 Hello, good afternoon. Welcome, everyone, to this last session, last webinar of the Open Education Week that has been organized by Eden in the framework, of course, of the initiative that is coordinated by the Open Education Global. As you most probably know, this is an initiative that Eden has been organizing every year in the last couple of years. And basically, we try to explore the hot topics of Open Education in connection with also the developments in our field. And this year, this past year and still this year, our field has been dominated by the discussion on our response to the pandemic and the challenges of the pandemic. I will start by giving you some notes regarding how the session will be conducted. So I'll start by introducing the topic and the speakers. And then each one will have a brief period of time, sometimes 12 minutes, to present their initial case. Afterwards, we'll have a discussion and a Q&A. And so you're all invited to already share your questions. And you can use both the Q&A, especially the Q&A, but also if needed the chat. But we would like to invite you to use the Q&A option, which you can find on the bottom of your screen. I'll now share my screen to introduce the speakers. So as you know, the session, this session has selected this topic also just a minute. Okay. I selected this topic supporting teaching and learning in schools through Open Education Resources, the lessons from the pandemic. We have a wonderful set of speakers. And I'll just give you a short note on each one of them. First, we'll have Abby Ross. She is the Chief Executive Officer of Koriki in the United States. And as you can see here, in the slide as well, Abby is a seasoned technology entrepreneur with a passion and background in education technology. She started her career in product management at a startup that grew to 10 million users and was acquired by Expedia in 2010. Abby then led the strategy and growth for Web and mobile development firm as a managing partner. In 2013, Abby co-founded Thinkcirca, a venture-backed education technology company focused on helping build critical thinking skills through writing a trusted curriculum. Abby was integral in raising over $20 million in capital across three rounds of funding, developing Thinkcirca's initial product offering and go to market strategy to launch as an enterprise K-12 program. So she's a very experienced entrepreneur in this field. And she's now the leader of Koriki in this phase. Next, we'll have also Agde Gras Velázquez. She is the Science Program Manager and head of the Science and Education Department of the European School Net. Dr. Agde Gras Velázquez, she's just pointed out, she is in charge of overseeing and coordinating all the math and science projects in which the European School Net is involved. Additionally, she's in charge of the day-to-day management of the scientists, the community for science education in Europe, and she'll be talking about this. And she coordinates the UN's work with regions and UN's ministries of education, STEM representatives' work in group. In her eight years at UN, Agde has been involved in over 25 European Commission-funded projects and 12 private-funded ones and also sits in the advisory board of a number of projects. Well, interestingly, prior to joining UN, she was an independent learning professional and she has also a PhD in astrophysics from Trinity College, Dublin. So she has a very solid scientific background. Also, we'll have Andrea Enamorato-Chantus. She's a scientific officer at the Joint Research Centre at the European Commission, in which she joined in September 2013. Her role involves research and policy support on ICT for learning skills and open educational resources. Her work contributes to finding opportunities and challenges of ICT and OER implementation at the policy level to innovate in most nice teaching, learning, and training practices in Europe. Her current focus is on the promotion and takeoff openness in higher education institutions and member states. She has a PhD in education technology from the Open University of the United Kingdom and she has worked extensively as a researcher and also as a consultant. Andrea produced a national report on OER in Brazil, which was published by UNESCO in 2011. Next, we'll have Dr. Sophocles Sotirio. He's a well-needed fellow and also the research and development department head of the research and development department at the Eleanor-Germanic Eagogy in Athens, Greece. He has worked at CERN at the National Centre for Scientific Research and Democracy in Athens and also the physics laboratory of the Athens University. He holds a PhD in high-energy neutrino astrophysics, also an astrophysicist, and a PhD in science education. The Eleanor-Germanic Eagogy is one of the biggest educational institutions in Greece and he has been quite active in the coordination developed by research projects on implementation for advanced technologies and in science education and training. He's also director of the Eleanor-Germanic Eagogy Centre for Teachers' Training. His main field is the design application and evaluation of training. He's a member of the European Academy of Sciences and the Board of Excites and has served as an expert evaluator to the European Commission for the FP5 and FP7 programmes. Finally, we'll have Professor Stella Miel. He is the director of UNESCO Chair in Distance Education of the University of Brasília. He's a professor of the Department of Mathematics and Techniques at the Faculty of Education of the University of Brasília, where he coordinates the distance pedagogy course. He's a coordinator of the UNESCO Chair, as I've said, and has coordinated also the UNESCO Chair in Open Education at UNICAMP from 2014 to 2014 or 2018. He was a visiting professor at Utah State University and a visiting fellow at the University of Wallagon. As you just could see, we have an expert panel and we'll be starting now with the discussion of our topic. I'll start by inviting Abby to back her presentation. Abby, please. Thank you very much. I'm really happy to be here and with such great panellists, which is such a great organization. I am going to speak a little bit about Kariki and welcome any questions around technology and open educational resources. At Kariki, we are shaping the future of learning. We have created a free and open source technology to create interactive learning experiences. Ultimately, Kariki has been around since 2008. We created an OER for teachers. It was basically a repository where teachers could post their curriculum, lesson plans, on-demand content, and we had grown to about half a million lesson plans and example lessons for teachers to share. If you needed to teach something on Pythagorean theorem, you could go to the library and find something from another educator. We took a look at that content over the past two years or so. What we realized was the quality of the lesson plans in there just weren't as high quality as we needed with the pandemic and the shift to distance in global learning. We started building technology about two years ago, and we've introduced an open source authoring and publishing tool to make learning interactive for students. I'll show you that authoring tool today, which is called Kariki Studio. It's comprised of 50 learning interaction types that you can pull from things like drag and drop, interactive video, 360 tour. Because it's an authoring tool, it then allows any educator to instantly publish a lesson or a course that they've created to any learning management system. We have decided that our place in this ecosystem is to build sustainable technology and architecture so that other organizations can build off of this authoring tool and incorporate it in. The organizations that we work with are schools and districts who want to make their lesson plans dynamic and interactive for students. We work with publishing companies or subject matter experts that have content, and instead of using a static PDF emailed to students, you can make a dynamic learning playlist. With our sustainable technology architecture, developers from technology organizations can build off on top of it, integrate it into their technology stack, and go to market quicker. That's what Kariki Studio is. The future of learning on one place is a content authoring and publishing solution so that you can create and manage dynamic learning experiences for any of your users. This is a summary. When you think about some of the learning that we're asking students to do, sending them to one-off pages, static PDFs, or limited interactions like multiple choice, fill in the blank or text response, we are empowering curriculum and curriculum creators to transform to interactive playlists that truly drive student engagement. There's 50 interactive activity types. You can one-click publish to any configured learning management system. Authors can arrange their lessons and playlists into a scope and sequence, and anything created with Kariki Studio is mobile optimized by design. The 50 different learning activity types that we have are really used for learning designers can leverage them from pre-K all the way to gray learners. It's just the matter of the rigor of the content that you add to the technology. Examples include drag and drop, an essay, fill in the blank, a little memory game, interactive video. It's our goal with this open source technology to go from 50 learning activity types to 500. Imagine being a content creator or an instructional designer and being able to incorporate VR and AR for immersive experience and then add in a quiz at the end, putting in badges and leaderboards to gamify the experience for your learners. That's really what we're creating at Kariki Studio. All of our road map is driven by feedback from authors and students. If you are building in Kariki Studio and say, hey, this essay tool is okay, but what we really want is the ability for students to collaborate while they're writing, those will be the types of integrations that we're looking to build in. So the flow with Kariki Studio is create a learning project, find a poll from those different learning activity types, add your content to those activities, create a playlist, arrange or rearrange them in whatever order you want, and then you have an option to enable distribution to your environment. That can be embedding it