 Wow, okay. Good afternoon. I think this is relatively self-explanatory. I'm hoping this is easy. I mean, it makes sense to me, but I'm judging my performance yesterday. It's a bit of a stretch to expect it to make any sense to anyone else. So, and as I said yesterday, I'm kind of slightly repeating myself for understandable reasons. This is an attempt to merge, if you like, some theoretical speculation with some practical possibilities. I'm the theoretical speculation, and Tim is the practical possibilities. That's what we agreed, isn't it? Yeah. Okay, so my concern has been, I suppose, a view that implicitly the open community and OER are, I don't know, tacitly or implicitly globally northern or Eurocentric. And was there possibly a way of addressing that? And I suppose my thinking is then that actually what underpins pedagogy is culture in some way or another. And when we try and use, if you like, OER, that I'm kind of assuming it's a default position, it's unprovable, but it's a default position. If I'm assuming that the OER are somehow tainted with a specific culture and I'm then thinking about how can we make OER more relevant or more appropriate or more applicable to other cultures, I then say, ah, okay, so I can talk about cultures being different, but can I then kind of quantify or objectify the distance between them? Can I, as it were, calibrate them so that I can say, I don't know, Chinese culture is in some ways similar to culture in Saudi Arabia, therefore what fits in there in Saudi Arabia will fit in China. Or not, okay? Do I have a way of calibrating culture that would make that kind of measurement and that kind of inference possible? And if you like, just as a kind of modernist something for the sake of argument, I pick on Hofsteder quite a lot as a way of provoking my thinking about it or just provoking everyone else. And he says, yes, you can, as it were, calibrate culture. And there's lots of critiques of Hofsteder. I mean, one of them, of course, being that it's modernist and cute and not much else. Another being that level of granularity is national. So, you know, you could argue we ought to be looking regional or any other finer gradations. And you could argue that we're all at the intersection of various cultures which might be our institutional and professional culture and our ethnic and spiritual culture and whatever else, not just our national culture. But nevertheless, he says if you choose that level of granularity and that way of looking at things, then in his empirical work, he says you can identify several different axes or several different dimensions of culture. For example, is the country you're looking at highly individualistic or highly collectivist or somewhere in the middle? And so the classic one is the United States of America is way over there in terms of individualism and maybe people's Republic of China is way over there in terms of collectivism or communalism, as it were. Is there a great deal of difference between the highest in the society or the highest in the country and the lowest? Is it very hierarchic or is it very flat? And again, I'm sure you can think of classical examples at either extreme. I imagine maybe Holland or Sweden are way over there. And so on and so on. Low or high uncertainty avoidance, is it risk-taking or is it risk-avoiding, risk-averse? Does it have a long-term orientation or short-term orientation? Does that drive people's values? And I suppose part of my argument would be if you thought about specific teaching techniques like project-based learning, group-based learning, game-based learning, and rather than assuming they're unconditionally benign, do they have some kind of resonance or dissonance with any of these particular dimensions? So I've encountered the problems in maybe parts of Southern Africa where individualised competitive group-based, individual and competitive work is problematic in collectivist cultures, for example. And so there are various versions of this. So this is one putting actual real definite countries on some of the axes and probably the decoding is commonsensical like Italy, France, Belgium, Great Britain and so on. And so you could argue that, or what I'm trying to argue is that an OER developed in... It's just Great Britain there, isn't it? Do I mean even the United Kingdom? Well, anywhere we live, it's no great distance in terms of these dimensions from the USA or Australia or Canada or New Zealand, and therefore it's no great stretch to see OERs developed in one as being relevant in any of those others, but on the other hand it's a big stretch to Turkey, Mexico and whatever it is, Guatemala, way over there. So that's the kind of basis of my argument. There are other models. It's not just Hofsteder and his disciples. So this is a different set of dimensions, if you like, that put the countries of the world on what you call this triangular axis of active linear reactive and so on. The advantage of Hofsteder, you'll be pleased to know, is there's an app for it. So maybe that's why it would win this game, that you just put the appropriate country in and you get the numbers. And so, and this is another one from Hall looking at low and high context cultures. I'll skip that, skip that. And so our proposal was the idea that OER metadata should not only include all the things it currently includes, but some indication of culture. For example, the appropriate numbers from Hofsteder's six or seven axes so that then one could talk about its transferability from its country of origin so that you know the Hofsteder numbers to somewhere else where you can look up the Hofsteder numbers. And on that note. Thank you, John. So much for my half of the talk. Briefly, very briefly to tell you that the context of this is an