the different concepts are and from what I understand your institution is actually supporting the development of policies and open practices and the idea is that if these policies and open practices aren't enabled then they won't be sustainable and that point is that we actually produce this such a situation I would like to thank you very much I just looked into the chat and I don't see suddenly I don't see the questions there is a question in the discussion about copyright but I think that's not directly to how to deal with different dimensions of licensing and copyright issues and the development of OERs I would just like to point out that we can share the link that you have in your presentation you have a link towards one of the resources you have for capacity building that you say that you've been using and I think it's interesting that the fact that you practice what you preach has promoted capacity building in the community that you work with so it's all very holistic I would like to thank all of the speakers I think in a little bit over an hour we have gone all over the world we've gone through inclusive education we've gone to the higher education sphere we've done an overview of the entire global different areas and different declarations of OER policy and we've just started of course and I think one thing that comes out from it is that it's a very long process and it's a process which requires I think perhaps Dr. Cronin has put the link into the chat if you'd like this is a very long process and it's not a process that can be tied up with a bow as Dr. Cronin pointed out it's a process that in order to be legitimate perhaps talking about open educational resources or open education has to be collaborative and being collaborative means that it has to be agile and to fit into developing into developing needs and different needs so with that I would like to thank all the participants for joining us all the speakers for sharing your knowledge with us and I would also like to thank the the interpreters for their kind indulgence to stay 15 minutes longer we greatly appreciate it and the technical support our next webinar will be at the end of July which is next month amazingly so and it will be focusing on sustainability and we'll get back to you more with more information on that thank you so much and I'm wishing everyone a wonderful afternoon morning or night or whatever time it is where you are and have a very good continuation of the day or night thanks so much bye bye