into a website, into a learning management system like Moodle, Canvas, Schoology, or Google Classroom, and then learners can engage with what you've created. All of the grades can then be passed back to the learning management system. So when we think about the future of teaching and learning with open educational resources, this can be a great way for teachers to build and launch interactive learning and then see how students are doing that directly where they're already doing their work, likely their learning management system. So I want to share a couple of examples, and I'm happy to throw these in the chat after I'm done speaking so you can kind of see when I say an interactive playlist, what do I mean? So Civicate, I am based in the US here, and Civicate is a curriculum actually designed by a high school student to make sure that all students have a good understanding of government. So we worked with Civicate. We partnered them with one of our certified curriculum studio authors to turn their videos interactive. So they had a series of different videos, and what we essentially did was used our interactive video tool, and along the way throughout the video, there's little pop-ups with questions, you can award points, and within the interactive video, you can do multiple choice, drag and drop, free of response, and just making that content more dynamic so that learners can engage instead of just watching a 20-minute video, they're prompted to lean and engage with the content. Another example for the higher education market is we've been working with a renowned entrepreneur, Raoul Deju, and he has a course called How to Become a Successful Entrepreneur. This course was basically a series of YouTube videos that he would email out to his students. So what we did is we took our interactive book functionality, and we created an interactive self-paced course about learning how to start a business, and it's targeted to higher education and adult learners. So what this means is that any higher education institution can go to Raoul Deju's website and one-click request that it gets sent to their learning management system so university professors can easily incorporate it into their curriculum, and they can also have their students go through it independently and get certified at the end. Another example I want to share is how other technology companies are using Cricky Studio. So Vivensi is a social-emotional learning platform, you know, I'd consider them a little bit of an up-and-comer startup, and they've used Cricky Studio as a way to go to market faster. So they were building technology for their social-emotional learning platform and decided to use Cricky Studio to author all of their curriculum, helping their developers reallocate resources to be able to focus on things like analytics and grading and feedback for learners. Using Cricky Studio, their development team saved over a thousand development hours and launched six months earlier than planned using Cricky Studio to build their learning app. And the last one here is the LA Opera. Since no one can go to the opera due to COVID-19, they wanted a way to engage with their community. So they transformed static PDFs into 20 interactive lessons that taught students about music, where they can learn about the different pieces of the orchestra and even then have learners record and create their own song from the sounds of the orchestra. Oh, one last one, sorry. The South Carolina, which is a state here in the United States, their Department of Education is building a statewide repository of digital curriculum assets. And so they are taking Cricky Studio and integrating that into their technology stack. So they're offering all of the teachers and state with the ability to integrate Cricky Studio as the primary platform for creating interactive learning experiences. This has the impact to reach over a quarter of a million students. So the future for Cricky and the future of kind of what open educational resources looks like to us is building the future of learning. So it's our vision that with Cricky Studio, all digital learning experiences become experiential and immersive, blending synchronous and asynchronous at the pace of the learner. Cricky Studio as a technology can be at the center of that. So things that we're planning on adding to Cricky Studio over the next three to five years are embedded collaboration. So authors can choose moments to have peers collaborate on their work or even push to get connected with a tutor. Students can have a portfolio of all of their work created in Cricky Studio to help with jobs and admissions. Courses can be gamified for 21st century engagement. VR and AR for real world experiences and integrating in STEM lab simulations so they can still have engaging hands-on learning at their fingertips on a device and blend that together with online learning. So how to get involved is, you know, check us out on our website Cricky.org. Again, this is free and open source so you can easily sign up for the demo environment and try out what it looks like to build interactive learning. Because we're free and open source, you know, have your technology team check out our code on GitHub. The entire software package is free and open source free to be able to incorporate in and available on all cloud hosting providers. And please feel free to email me at abbey at cricky.org. We can set up a demo or a discussion about how your organization could use Cricky Studio. And again, we work with education institutions, publishing companies, and really anybody with something that you want to teach in an interactive and dynamic way. This is, you know, really kind of come out of shifts in learning from, you know, static content and how we can make it dynamic and easy and do that through technology. So thank you so much. Thank you so much, Evie. And well, thank you for a wonderful presentation and a very clear one on the work that Cricky has been doing at this point. Well, I should add that Cricky is the leading initiative in OER in the U.S. for some years now, well, especially dedicated to K-12. And you have just shown us why. We have just a couple of very brief questions that will be very easy for you to reply. First one, does this OER come in other languages than English? And secondly, is Cricky using H5P? And which are the advantages to use Cricky instead of H5P embedded in LMS? Can I enter those live or type my response? Okay. I can answer. Yes, yes. You can answer live. Okay. So yes, we are using H5P for some of our activity types. Ultimately, our vision with Cricky Studio is to continue to use H5P. We're a contributor to their project and actually contribute some XAPI coverage back to H5P for the grade pass back. We are adding additional activity types outside of just H5P. So things like, you know, VR, AR, we've got a Unity Kit for gamification. So you'll see a growing library in Cricky Studio. And then the other thing to consider ultimately is we've built where we've really focused is the front-end interface for authoring. So making it really easy for non-technologists and really anybody to be able to author content directly in Cricky Studio. So we've really focused on the author experience. So, you know, please continue to use H5P embedded in the LMS. We are, we kind of have one click publishing to any learning management system so that you can have a broader distribution besides just the embedded LMS, which I believe is Moodle. So if you're looking for reach across Google Classroom, Canvas, or other institutions, this kind of gives you a create once published anywhere. I think the second question was other languages besides English. Yeah, we are working on it. So it is a browser native platform. So you can use any browser translations for your learners. You can create any content in any language. Cricky Studio as an authoring tool right now is available in English, but we will be adding more languages this year. Thank you, Abby. And now we started by having this perspective on the work from Cricky in the US. And now we'll shift to a different kind of experience and the experience of the European School Net. So, Agda, you have the floor now. Thank you very much. So I'm going to be talking about STEM education and particularly resources on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and on what we've actually been doing during the last year to support teachers with their activities, both with resources and online courses. I'm going to be telling you a bit about what we've learned in the process. So of course, to start with, we need to understand that the moment that we get up from bed every morning, science is all around us. So we go and brush our teeth, we get dressed up, we might travel to work, we turn on our computers, even when we cook breakfast or even in the evening when we go play or if you go watch sports or just play around, STEM is absolutely everywhere. Now, the problem is that when you go to the classroom traditionally, you get the kids inside the classroom, you close the door, it's kind of like a closed environment. It's more like a box where you're separated from the real world. And you have the kids kind of having to learn all this in a way disconnected from this world going around. Outside. So the teachers have to have to share all this content, knowledge, all this pedagogy, all the way, they have different students, they have different areas of expertise. And on top, they have to connect with everything else they have. So subjects, topics, ethics, career progression. And now during the last year, they had the extra component on top in case they didn't have enough things to handle was the remote teaching where they suddenly had to interact through a screen with kids of every single age, different capabilities, different interests, and even more different situations at home. So where they might have kids where they could have access to a laptop, but there was places where they have different one laptop for the whole family. So it was a very, very difficult situation for teachers across the world, which is not finished. So at European School Net, as Antonio was explaining before, we are a network of ministers of education. So we work with 32 ministers of education across Europe and beyond on how to improve education. And I'm running all the science, technology, engineering, mathematics projects