Erasmus Plus programme using MOOCs to help refugees and migrants with their linguistic skills and entrepreneurship skills for social inclusion and employment. And we're at the stage of the project where we're developing language MOOCs and meta MOOCs to help with this project. And the way we actually started to do this from previous experience we've found trying to recycle old courses for this isn't necessarily effective for cultural reasons. So we actually got together 20 refugee support groups in Madrid a couple of times. These are NGOs, support networks, et cetera. And we actually asked them how do they carry out their training. And from this we're able to do identify roughly almost 100 specific, what we believe are refugee specific learning criteria which we're able to classify into four categories. And then we actually started to think, OK, if we've got this then how can we actually use it to actually specify the dimensions of the course we're actually going to give to them. And when I go into any detail because I don't have an awful lot of time here from the technological aspects then we really need to focus on mobile deployment because without exception all of them have mobile devices. This is the main computational apparatus. The linguistic factors is actually very simple. It's important the sub languages we use are simple and that we subtitle appropriately. So in the case of our refugees they need to be subtitled in French and Arabic from a methodological perspective then it's very important the role of proxies in the facilitation process because obviously if we're typically white European males then we might be pushing people out of their comfort zones depending on the audience and the way we actually run the courses. So it's actually quite important to actually get the refugee support groups to actually participate in this project. And we are really, really happy and really, really grateful for the work they've actually done in this area because they've actually helped generate the content and they've helped facilitating and I think this is a really good collaboration. And as John was mentioning before the important things here is also some of the cultural factors because it's quite a heavy oral learning tradition so we need to try and incorporate a lot of this try and keep the amount of textual artefacts to a minimum and think about the way these courses can actually be run. So the question there is are we actually in a position to be thinking about producing a refugee metadata profile? Is it worth the effort? Because to some extent you might think well if we have to adapt these courses just for refugees I mean I didn't mention that the courses aren't just for refugees, they're for migrants and anybody who wants to get an A1 level of Spanish related to daily life in part the reason we're doing this is to try and achieve some kind of implicit social inclusion because if in the MOOC they're mixing with other kinds of social groups then hopefully that will facilitate social contact etc etc but at the end of the day we need a way of representing this information so at least we can know what we're doing and think about how we use it in the future but then what should we actually do with that? If we do have this metadata standard what are we going to do because the platform we're basically using is our in-house installation of Open edX what are we going to do? We're going to hack the platform so that the course can be adaptively given to people I mean if we're giving this same course to refugees and migrants can we just give the same course to everybody? Will it be equally popular? Because another one of the cultural aspects are that the people that are appearing in the video are culturally diverse and reflect all the different ethnic groups will have problems with our typical white European audiences for the course so there's lots of research questions there in the future and we are focusing a bit in this area on this cost benefit analysis of what we can actually do with this representation of information and how we should use it in the future moving forward to new kinds of courses we might want to run with our social group. I think with that just about on time. Thank you. You're turning to answer the questions today. There is time for questions so does anyone have any questions after the presentation? Yes. My interest was actually just in raising the question maybe rather than thinking there was an answer or that there was a practical answer. I don't know if there is a practical answer and it clearly requires a lot of work and I guess I pointed at some of the I don't know if you like theoretical reservations and I suppose if I had an objective in this talk or this discussion it was about just a sense of the question and I think it's a good question and I think it's a good question because if I had an objective in this talk or this discussion it was about just a sensitising people to the fact that OER may be culturally specific and we can't assume that they're universal and if anyone else wants to go and think about moving to a next step that would be great. I don't know what it is. I'm certainly not advocating Hofsteader. Cupid though I think all of those pictures and diagrams are. We shouldn't be giving the impression that refugees are going to culturally homogenous. They are no more culturally homogenous than the rest of us but it would at least kind of challenge the assumption oh we can get the infrastructure right, we can put a platform up and it won't be a problem after that. So if we get any further than that, fabulous. It is very quickly ready, it is very difficult to answer and actually think about how you might specify an application profile et cetera, how will that be eaten by the platform, it's