 Thank you, Willem, and welcome to everyone from a sunny Port Elizabeth here in South Africa. Gunglungisi and Kelly are joining me. Gunglungisi is in the hills of Gwazulu Natal, and Kelly is here in Port Elizabeth as well. We don't have much time, so expect this to fly by. I will start sharing my screen. So our session is titled Becoming an Open Education Influencer, the Nelson Mandela University student advocates experience of opening up in collaboration. Open Education Influencers, or OEIS, and you can say this out loud, OEIS, are ambassadors for open who increase awareness of open education resources and open education practices. OEIS facilitates the adoption, creation and licensing of OVR. Open Influencers energetically advocate for the use of open textbooks across purpose, faculties and school. OEIS do, they don't just say. So the Open Education Influencers aim is to empower people, and remember you are people, to activate their goals by doing something about achieving them. Bowie is that vehicle. Bowie stands for Becoming an Open Education Influencer. Bowie project aims to contribute towards the sustainable development goals in whatever capacity or space. It's not just about education by enabling advocacy through an online empowerment course. Some of our 2020 made during lockdown activities as always. Well, you can go out and have a look at these videos, these advocacy materials. Each of the images is hyperlinked so click on them. Our presentation is under our OEG Connect page. Kelly, over to you. My road to being an open education influencer started when I applied for a writing respondent position, but stepped into an OE position. At first, we were a team of three called the open ambassadors. On our first day, we were told that we were the first open ambassadors in Africa. We had no idea what this meant, or what open education was about, but this journey was exciting to us from the start. Later, we became the OEs when brainstorming for a name for the Bowie course. Over to you. And my name is Lucy. Beginning of the year I was working as a first mentor in our orientation program at Nelson Mandela. I was supported by our project leader, you know, who then presented me the opportunity to become an OE. When I joined the team, I do not know what open education was or anything related to it, but working with the team. I had soon had gotten an understanding of what it is and I had established my role in the team and I've been learning from them from the team and receiving great support from them. Thank you. The Bowie team was recruited in 2018. I was lucky enough to be one of those members. The team included Samaya Defala, Kerstin Meyer, and myself. Next slide, 2019. We had an additional team member, Norma Wetu-Matthew Beni. She was fortunate enough to attend OE Global last year in Italy. In 2020, we had two additional team members, Mluungisium Longo and Intimesia Masseka. Mlu will share a bit about our training experience in the next slides. The first OE training in application, anything we do not know, we had to reset. An example of this is open licensing. And also as part of our training, we had to take the Commonwealth of Learning course that happened earlier this year before the lockdown happened. A contribution to the Bowie course started with brainstorming appropriate modules for the course, sourcing openly licensed content for each module, conducting practical research, which included participating in online open courses, sorting through content and developing a structure for the modules, script writing for media clubs, which was new to both Mluungisi and I, and collaborating online both locally and internationally. So before lockdown began, we began with the creation of the Bowie Development course. Next slide, please. We had a timeline for the carrying out of this task, which was hugely based on normal face-to-face engagement, but when lockdown happened, we were then presented with a new challenge of now having to shift from working in the office to doing everything online. And this included, as we see on the next slide, it's included doing media production, continuing online collaborations with the other contributors from UMS, and also writing script for our voiceover artist. And now we're on the final stretches of the Bowie course and as you maybe had on our Monday session that we have a module that is done advocacy and you can see our conduct details towards the end if you want to take the course. Of course, moving to an online collaboration had challenges and we can go first sharing challenges. One of the challenges I experienced with online collaboration was that the course suddenly had many contributors. This made it difficult to follow the progress of course development. Knowing my role among so many other people who had more experience was also challenging and keeping up with meetings in a home setting with many disruptions from family and pets and I'm sure everyone can relate to that one. Next slide. My biggest challenge was connectivity. For me, this one then still is sometimes a challenge because I'm in the rural areas and here the poor network coverage is really bad. And sometimes I would miss meetings and deadlines to a point that I would sometimes break some of the lockdown regulations and go out to the main road because it's in the upper here so that I would find coverage and be able to receive emails be responsive and you know, no other tasks that I had to do. And also having to take my home into an office was also a challenge because yes, I'm in the rules and you know, the neighbors, the kids would make noises so I would have to find quiet spots. Sometimes outside the house so that I can find some time and quite to take videos and everything. But the way we made collaboration. Yeah, you can shoot. Okay. What made online collaboration easier for me was the support from the team. Video recording came with a lot of stress, but full our producer helped us relax before recordings and gave us helpful advice. I found that home was a more comfortable environment for filming, despite disruptions from family members and pets in the house. The support from family was also a great help, especially with the filming process. I even had them aid in doing hair and makeup and they were very patient with filming and all my bloopers. Next slide. Over here we can see some of the filming tips that fall shared with us before recording. And now over to him Lou. Thanks for the great online commissions. Firstly, I had to change network services provider for a better network coverage, and also receiving internet data support from our project leader, Mr. General frontman. And as also Kelly has mentioned, our producer Mr. Phil also assisted us with tips on how to produce quality videos, even though we're doing it from our home setting and support from family. They even attended some of the meetings with Phil who was giving us tips on how to take this