that we have. So we're talking about 15 to 20, depending on the year. And we have quite a lot of people connected there. And one of the questions we got during the pandemic, a lot of people were saying, like, Oh, so you might be more relaxed this year, because, you know, you don't have events, so you're not organizing face to face training. But it's actually we became kind of like a source of information and knowledge, not only for teachers, but also ministers of education, where it was more passive in the past where we would like, Hey, guys, we're doing this, we're turning around and they would go, Okay, what do we have now? What can you help us with? So I'm going to show you two examples. But before I go there, I want you to understand one thing. If you want to use something in a classroom, especially across Europe, if you talk to a teacher, I want you to include a new topic in your classroom. The answer they're going to give you is I can't, it does not fit my curricula. No, I don't have the time. So if you think about curricula, it's kind of like this bookshelf that you see in the background. This is a curricula is what tells the teachers what they have to teach. And this curricula depends not only per country, sometimes even per region or age and everything. So if you tell a teacher, well, now on top of what you're doing, I want you to do this extra thing is like trying to put an extra new book in this bookshelf. You need to take something out. And you say, Well, I'll just know what I'm going to do is just give you a new chapter. Even then the book is a bit thicker. If you're trying to put the book inside the bookshelf is not going to fit. So you will need to understand that these are the constraints we're working on. So if you want to improve education without having to wait for the process of curricula being changed is by enhancing it with adding on top or supplementing the lessons with resources, with training, with anything that helps carry the teacher do what already they have to do in an easier way or in a more effective way. So we have two initiatives that I wanted to highlight today that have helped during this year. So one, as my colleagues were saying before, before we started this webinar. So of course, we work on scientists, a community for science education. So we've been running this for over 10 years now, 11 years, 10 years now, so quite a long time. So we've been working on making sure that everything that was happening in Indian STEM education year was in one place. And in particular, the resources, the teaching materials that were creating different projects were included in one repository. So when the project's finished, you will still find there. Now you have to understand one thing that is actually been very interesting during those 10, 11 years. What's happened is from the beginning, we had to go and look for the resources. Okay. And but in the last few years, we don't actually look for them. They come to us. They already know that it exists. But as I was saying, before, before we were more like kind of pushing our content out during the last year, it was the things really turned around where we would get people that would normally not pay attention to online teaching go, can I have these type of resources? We had ministers of education contacting us. I know you were talking to me for three years about remote labs. I kind of wasn't listening. What did you have exactly again? Because now we have to problem. Now we actually have to look for it. So it's very important to understand that you are going, when you work with open educational resources, you might be preparing things that are not useful yet. But if you don't start working now, by the time they actually need it, it's too late. If repositories like scientists or even the clicker that Abby was mentioning before, if they didn't exist, if they didn't start working five, 10 years ago, they would not have been there last year when they were really needed. And by then it was very late to actually implement many things that were required. The second thing I want to talk about is, comes from the lessons learned from another pilot that we were running last year on integrating nature based solutions into the classroom. So we're talking about solutions that improve society that use nature instead of artificial materials. So for example, instead of actually, if you go to the street and they're creating a wall between two lanes, so instead of just putting concrete, then you put like trees, then you're actually still achieving the same result, but helping nature and making it in a more eco-friendly way. So we had a project on creating learning scenarios for the integration or the use of nature based solutions in classrooms. So that project started like a month and a half before the pandemic hit. So of course, we already knew we were going to create learning scenarios, they were going to be in English, they were going to be translated, they were going to be modular, adaptable, expandable. So pretty much everything we knew learning scenarios should be. And I'll tell you a bit more in a second how that got impacted by the pandemic. So going into the lessons learned, as I was saying before, thanks to the fact of those borders or resources existing or repositories existing, you were able to already help. So as a message to anybody working on an educational resource, you kind of have to think about it before the need. So if you're already thinking, oh, they really need it now, it's a bit too late. So think about a license of the materials, are they going to be adaptable? Are they going to be able to translate it as Abby was saying that you actually are making sure that this resource can actually be used by anybody or they can actually be integrated in different aspects. So that's one of the things that we realized again that, okay, at some point where you felt, oh, why am I doing this? Nobody's using it right now. It actually serves a purpose and it is ready by the time it's needed. The second thing is of course, the adaptability that we were mentioning before, in the learning scenarios, we actually realized as well that in spite of everything, teachers are amazing. They're very resilient. They really figure things out. So within a few weeks, we had to tell them, okay, all this work you've done on creating these wonderful learning scenarios, go back and make them that you are able to use them through remote teaching. So you're no longer in the classroom, but you still have to teach this. How do you adapt it? So those amazing authors, teachers were actually went back and were, okay, if I move this and I turn it around, but they had to make it so, so adaptable that it's not only that it's going to be with different types of kids, different subjects, different ages, different cultures. Now they had to do the case where you have no students in the classroom. They have case where you have some students, but others not the case where you have a student connecting, but they're by themselves a student connected, but the parent is behind behind them. So these learning scenarios and these teachers learned how to well adapt it to remote teaching, intervention of parents where they were there, activities across different time zones. So they really became essential both the fact that the materials were already open, but the teachers knew how to expand and were ready to really adapt it like that. Then we also have, of course, an experience connected also with this project is that online training, many, many people were saying, well, people, teachers are very busy now with the whole teaching. So they're going to be pulling away from training. In fact, we've seen the opposite. We've seen a huge rise on participation of teachers on online training. So they realized even those that had never participated before, they realized they really had to be there. So for example, this online MOOC that we run this year, the beginning of this year, we had over 1,200 teachers actually taking part of the MOOC and learning how to adapt it, how could they use it, and how, and they realized they had to connect their classes to real situations, real cases. And nature-based solutions gave them a very good excuse to do that. And also connected to that, we also, of course, have the STEM discovery campaign that we've just launched. And even if they're working from home, there's also still this need of the connectivity, of connecting from different angles, how to make sure that what you're doing, even if you're not connected in the classroom with students, how you're connected to everybody else. So we do have this campaign where we have teachers already about over 700 teachers have already been sharing all their actions they're doing on STEM education, either in isolation or with the students, with communities and everything like that. So I just want to finish saying that it was the productivity and being ready beforehand, where you could see that teachers, where you could see that all your efforts were, had to be ready for when they're needed, not create them when they're needed. And one of the examples I was mentioning before, going back to the ministry, was about these remote experiments, for example. So I know my colleague Sophocles later on is going to be talking about it as well on hands-on experiments. So that's something that was really like, oh, no, now, okay, fine, we have the resources. How do we actually do the experiments as well? We have remote teaching. And finally, make sure that you understand that teachers are amazing and they can really adapt and use anything they want. And just make sure that they're not working alone through campaigns, or any way that you can connect them. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Agda. A wonderful presentation. It will be an endless number of excellent presentations. Thank you very much, Agda, for pointing out a number of very important aspects. I will just ask you if we don't have questions from the participants at this stage, but do you have actual figures on the increase of OERUs from your case? So we don't have the number of all increased use of the actual resources. What we have noticed is that so far on the training, yes, and all the materials used. And I can also tell you of the importance of actually being a representative. So for example, in science, we have scientists ambassadors, which are these teachers that represent and connect and share the information. And under normal circumstances, we would have got about, I don't know, 800 applications. So we had almost, I think it was like 1,500 teachers from across Europe that said, okay, no, I really want to be there and help others on how to access all that. And as a small announcement, like it's still not public completely, but so you just say, no, there's actually 400 more ambassadors that have passed all the levels. And from now, we actually have 800 teachers across Europe that are official scientists ambassadors, and they're going to be helping other teachers on the use of of resources, the training, and how to implement teaching, not only for students, but in remote settings. Well, Agda, we have a short question from Mirka. Who can attend the middle courses offered on science? So the massive open online courses at the European School and Academy, they're open to absolutely anybody in the world. And we have teachers from everywhere. Yeah, pretty much everywhere across the world, even the scientists ambassadors, we have now teachers representatives in India, we have several, we have ambassadors in several countries in South America, we have one in the States, we have, I was listening before in the Philippines. So everything we do is completely open, creative commons, you can have actually even grab the MOOC, take pieces of them, translate them using them in their own platforms, you can take them to Curriculum if you want to, and you can embed it wherever you want. Well, Alfredo, also need a fellow is asking you if these materials from those school, the European SoulNet can be also used, or if you have, of course, evidence of that can also be used in higher education, for instance, or other sectors. So higher education, we don't have much experience, we concentrate on primary, secondary, so that means four years old to 21, depending on the country. What we do know is that it's being used in teacher training, so in higher education with when they teach future teachers. So in that, yes. But at higher education, I'll tell you in a different direction, we have a number of materials and resources that we created for secondary education. And it turns out that teachers were had been able to adapt it to pre primary. So they were using things that we thought, okay, this is for 16 years old, and they found a way they could still use it with three years old. So my guess is that then it can go in the opposite direction as well. Thank you, Agda. Well, there is also a question here related to translation, but you had already replied to that, explaining that these materials have been translated to several languages. Well, thank you, Agda. We have seen now, I mean, we have had now two perspectives from OER production, in a sense. And we'll now shift to a different kind of perspective. What is the input from research and the research that actually is giving an input to policy making, the policy making that is also supporting the European School Net. So this completes a kind of a circle. And so, Andrea, what is your perspective on these experiences, especially what has been your experience from this pandemic context? Thank you very much for this briefing introduction. Anton, good afternoon. Good morning, or good evening to you all participating. Greetings to my fellow panel members. It's a pleasure to be here participating in this Open Education Week event organized by Eden. And indeed, I will share with you exactly what Antonio said now, a little bit of the European perspective on the policy making and our research and how this is translated not only into policy, but actually into tools that have been used all over Europe and beyond. So I'll share my screen with you. Yes, Andrea, that's perfect. Brilliant. Okay, thank you for confirming. So as has been said by colleagues in the panel before COVID has really posed us many challenges in education, not only for schools, for teachers, but also for the students and families and parents. We know that there has been a quick response to the COVID by schools, increasing also the access and on the search for open educational resources and MOOCs and open online courses. But the immediate response that we saw was an increasing remote learning and quite often transposing or changing what had been doing on face to face education, taking it into the online domain. And what we realized in this new way of learning for many people is that although we consider that young students, now the young generation were digital natives, research has already shown to us that not all of them are actually prepared for studying online and not all of them are actually digitally competent for studying online. We know that studying online requires a number of skills nor using the digital and digital technologies for studying requires some skills and that is organization, it is being able to understand what could be fake news, it is self regulation, so and so forth. So that was something that we already knew before the pandemics, but during the pandemics, that's another data that has become very transparent and visible to us educators. Now, the same question can be asked with respect to the teachers. Now, are teachers, are they actually equipped to respond to this challenging of suddenly having to teach online or use digital technologies for their teaching? We that belong to Eden and that our educators in the area, in the field of distance learning have been working with this for many, many years, decades, no, perhaps, but for many teachers, this was something new. So we know that there is limited preparation and support available for teachers nowadays that could enable them make a smooth transition to the digital world to online teaching. And we realize that ICT skills for teaching stuff was something that we really needed to cater for because there was this huge gap in knowing how to use not only technologies for teaching, because teaching, no, co-facilitating learning, co-learning is not only about using technologies, but above all to understand the learning theories behind the teaching methods that we use. And once we know the learning theories and we know all the methodologies available, preferably active methodologies, no, for teaching, then we can perhaps choose the best technologies to be used. So using technology as a medium, not as the end of teaching online, you know, not as the only destination for teaching online. So we realized there was a huge gap in that and we really need for more teacher training in that sense. So some research there also before the pandemic shows to us that 56% of students in Europe had received the training on using digital technologies for teaching and out of this 56%, 43% felt that they were well equipped, you know, to teach using digital technologies online. But what about the rest, you know, there are many teachers that have never actually had proper training on using digital technologies. So why am I talking about digital technologies if we are talking about OER? Because I really want to make this call for the need of digital competences so that teachers can make the best use of what open educational resources can offer to us, the education community. Now, by knowing more about how to use digital technologies, teachers and students can not only find OER, but also create and share open educational resources, right? So this is the lens that we are taking. First of all, we're starting with awareness raising about the need for more training for digital technologies and then introducing OER within the tools that we are building, which I'm going to show you in a minute in a way to make teachers more aware that these two things come hand in hand. Not to say that OER obviously is not only about digitally created resources, we can have also, we are based on printed materials. But the idea here is really to showcase the need for digital competence of teachers going hand in hand with the creation and use of OER. Okay, so how do we European Commission respond to it? As many of you know, we've had in 2018 a communication on the digital education action plan, which has now been revisited just during the pandemics in 2021. And now we have a new plan, which is called the new digital education plan for the European Commission, 2021 and 2027. And one of the main priorities of this digital education action plan in the commission is to foster the digital competence of educators. So I think that most of you know the RECompedu framework, a framework that was first published in 2017. So I've been talking about it for a long time now. It's a framework that showcases six areas in which educators should be digitally competent. And it's, as you can see, much, much more, it's going much more beyond technology use. It's really about how to be competent in communication, as you can see in Area 1, communicating with their community, their immediate community and colleagues and beyond, building networks for collaboration, how to use digital resources. And this is exactly where I would place open educational resources in this framework. Because as you will see in a moment, we talk about the use of licenses, right? So teaching and training, assessment, how do we assess online? It was also something else that many teachers had to learn. And also very important, as previously said in the beginning of my presentation, the need for empowering learners and also teachers in the role of facilitating the learner's digital competence. So if you're zooming to this framework now, I would place OVR in Area 2 when we talk about creating, selecting, creating and modifying resources, right? Although not very explicit on this, on this tube map, let's say, on this roadmap, this is where we place open educational resources in there. So when the teacher uses this DECOMPEDU framework, they can have a level of expertise described within the six areas from A1 to C2. And they can do that by using the checking tool. Currently, we have available for everyone in the world, not only for Europeans, the checking tool, you can see that you are eling there, which based in this framework, which I've just shown, every teacher can do a self-assessment, a self-reflection on their own competences, on their own digital competences, on those six areas that I've shown. And towards the end of the self-assessment, there is a report