difficult because I found it interesting David White's comments this morning about learning objects and I burnt my fingers by making all these lovely learning objects in funding projects which no one actually bothered to reuse again and I don't want to get down this dead end again so I mean how can we actually do this? I suppose there is a slightly more general reservation and that's actually in relation to refugees we might succeed in making something that was more culturally appropriate to them and yet actually not close the distance between them and the European environment which they're trying to enter so it's not straightforward that it has to work for them if it doesn't actually help them understand the cultural environment into which they're moving, so I've only just thought about that so I better retract everything I've previously said. Well you could argue that actually, sorry, I mean you could argue that even introducing these ideas to refugees or if you like non-Europeans would make them critically aware of the cultural divide or the cultural distance that they might have to traverse rather than necessarily putting the owners on as it asks, as it were, as the educationalist to say that you're going to struggle with this for these reasons Hofstadter 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. That sounds like a kind of advert for critical digital literacy I suppose but no harm in that. OK we have time for one more question. You have cats on the table when we do this kind of stuff and say look this is where we're coming from. This is our approach. Metadata has a role but I don't know if this is it. Oh maybe so. My argument will be slightly flawed if in getting all of this culture incorporated into metadata it then turns out that metadata is unhelpful and unused. That will be kind of moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic really. Yes. Well and a kind of modernist flaw might be to imagine that culture is somehow fixed and to reify culture into something that is actually fixed and stable and measurable. So again, yeah. You might argue that's just academic. I'd say you have to be careful because there's more or less formal aspects of metadata. Metadata is just data about data. I wouldn't be wanting to suggest using LOM necessarily for this. I mean you could use XAPI or something else but I think it's very important to have an explicit semantic representation of how you set stuff up because if you haven't then you can tweak the variables for the next edition of the course and you lose sight of things. Perhaps a way of expressing that is a kind of description of statement at the beginning of the learning resource. That's the distance where we're coming from. That's what your cards are going to take. And I'm going to ask you to park that until after the session just because I don't want to run out of time for everyone else but thank you both very much. Wonderful presentation. So many conversations to continue. The next session is about the open med open course and we have three presenters. Fabio Nascimbeni, Daniel Villar-Anrubia and Addie Twisi who will magically all speak within 15 minutes. Thank you Catherine. We have decided to keep it a little bit more simple so I'm going to be making a very brief introduction to the project and then Addie is going to talk most of the time because this presentation in particular is about the perspective from facilitators and he's the only facilitator here. And also Javier is with us and she's an external evaluator so if you have any other questions about evaluation she will be also available to reply. So open med is an Erasmus Plus project as well and it's about raising awareness and facilitating adoption of open educational practices in the South Mediterranean region, in particular Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Palestine. This is an overview about different things that we have been doing over the last three years but today we are going to be focusing on this, the capacity building course which has been a core component especially being an Erasmus Plus project looking at capacity building for higher education. So an overview of the course it has a five modules covering in total 80 hours of work it has been translated into three languages it has 12 facilitators and 62 participants from five countries. This is our learning circles and we have learning circles in all the partner countries and also Lebanon so in Lebanon we had an extra learning circle and if you want to just take the floor, Adi this was our first facilitator of facilitators training last September in Torino. Thank you, Daniel. Welcome everyone, thank you so much for being here. So this picture was taken back in Torino and as you can see there's a lot of people here. Most of them are facilitators who joined that program in order to get introduced to the processes that's going to happen and how are they going to present the course online to their learning circles. We showed in the previous slide here there were 12 facilitators in total and 62 learners differentiated and partitioned in different groups we called them learning circles and they are among the five countries as well so we had in the course as mentioned before five modules and each module we planned to have webinars with people who have impact and open education in different countries. These are some of them and we were humbled to have them in our webinars as well so that our learning circle would understand and get more insight from the outside world and from people who lead organisations in this aspect. Now here are some findings that I would like to share with you when we finished the course and I presented the module it lasted for about six or seven months and then once it was finished we were