video so that they'll assist me to make sure that some of these videos were in quality. The benefits of the Bowie project online collaboration include maximum utilization of resources for us this main people mentorship being innovative about getting past challenges. Online collaboration demanded demanded resilience and dedication which is a skill that we will carry on to other tasks and projects. In course development, including content search creating activities and assessments and promoting the course. Working with a wealth of skilled people was also a great benefit. We learned a lot from everyone on the team. We also learned punctuality and navigating Google docs because this was new to both and do and I. We are so fortunate being part of Bowie and international project that will reach thousands of people. Next slide. So from my side, I think that a message that we want to get across to people is visit open it influences dot Mandela dot AC dot z a. Our intention today is to help you start making your moving open or advocacy with Bowie. Content spread open and make change real. This is a list of the contributors to the course and to our project. It's an exhaustive list so it's spanning three years at Mandela University, but so much longer in my own career history. So just a note of thanks to the organizers of only global 20. We'd like to express our heartfelt thanks to only global for the opportunity to have participated in the only global 2020 conference. We've not only networked with contributors from around the world but also gained access to an incredible wealth of information from the best in the field of open education and just education. This conference made it possible for us to continue growing and advancing in our efforts to change the world for the better through open. We'd like to give special thanks to the organizers of the conference and the workers behind the scenes, many of whom haven't come out from the shadows, but the efforts are what enables us to be here and try to influence you. It's fantastic for pulling together such a wonderful event during a global pandemic. Half of the open influences yet Mandela University we'd like to congratulate you on hosting a successful well planned and enjoyable conference. And finally, I want to thank all the participants that connected with us. It's through you that we will help to open things up. We leave the conference enriched encouraged and hopeful for a better world of open education for our learners and teachers. And thank you so much to Selvon Mulbrough for being a constant source of support for us, for the team, and for colleagues at the university trying to open up. Thank you, our social media details are here below. Willem I think it's fair to say that we've done well with time so over to you for questions. Thank you very much. And very thank you for the for the conference but also thank you for your, your, your fabulous presentation, and the great work you're doing with the open influences. I think it's a great project, and I see a lot of compliments in chat from from everyone. And I'm looking at questions. So if you have any question, please post them in the in the chats. Until now I only saw compliments so I see amazing project very very interesting thanks a lot. I'm inspired by you all, you show what is possible, you have done amazing work. So what's next is the question. Well, I think that our intention here has been to empower, and in order to empower we needed a vehicle to do so Kelly and long using were empowered by helping us to create an empowerment vehicle. So we need to share, and we need to expand the reach of not just the open influences but becoming an open influencer. So take a look at our session on Monday and find out how you as an educator or professional in an academic or other sort of development or work setting can start to harness what we've what we put together and use it to develop advocates who are able to take your and I think the greater good of the SDGs out and actually start contributing to those intentions by action, and not just speaking about action but actually going out and trying to influence decision makers decision making and the space that you find yourself with. And there's not a question what would be your advice for someone who would like to replicate your model. Okay, so I'm going to answer this because I think that it speaks to the licensing convention that we've chosen it CC by share like we chose this because we'd like people to use the content. This isn't something that we'd like to just put on to a website and leave dormant. No, it is to actually activate action through it being used in other spaces. So please do reach out to us and yeah engage with us about how we can help you to to use what we put together Kelly and blue DC are here. They'll be here next year we are excited to help others at Mandela University our first year students will be taking the course. The how to bodies will be taking the course these are facilitation facilitators of other students entering the system so they'll all be empowered to engage with open but we have six modules and those are open one to advocacy influencing facilitation and then the SDGs to place them in a global context. Okay, great. Other questions. Let's see. Yeah, Matilda right your work has certainly inspired me proud to be a member of Nelson Mandela University. I think you did a great job. And that's that's the whole idea about I think this project is to inspire others and I think you've done that here today in our conference and then I hope you can continue to that work. So, thank you very much. And then I don't see any new questions coming up. So, final words from also from you. I think I'd like to give final words over to Kelly and look easy. Would you like to start. Okay. I think the opportunity to be part of this conference this year it has been a great inspiration learning and learning about others are doing yesterday there was a presentation from students in Canada so it was great inspiration to learn that they're also doing something in the open space. I hope that this collaboration and connections will also grow and next year would meet again and do more in open reach out and reach more people and you know advocate influence. Kelly. I would just like to give a special thanks to the team from UMass Amherst. We learned a lot from the team over there, and we look forward to working with them next year again hopefully. And again thank you to Gino for having us as open education influences and giving us this opportunity to present internationally. Thank you so much. That's it for me. And you know. I want to say a final thank you to both Kelly and move easy. It's a, it's an example of perseverance and just fortitude in a time of pandemic and stress, and they have risen to the challenge and I couldn't be proud. So, great job everybody. All right. Thank you very much. We can stop the recording.