automatically produced for this teacher, right? And this should be the idea is that this should be used to help the teacher plan their own professional, continuous professional development from them on, whether they are looking for open courses, MOOCs, et cetera, and also to help their institution to plan for their training needs, okay? So that's how it's being used. In terms of the checking tool, it's important to say that it can be, and DECOMPEDU can be used for both higher education and school education for all levels of education. And that now we have been having an experience with Spain just to give us an example for higher education in which we have included in this checking tool, which is based on the DECOMPEDU framework. All these statements for self-reflection are based on those areas. We have explicitly included a section on the open edu framework, which is the European framework for open education, in order for teachers to be able to reflect upon their practices on open science, open teaching, accessibility, et cetera. So our goal, although it seems really embedded into the tool, was really by promoting self-reflection to enable teachers to become more aware of the role that open educational resources have to play in creating, producing, finding, and sharing resources. So what is next, just to finalize, it's a new tool that we are putting together called Selfie for Teachers that we plan to launch in September 2019, which is a new version of the checking tool focusing on school education. For higher education, we remain using the checking for the moment. And I invite everyone to join the DECOMPEDU community. If you search online for DECOMPEDU community, you'll find it. It's an open community for everyone to exchange information on digital competence and open education. Thanks for the moment. Thank you very much, Andrea. Well, another excellent presentation, as we were expecting. Thank you very much for pointing out also a number of important aspects that, well, most of them related to the role of teaching and how teachers are prepared to use OER and are prepared to engage in an open educational culture as well. We don't have other questions at this stage from the participants, but I would just ask you, do you have clear indicators at this point on the increase in terms of this awareness from the part of the teachers? Awareness of the OER. Well, I can give you some numbers of the open educational culture, what it implies. I mean, as a result of the development of this competence framework. Yeah. Okay. Good question, Antonio, because you see, we have done lots of research specifically on open education and OER in the past. And now, because of this need to increase digital competence, we are focusing more on producing this tool and on reframing those questions in the framework, because these questions have been revisited now. But by embedding, by embedding OER in there, we are hoping that this awareness raising will take place. Now, this is our way to help awareness raising in OER. But I can give you some numbers. I think that overall, we have more than 250,000 people using this tool. So it's quite a big number. And we plan to increase it even more as soon as we launch in September the new version of this tool. So we have countries not only in Europe working with it and ministries of education as well. Many ministries of education are asking their teachers to go through the self-reflection, but also countries in Latin America, more than nine countries in Latin America have been using this tool for awareness raising. Thank you very much, Andrea. Now, it's time to go to another part of the problem, the center of the problem, which are teachers, of course. And I would give the floor to Sofak Lys for him to give his perspective and bring, of course, bring us back the discussion to its center to teachers. Sofak Lys, you have the floor. Antonio, thank you very much for this invitation. I would, let's say, start by wishing to you and to Eden happy anniversary. I'm following the journey of Eden the last 22 years. And I trust that you are really serving in the best way, the modernization of education. And I'm very happy to see that many things that we are developing together all these years, they are now due to the pandemic, they are coming to real action. So my presentation is going to focus on a rather, let's say, specific issue that has to do with science education, and especially the introduction of inquiry learning during the time of the pandemic. The, especially the experimental process has a central role in the inquiry approach. There are very important benefits for that. So we cannot really just replace the experimental work, the lab work with, let me say, Zoom or a Webex classroom. So in principle, we have really to make use of all the tools we have in order to keep the process running. So here I'm going to present a series of findings that we had the chance to explore during the school's closure one year ago. We have, we had in one night to turn the operation of a whole school involving more than 2000 students online and try to keep delivering high quality services. And we came up that all these restrictions at the end of the day, they have offered us unique opportunities because we were more autonomous. There were flexible solutions and tools that everyone had really the opportunity to select and test. We have seen a significant use of open educational resources. I would like to highlight that it was really very important all this community building process where teachers were really supporting one the other. And as I said, we had the chance to see numerous innovations from the last years, from the work. We are making small scale experiments to really take up. And I believe that with the appropriate use of resources and tools, we had the opportunity to highlight the importance of personalized learning. Somehow the participation of all and the contribution of all students was really necessary. And at the same time, thanks to a series of tools, the teachers have the chance to monitor the students' activities during the experimentation. The most crucial parameters that we had to study very carefully during this exercise was to make sure that we are keeping the interest and the motivation of the students at high levels. And we are still enhancing the problem solving competence of the students. I'm going to present very quickly some examples of tools and resources that have been used at different levels of school at different, let's say, different time duration in the framework of normal lessons or project or project work. I will discuss the remote labs and virtual labs. And some in some cases enriched with augmented reality applications that are offering really a great tool for teachers to describe the, let's say, the invisible scientific phenomena. The use of resources from data archives from science centers, museums from research centers, and also virtual visits to research infrastructures. So from one side, there are numerous experiments, remote ones or virtual ones that can really replace the experimentation in the in the school lab. And there is also a significant benefit here that every student is able to perform the experiment, something that it is not really happening in the in the school lab, where usually there is the demonstration and the students are following here. Somehow due to the pandemic, every student had to perform the experiment, get involved with the activity, to collect data, to set the parameters, and so on. And I believe that this was a benefit in the overall process. As I said, the use of augmented reality was also a tool to present the phenomena and to support, let's say, the conceptual change for students. Other animations coming from different fields were deployed in order to support students' work, always connected with the school curriculum, even game-based platforms that are helping students to design and develop their projects like to develop and run a wind farm and check out the operation, the power and power production, and so on. Also resources from science centers and museums, unique resources, for example, from Galileo Museum that is presenting a series of discoveries of Galileo that can be used in mathematics, in physics lessons, for example, the rotation of the sun can be used as part of the circular motion lessons in the school curriculum. Also access to scientific resources like SOHO observatory that is following the sun, together with the resources from the science center that I have presented before, can give a rich experience to the students of the whole history of science. Of course, these are just some examples that we have implemented in the framework of these activities. Here I would like to highlight, apart from the digital content and the real added value of digital resources, the importance of the support that schools have received from outreach groups and research groups of major research infrastructures, that they have offered access to scientific data for students to perform experiments. One case are the seismic data. Maybe you know that this period, apart from the pandemic in Greece, we are experiencing very strong earthquakes in the central area of the country. These data, thanks to a big network of seismometers that are installed in schools, can be always available to everyone to design lessons that are connected, not only with geology or, let's say, earthquake activity, but also related to the tomography of Earth receiving signals. Here, this image is from yesterday night. The blue and the red, let's say, waveforms demonstrate the two earthquakes that hit central Greece, and in between the small ones are coming, in fact, from the other side of the planet, from the big earthquake in New Zealand. These waves have crossed the center of the Earth, and they were monitored from the seismometers that are installed in these schools. Another case was virtual visits. It's not only important for schools to move to the digital, let's say, version of schooling, but also other players who are really very important to contribute to school education to also adapt to the new reality. Here, I would like to mention the emblematic figures of Mikhail Khokh and Mik Stor. I know that they are following this event today, and I would like to thank them, because they were always there for students when they were visiting CERN, but also