running a summative and informative evaluation for the course. As we can see here here is also a recap for how many facilitators and trainers we have in each country as you can see that five of them have one facilitator against or versus the remaining of the trainees for the remaining some countries chose to have two facilitators because some learners actually wanted to learn more about OER although they had the ability to teach online so there were teachers and instructors at the same place but they wanted to get more information and more hands-on experience on what OER are and try to make their own actually. Other insights that I would like to share with you is that the impact was expandable actually. It wasn't also just narrowed on focus on these universities. We had other partners, a room for other partners that I come from for example the Monterey University in Egypt, the Yarmoke in Jordan, Helwan University in Egypt as well and in Morocco University of Mohammed V and Robert. So this is actually that shows that the impact was expandable as well. We will reach as much as possible at the extent of our ability in this project. Okay, and here I would like to share some quantitative and qualitative results with you from the evaluation. We see that in this evaluation of the open-bent course we saw that the over quality of the course was made as good. Most of the people, the good represented by green colour here most of the learners and facilitators as well thought that it was really good to have this platform in terms of navigation, the level of the students who participated, the learning circle and the value of the activities themselves inside. So as we can see here that was mostly positive in terms of the experience that they had. Facilitators now talked about if they learn new techniques on how they can use in their teaching and will they be using OER in the future? Take into consideration here that when we are talking about facilitators in the South Mediterranean region not all of them were previously involved in as open educators I would say. I had to happen to be one of them and I'll tell you my story in short. One of the things that I would focus in here will you adopt the methodology of this course in your practice later on? The majority said yes and this is actually a positive insight that you can get from this result. Now here's the qualitative part which is something that I would like to focus on. Myself, I've been involved in this project since day one in my university. I represent Princess Sumaya University I'm the director of the e-learning centre and my day one in Princess Sumaya was the expert meeting of OpenMid there. The vice president came to me and said hey I'm going to introduce some people their work might be so interesting to you so let me show you. He introduced me to Daniel and Fabio was there and afterwards what is this all about? They said it's open education. Can you get education really open? Are you kidding me? That's what my mindset was telling me is that how can we make education really open? What is OER? I've never heard of it like a term OER since it was coined back by UNESCO's forum back in 2002 until now and then I began to read more about it because I was about to involve in this project I wanted to learn more how to use OER and evolve in my courses and my techniques and I found that there was a problem between applying OER and depending on the country itself how am I doing at the time? Between the policies that are applied in my country which is Jordan and other countries in the region and how to contrast them with the European Union in this project so that I can get benefit from everybody and they share and exchange ideas what I found is that the problem of OER in the closed education systems resides in the very definition of what OER is. OER openly or freely accessible openly licensed again freely accessible openly licensed when you are being open you're moving this way when you want to care about privacy and security of your stuff you're going to move this way so that's actually applied in every aspect of higher education in Jordan that they really didn't grasp the idea of OER at the beginning and I'm talking as a facilitator from one of these countries I began to understand OER and the opportunity and the vistas of I would say cooperation that I can open with other universities and how expandable it is so I'm really grateful for that. I'm going to go really quickly through these findings and focus on some of them for example facilitator C I don't know who that is but I agree with them to make more visual materials and improve the quality of the produced videos as one of the recommendations that they made to make the course more impactful and more reachable to everyone else. One of the notes that we got on the course of the open mid is that it has a lot of textual content although I've been involved also in designing the course I've been there in the beginning and we try to involve as much as we can from different multimedia and in order to make them understand how OER works how to use them, reuse them, improve them and implement them in other places and also how to use the open licenses so maybe it was depending on the type of learners in which region are you talking about some learners prefer to be more textual others maybe more visual there are some people in the middle hall in the mix and from the end-depth interviews I can share many of the readings readiness for OER adoption and how to develop that and making the experts in open education appointed to influence positions like the director of e-learning centres in each university to be a reactor for OER and the promoter for their learning circle in the future I would like to mention and reassure that this course