during the pandemic, they were always ready to share their experience, their knowledge, and organize virtual visits for numerous schools across Europe, not only for our school, but also for numerous schools sharing their work and findings. So, concerning the use, there was a significant upgrade to the usage of the platforms, the usage of resources. We had almost all the schools moving online, so clearly the analytics are increased, but the issue was that we had the opportunity really to see the distribution, let's say, of the activity during the time that was also expanding in the afternoon hours when the students were using the platforms and the tools during the preparation of the lessons. So, this graph demonstrates a week from Sunday to Saturday, and you can see with dark blue color the main time of the activity from the school platform, but also additional data demonstrating the session duration, the lessons duration, because this is also connected with let's say the quality of the service that we are offering to the students. We had about a 45 minutes very close to the normal school hour, measuring the starting, the number of students who were there the moment that the lesson was starting or when the lesson was ending. Again, we had very significant numbers in the participation and also the delivery of the homework of the projects or the findings from the experiments that were always, let's say, in the majority of the times before the deadline. Measuring the interest and motivation of the students was for us a very important aspect, so we have monitored this during the whole period, and we have seen that we have managed thanks to all these activities to keep the interest and motivation of students high, and also they were very much interested in the preparation of the experiments that they had to present in the class, because this was the task, the task of the presentation of the experiment was allocated always to students groups. And we had also data from assessing the problem solving competence. As I said, the fact that all students were using the platform gave the opportunity to monitor the whole process during the inquiry cycle, also during the performance of the experiment. So this is offering us unique data that are helping us to assess the partial abilities that are developing the problem solving competence, which is a major, let's say, issue when we are implementing inquiry-based approaches. So lessons learned. We have seen that the use, the massive use of these tools can help teachers to implement inquiry over distance. We have seen a unique pool of OERs being used. They are keeping the interest and the motivation of students at high levels. It's a good opportunity also for teachers to monitor the students' experimental work effectively, because all the students are performing the experiments in this distance learning environment. There is the chance for every student to be involved in the experiment, not the only one or two when they are making the demonstration in the class. And I think this is a strong message to revisit the policy as far as the use of open educational resources in education is concerned and to bring back this idea of open education, open content, open pedagogy, and open collaboration, which is restricted even when we don't have, let's say, the difficulties we are facing now with the pandemic. So we have to look to all these findings and rethink, I believe, a science education after this crisis. So I think that's all from my side. Thank you. Thank you very much. And looking forward to hear comments or questions. Thank you very much, Sofia Klis, and congratulations, because this is an extraordinary work that you've just presented. It's very interesting these, well, your conclusions, but also the fact that during the presentation it became clear this connection that you actually managed to increase between open educational practices, in a sense, and also open science and I would say even citizen science in some way. So the increase in the levels of participation by the students, possibly even the families, you can comment on that. It's quite interesting and significant. Also the fact that this collaboration with science institutions, I mean, especially with non-formal education institutions as museums, laboratories, labs, and all of these other research institutions that are also producing resources that can be used in educational contexts. And this is really amazing because it's a clear evidence of something that we've been discussing for many years, but we haven't seen as clear evidence as this. So my question to you at this point would be, do you also find, Sofia Klis, evidences of improvement in terms of student performance given this increased participation and this increased involvement in the scientific process? And let me just add a comment that congratulations to you as well for the 30th anniversary of Eden because you have been a very important contributor to that success. Let me say, Antonio, the fact is that our experiment took place mainly, let's say, to a specific period of three months when the schools were closed. Then students came back to school and also the final exam was organized following the traditional way. So I can say that we didn't have the chance really to perform the experiment at a very long period. Our aim was really to see if we can keep the interest and motivation high. As far as the problem solving competence for me, it's a major educational outcome. But as the system for the exams at the end remains at the traditional level, we cannot really monitor or see any impact or know about that. The fact is that the students perform very well also, the students at the final exams, the national exams of the school perform very well. So we can at least say that we have still managed to deliver a service at the quality of the traditional education by moving all these aspects to the digital world. Thank you very much. Now to conclude this cycle, I'm going to call Thel to share his view as well on this topic. Let me also add that Thel represents also a kind of a circle of the world because if you have colleagues, Abby, well, she is early in the morning in the United States. Well, the same with Thel in Brazil, we have Sophocles in Greece, Agada in Belgium, I guess, and Andre in Spain. And we have also people following us in the Far East. So you can have quite a good understanding of what is the outreach of Eden with just this tour of the world. Thel, you have a lot of experience in actually following up and supporting teachers using OER in schools. How did it change due to the pandemic? Well, Thel, you have the floor. All right. So I'll answer that question by looking at one of the things that we're particularly interested and curious about during this period and has been this idea of what we're calling the education under vigilance project that we've been doing for quite a while. And it's gotten to the center of our attention because we think it's been kind of an underrated discussion around the idea of openness. People are very eager, and I think people in our community and people that are interested in distance education and open education are very eager to promote this movement towards the use of these technologies. And sometimes we're not quite aware, I think, and not quite clear on the message that we send in regards to what kind of infrastructures and technologies that we use. And this is something that we've been focused on as a project during this moment of great openness, but at the same time, some very difficult decisions that have to be made in terms of how we make this openness happen. And so I'd like to present that for a little time that I have here. So I think we're very much aware of this movement to online environments. We've all talked about this, and we've gotten used to it, I think, a bit over this past year, even though we all promote distance education and open education, this is quite new for all of us in the speed that it happened and the way that it happened. And it didn't occur just to us that this speed and this movement that caught us in shock could be used for educational purposes. It also can be used for very strong marketing and economic purposes. And so this little slide from the garden says something that you see the benefit of this learning, but you also see an opportunity of privatization of public education and an increased movement of some businesses towards the online and the open environment. I have this quite beautiful phrase from the director of education from Google in Brazil that says, one of the advantages of offering services to schools is that you build loyalty early on. And this is something that I used to say that was a problem in regards to these platforms as they join educational systems. And it was kind of a shock to me to see this spoken so openly. And it should alert us that any business that's based on the fidelity of kids, you can think of other businesses that do the same business model, wouldn't cause an alert to us, wouldn't cause us to kind of scare to us in regards to what's happening in education today. And I won't have time to talk about a lot of these issues, but I want to just kind of give you a sense of what the things that we are worried about. And there are many more. And some of these, of course, you are well aware of others might be something that you haven't thought about before. But we encourage people to think as the intersection of what we push for in terms of open education, what we want in terms of open education, and how I intersects with what these businesses and what's happening in terms of a movement towards these businesses. And what I mean is the great proliferation of platforms like Google Shoot for Education or Microsoft 365 that have kind of dominated the market in this area. And I'll present you with some data on that in just a bit. Some of the worries that we have in this GAFAM model, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft has been called in some place it's called GAFAM without the Microsoft at the end. We very surely want to include Microsoft here. Is that we all know that I think it's been hammered into our heads through movies and news that collection analysis of data and metadata is a business model, whether it's used for advertising, whether it's used for promotion of their own products. These massively complex services that are offered to schools around the world is not something that's been given for free, even though it's pitched as free. It's just an exchange for a massive amounts of data and as we see that a play for fidelity on kids' minds. We know that there's a huge problem with feeding algorithms and fake news that's been abundantly clear in our political systems. And we again have seen movies on this in Netflix and in other platforms that talk about the problems with how we feed and the opacity of algorithms. And the same thing happens within the educational systems when they adopt these platforms. The issue of loyalty I've just mentioned from that quote. We have a big problem in reducing service options. Once you lock into a service like this and in the pandemic, many school systems, many universities have locked into systems like this and when you migrate, as we all know, when you change a provider for distance education or remote education, this becomes a huge block in problem. It's very hard to move from one to the other and they don't encourage you to do that. I mean, you put all your data, you make all your accounts, you integrate everything within these systems and you end up teaching your own faculty and students to use these systems. That becomes a problem. We have all sorts of issues with what's now being called algorithm prejudice and content removal from these platforms. So once we encourage to you say Google suit for education, we're also encouraged to use YouTube. We're also encouraged to use their own platforms to publish our content. And that leads to things that are not educational in their essence and it integrates within the educational offices. And so there are a lot of other issues that I could talk about and I want to skip some of that because I'm sure you're aware of these, but this concentration of power into basically two big platforms has become a really big issue for education for us in open. And we see quite often people that are very strong advocates of open education saying things like well, create a Google classroom or create a Google page or you can create your own course at Google. And we often don't see the incongruity between these two things. And we want to encourage schools and universities to join these platforms. It becomes a big issue. And so since 2018, we've been kind of mapping this information. And we have a project that's called in Portuguese education, which is we're translating as education under vigilance. And we've mapped the data on through an automatic script. It's an open script. Of course, it's published on GitLab. You're welcome to take a look. And what we do is we map how public higher education, school, state systems and municipalities are adhering to these systems. Are they contracting these systems? Are they entering into agreements with particularly Google and Microsoft, which are the biggest players in our region? And we verify this data through freedom of information requests or LI as they're called in Brazil. We verify this information. And we have a pretty consistent map of what happens in Brazil over the past couple of years. And we've been tracking this information. No surprise has been going incredibly. And if we look at the data that we have now, this is very recently just pushed to the side a little while ago. It shows us that if you look at all public institutions in Brazil for higher education, which are over 120, you look at all state systems, 27 systems, which are in charge of basically secondary level basic education. And then you look at all cities with over 500,000 inhabitants. 66% already have an agreement of some sort with Microsoft of Google in Brazil. If you take out the municipalities, the number goes to 75%, which is an incredible number of students that are involved already within these systems. And this number has grown substantially during the pandemic, which in this emergency moment, people are flocking to these systems because they are free offerings and they didn't have time to find alternatives. We're just finalizing the expansion of this data to all of South America. The data is going to start to be published this week. And by the end of the month of March, we'll have all data collected already. But you can see that in other countries, this situation is even more dire. So in Colombia, we have now that in higher education institutions, 95% of them are already associated with both Google or Microsoft. And this is a trend. And the reason we worry about it is because if you look at a national survey that's done every year in Brazil on technology and education, you can see that most students have, for example, a profile or an account in WhatsApp or Facebook, which are the same company, obviously, and a very large number of students report using this for school. So in case of WhatsApp, for example, 61%. And so we're encouraging students to join these platforms where the school systems are bringing these platforms and we're kind of locking ourselves in into a place like this while we're talking about being open. And so in order to change the tone from very drastic and very hard times, what we're been trying to do in partnership with UNESCO here in Brazil is to try to create a new set of new mentality around the world of open, which includes the idea of digital rights as part of what open education might mean. And so we started this year and we have our first cohort finishing this month, a course that we're calling Open Education Leader. And it's supposed to be purposely a contrast to something like a Google educator. And in this course, not only we talk about open education resource competencies, but we also discuss things like open tools, open source, and what does it mean to have privacy, digital rights, access to information, and so forth. So we want to embed this idea that open education is not just about learning and using open licenses, which is a very important thing to do, but also the sort of tools and the ecosystem around this is very important. So this is our first cohort. We have two more this year in 2021. And I think it's an interesting initiative to get educators on board. As part of this, in order to support the course, we started a project that's called Escuela Livre. And these materials are, of course, in Portuguese, they've been launched in the past three or four months, which is sort of a guide for teachers about open source software and open educational resources, where to find them, how to use them. But it's really focused on the idea in the moment that we're in of the pandemic. So you want to do a video conference. This is places where you can do it freely, and here are the advantages of doing it. And here are some teachers talking about this. You want to do collaborative writing, or you never thought about doing collaborative writing. This is where you can do it freely, and this is where you can do it safely, not looking at the platforms that are necessarily imposed on you by government or by an institution. So it's a free guide to talk about these issues. In order to help public managers, the people that contract these things, we started a project, and this is the last one. It's just been launched a little while ago, which is a map of providers. So we have some information now in the next couple of months we'll have a lot more that basically tries to tie businesses and providers that work with open source and open educational resources with people that want to hire them. So public institutions, governments in regional places, that they'll be able to find who they can hire to install a Moodle instance or a Rocket Chat instance or a Jitsi server or a big blue button server or whatever it might be. So putting these people together has been a big challenge because this is a very fragmented market. And finally, we did a little testing of our own. And so when teachers come to our course and they learn about these tools, one of the things that we do is say we encourage them to try these things out. And so we did our own little server that has basically three, I think very useful tools, a Jitsi instance, which is a video conference instance, a Mumble instance, which is for audio chat for a lot of people. And then an Etherpad instance, which is just collaborative writing. And we've had some teachers that have sort of defied their institutions and instead of using their own Microsoft 365 business, they're conducting their whole courses on our Jitsi instance, for example, which shows that it's viable and reasonable to use. Now, we don't mean to supplement, but we want to educate and say, don't believe that this is the only thing that you have, and it's the only thing available. And you can learn the differences of what these two things offer to you. So this is just a preview. There's a lot of data that we can share in the project that I encourage you to take a look. We're very interested in knowing other people that would be interested in mapping this kind of information. And I leave you with the sites and I'd be welcome to take questions and talk more now or in the future. And thank you again, Antonio, for the very kind invitation. Thank you very much, Stel. And well, congratulations also for this excellent reflection. Well, actually, you have pointed out one of the major problems that we've been facing, which is the difficulty and the unawareness of many of the teachers and also these educational institutions on the issues related to data privacy and data management and all of this. But I mean, from your experience, do you see these in terms of correcting this problem or solving this problem? Do you see these more in the part of action regarding policy, action regarding changing the, well, giving more information to teacher staff, also more information to students, developing more kind of overarching understanding of digital citizenship. What is your view on this? So I'll give you an example of something that we're doing now. So we're working with the state of Sao Paulo, which has a massive school system. And in the past, when we worked with open policy, we did it with the federal government here as well. We often emphasized and they were really eager to work with OER policy, which I think is a great thing. I mean, working with an established and open license policy and identifying stakeholders is great. Now, what we've started to do since 2018 is to say, well, if you want to