was in a pilot phase all of what I'm showing here it's something to be more improved it's something to be translated into three languages it's basically in English but it's going to be translated in Arabic and French we're still working on that but for sustainability we are working on having several scenarios where this project is going two of most is and I think that's got to be linked with the main challenges of this project is that we would like to have this course also implemented in each university or in each partner so that everybody would get benefit out of it and we are also having the idea and the possibility to also link it with other organisations and extracting it out to different LMS systems ok so that was actually explained in my talking before and the improvement and validation of this course is going to be continuously happening but what I wanted to say here is that some countries and I would relate with this with the title of the previous presentation some countries are open in education but not open enough some other countries or other educational systems are really close what I see from here the real value is is at least to introduce people to this concept I mean there's always a shocking factor you know you have to get to use it and see it and get out of your comfort zone and learn something new and keep moving forward I see that's a big value in this one learning a new paradigm relatively new paradigm for myself and for many scholars in my country in order to get to it learn something new and keep moving forward with it I see there's a lot of potential in this one and thank you so much for listening I really don't want to keep lab lab-ling about many things here but I would also save the last few minutes for any questions that we'd like to ask thank you wonderful, thank you so much Addy my apologies earlier I didn't pass the microphone to the questioners so I'm going to do that this time and can I see if there are any questions from anyone? Do you have a mic? You do Hello, thank you very much for this very interesting presentation I would have a question about the learning circles how did the interaction work between a facilitator and the learning circle then within the learning circle itself and then between the learning circles Okay, good question so there was an interaction between the learning circles I would say that was back in also to we in a week we gathered them all together and they promised to keep on working together maybe to present a project, a final project at the end of the course we opened the door for everybody from different circles to talk to each other because that's what really it is about we wanted to have this international sense in this project but let me get inside each learning circle it was a fully online technique and this is something that I can also relate in terms of the Jordanian regulations for example I can talk in behalf of my country we have something weird that is called the blended learning it's not really weird, it's weird in Jordan they provided the ability to present the course any course in any university with 25% as an online content what about the other percentage well you can have them as face to face well that would destroy the whole concept of what MOOC really is and there were also certain challenges that we faced in terms of the ability for learners to learn through online platforms we use Sakai as an LMS and some students from our learning circles didn't have the technical ability yet enough to get involved in this course there were some technical problems in some areas of Jordan in terms of internet connectivity and stuff but we were able to overcome these challenges by addressing each of the learning circles problems before we started the pilot project so that the pilot went through very smoothly and I think that we've learned a lot even before we started the pilot project because we had to encounter some challenges that we waited long before we faced them and now with OpenMid the time has come to face them and to overcome them so thank you so much for this question thank you any other questions it's hard to see I don't know can I just know do I need the mic? just to complement something two interesting things about this course first it was developed and designed completely collaborative so we met all the partners in Madrid for three days and it really worked hard starting from zero so starting from designing one by one the learning objectives and taking into account the situation in every single country and it was for sure a learning experience for the south Mediterranean partner but much more probably for the northern partners because we tend to consider ourselves experts in the course design and the instructional design and there we had to start from scratch because the situation is very different in every country among the learning circles from different countries at the national level it's quite easy because people know each other and they were sharing stuff the trick we used there is to focus on the final project work on every learner so every learning in this course had to read some stuff take some modules run some activities and then develop a final project work which in most cases is actually an artifact and all you are is a piece of the course and so on and so we, let's say the bet there is to share and to work together then on these projects not so much in the learning process even if, and this was quite surprising to me the forum discussions in the platform were pretty active so normally we tend to be I'm not quite sceptical about how adult university professors use their time in responding to forum questions but in this case it worked pretty well showing again the interest I think Adi, Fabio and Daniel, thank you very much