do an open policy, you're going to do have to do an open education policy. And that means you have to think about terms of use. You have to think about tools. You have to think about privacy and rights, image rights, property rights and things like that. And so what we're doing now in the midst of this big, big push is trying to, and I think successfully doing this is getting governments to think about the whole thing. You know, you can't think about just open educational resources and licensing. You have to think about all these other issues. And of course it's a very complex problem. You have contracts that have already been put in place. You have donations that are given. People don't really necessarily see the difference between free and open. And you have to explain those things. And the advancement is not necessarily complete. I mean, we can't just block down with one new policy that will change everything. But I think we're trying very hard to raise awareness that these issues exist. And I think that often public managers and just administrators are really not quite aware of these things yet. They just don't see how these things connect. And I think this is an important thing to include when we're teaching people about these things and creating policy around open. Yes, well, I fully agree with you. I'll just read to you because I think it's an interesting statement that is also a question, but mainly some kind of a statement that is that is being shared by Petra Aspira. And so I'll just read to you is it's on the Q&A. Do you think it would be good to come up with a one unified platform for each individual level of education? This is the question. And then she also adds, namely, in Croatia, there are educational platforms within which there are platforms for webinars and online teaching, such as Merlin platform by CRC. This is a well, an organization from the in Croatia, the University of Zagreb. The problem is that different levels of education need different settings. And this is, of course, difficult to synchronize. Also, the issue of knowledge validation achieved in these ways is the biggest challenge. And I think that the platform should meet these requirements offered solutions for conducting knowledge testing and so on. And most do not provide for these options, but are modified versions of meeting platforms. I just wanted to share these with you. Any comments, Tal? Yeah, for sure. I think I think it's a good point. No, I don't think we necessarily need to have one platform for everything, but that's what ends up happening. So one of the things that we've did is we've questioned every single government and institution through freedom of information. So we asked for about, I don't know, I would probably say 600 requests for information to get an idea of how these things happen. And they are very centralized. When a state decides, a state decides for everybody. When a municipality decides, it decides for every single school. And when the university decides, it doesn't ask anybody. It just makes a decision. No departments, no students are asked. And so we live in, I think, and I'm speaking mostly for our South American region, when we've been talking to colleagues from Bolivia, from Peru, from Ecuador and Uruguay, we see this replicate itself. And so I think that there's, this primes us for sort of centralized solutions, not one big solution for the whole country and all levels of education that would definitely not work. But at a state level or at a specific level of education, I think we can provide a framework, which is what we're moving towards next. It's like a framework of software that you can use and you can implement that's sustainable and open that people can implement in their own level and make tweaks to if they want to. I think that there's just no other way around it, because we're competing with organizations that will offer a one solution for all blanket product that is implemented top down with no discussion. Well, thank you very much, Stel. Well, time flies when we're having fun and we're actually having fun, apart from having a wonderful discussion and extremely high quality content being also shared and the experience is being a valuable experience being shared. And I would like to, well, to wrap up with a question that would put forward to every one of you and would be like this. We are now entering a new phase after the experience of the pandemic, which is this new normality that we're building in which most it is becoming clear for everyone that schools will become ever more an hybrid environment. And so, of course, people are teachers, school administrators, well, everyone in the field is preparing for this new normal. Bearing in mind your reflection on what happened on the lessons from the pandemic, my question to all of you is what advice, what kind of key points would you like to make as we enter and share with everyone as we enter this next phase, this new normality? And I'll start by Abby. Sure. So, you know, ultimately, I think one of the things that we've learned from the from the pandemic and a lot of the distance learning is that it has to be a blend of resources. There isn't any sort of, you know, silver bullet or, you know, fix all and to take into account the diversity in terms of teacher readiness in terms of institutional readiness. And in terms of student readiness, you know, every kind of person is handling distance learning differently. And we need to be respectful of those differences. I consider technology, you know, a great equalizer when it comes to access and equitable, you know, opportunity. However, it's really up to the to the humans to make sure that we're deploying that technology in a in a way that meets the needs of all of our learners. So, you know, I think when we when we think about kind of the next wave will be how do we respectfully understand the differences and deploy technology and resources so that it, you know, is the healthy blend of not 100% online, not, you know, 100% in person, but how we are able to blend the modalities of learning for the individual and for the, you know, institution and setting. Yes, thank you very much, Abby. Agda, your input. So what I would connect to what Abby was saying is that also to for teachers, especially to kind of have a bit of patience with themselves as well. And we think that they're very good. We know that if they need support, there's plenty of organizations, resources that can help, but also to not be too harsh on themselves, because we've talked to many teachers where it was a big deal about all these changes and they're doing amazing. So, you know, if you cannot go as fast as other, that's okay, just adapt what you can and adapt and learn and develop slowly. Thank you, Agda. Andrea. Sure. Thank you. Well, I think I'll go back to the importance of policy and policy at least at three levels, no, institutional policy, sorry, governmental policies, institutional policies, and even individual policies, because I think that we all have our own policies, no, the way we conduct ourselves professionally in our lives. So to me, it's essential that digital competence remains a priority at a policy level for governments, but not only that, also open education, I think needs to be back as a priority in the policy in order to increase awareness raising. And in terms of institutional policies and individual policies, I think that it's about, it's understanding the importance of continuous professional development in terms of the use of digital technologies and the role of openness in this. And also raise awareness that we have existing platforms that are open and free and that there is a community out there able to share experiences, no. So to me, policy is key and continuous professional development of teachers. Thank you very much, Andrea. Sofa, please, your thoughts. Antonio, according to my view, teachers and schools have performed extremely well in the very demanding situation due to the pandemic. So my, let's say, proposal would be to look to very important issues that according, this is, let's say, my, I think these are the catalysts for developing a better schooling is to enhance the trust to teachers' professionalism and to offer more autonomy to schools. They have demonstrated both at the individual and at the organizational level that they can perform very well. Thank you very much, Sofa. Please tell your last word. Well, I don't know about you guys, but I'm not doing particularly well. So I don't know if I have really great advice, but, but I think I could have said it brilliantly, which is that we need to slow down. I mean, I think if we keep demanding that people do amazing things during a pandemic, we're all going to get sick very quickly, maybe not from COVID, but mentally sick. So I think slowing down is the best thing that we can do. Well, thank you very much, Otel. And, well, I think this sums up brilliantly what was a wonderful session and a great debate as well. And I'm, well, on the, I believe, on behalf of everyone here, well, the over 100 participants that we had in this session, I would like to thank the speakers for these excellent presentations and also thank the participants for their great questions as well. It was a very lively session, and it was a great pleasure for me to, to just moderate it. Let me just share a final message, which is this one. Here it is. Please remember that, oh, sorry. Okay. Here it is. Please remember that next June, 20, from 22nd to the 25th, we'll have our next annual conference. It will be virtual this year. Again, it will be the Eden 2021 virtual annual conference. And it will be a very special edition. It will be the 30th anniversary conference. You have the link here. You can still submit. You're welcome to do it. And I hope you'll do it. We all hope that you will be meeting online again in June, next June, for the celebration of the 30th anniversary of Eden. And of course, to have this wonderful opportunity to share once again, our thoughts and experiences together at the annual conference. From my part, once again, thank you very much to everyone. And, well, congratulations to the, to our speakers. And let me wish you all the continuation of a good morning, a good afternoon, or a good evening to everyone. Thank you. And bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thank you very much. Bye-bye. Thank you.