 Thank you very much. So again, I think welcome everyone to this session. A warm welcome to all of the presenters and especially the attendees. My name is Igor Lesko. I come from Open Education Global, the co-organizer of Open Education Global Conference together with the University of Nang. And I'm going to be a chair for this particular session. And we also have a rapporteur here, Judith Sabesta who is the Executive Director of the Digital Higher Education Consortium of Texas in the United States. Welcome, Judith. As a rapporteur, Judith will be monitoring presentations and also exchanges in the chat and we'll then write a short report on the issues discussed here. Thank you, Judith. And I should also say that actually in her free time, Judith likes to organize talent shows and she did organize too during a global conference. Thank you, Judith. We have four presentations in this particular slot. Each presenter or a group of presenters will have 20 minutes for the presentation. These will then be followed by five minutes of questions and answers after each presentation. And at the end, we will then have approximately 10 to 15 minutes for a sort of bigger discussion and depending items that still need to be addressed. I would also like to encourage you all to please post your questions in the chat window as you listen to the presenters and we will then address them during the Q&A or during the larger discussion time. The four presentations in this particular slot are positioned within the three areas of the UNESCO OER recommendation. I think that at this point in time, you all should have read the recommendation at least three times. So I'm not going to go into a whole lot of detail. But just shortly, we have one presentation that is positioned within the capacity building for OER and that's Paula Corti. There are two presentations positioned within the sustainability models for OER. This is Margrethe Twesme and Max Mahmoud together with Sarah Hatton. And the final one is related to the supportive policies for open educational resources. And that one is going to be done jointly by Javier Atenas and Leo Haviman. However, as you will be listening to the presentations, it will become apparent that actually each presentation has relevance for more than one UNESCO OER recommendation areas. So again, just a reminder that if you have any questions, please post them into the chat window during the presentation. Our first presentation will be done by Paola Corti. Paola Corti is from Spark Europe, which is the scholarly publishing academic research coalition Europe that she joined relatively recently. That's part of the part-time job. And her other part-time job is for Politecnico di Milano in Italy. And Paola actually, for those of you who are not aware, Paola together with her team, they hosted the 2019 Open Education Global Conference. So welcome, Paola. Paola is going to be doing a presentation on the European academic libraries at work. Let's build capacity together. Paola, you can go ahead. Hi, everyone. Can you see my screen already? OK, then. So as Igor said, I joined Spark Europe quite recently, starting February this year. And I am working mainly with the European Network of Open Education Librarians. And I am not a librarian, actually. I work with them as Open Education Community Manager. And it's a pleasure for me to learn from them each day. I can just tell you that every day is a discovery. Today, I'm going to share with you some of the main activities that we are doing together and that we started and some of the purposes that we are trying to do as a network, supporting each other. What you will see is, let's say, a showcase of the outputs that we are willing to share very soon with anyone. But mainly, what I would really like you to bear in mind while I'm talking is that the field that links all those activities together is the attitude of librarians to support each other and to be there for each other. In being that I joined the DLL starting this year, we were in the middle of the pandemic. I never met anyone so far in presence. We've been just working online and meeting online for the first time, mostly, I would say. So this is, let's say, the story of a journey that we have done together. Let me go to the next slide. Okay. So first of all, the annual is being recently funded because it was born during the OI Global Conference in Delta in 2018 to be precise. And we have 80 members and 22 countries now. Just imagine that in February when I joined, just only nine countries were there. So we are trying to enlarge the boundaries in order to cover as far as possible all geographic Europe countries. So no political issues, everyone is welcome. And what you see here are just three keywords because in annual, we work together. In annual, we share and in annual, we collaborate. Those keywords are common to anyone in this room, I'm sure. But for me, it's a surprise. I mean, I've been welcomed by everyone so openly. And the people in the room who know me knows about my empty theism, but it's not only just me. You have to put people on the other side and we have a lot of them. What we are doing. So the first thing that I'm sharing here is as you can see, we are working to share competences and skills that are already inside of the network. So one of the activities that we started, he's the under the spotlight webinar series where we have those webinars organized by the annual, within the annual network, but then shared openly, of course, in our YouTube channel where our members share their expertise and share mainly, which is their role according to what's required in their institution around open education. In cases, they are working also at other levels. For example, we are happy enough to have many members who are involved in national activities and international activities. They also share about this level of involvement. But the focus is the steps and the actions that librarians can take in order to enlarge the open education scenario in their libraries. So the idea is to share competences and also talk about the struggles and be open to answer questions to people who are maybe newer to the field. And that's what happens in a very informal setting very easily and I would invite you to have a look at the two webinars that we already shared in our YouTube channel. What we are doing now is to prepare also in parallel with other volunteers, of course, open education groups. The idea here is to share very short videos done again in an informal way and with a very welcoming attitude. Short videos that you can enjoy while taking a walk when you need to pause from your work or when you're drinking a nice coffee. So they are very short and they provide a short insight with the basic concepts at the beginning of the course around open education. And the idea here is to help other librarians who are not familiar with basic concepts to get in touch with them and maybe consider to join the open education movement. Those videos at the present time we have a paid-off version done by different members and the idea is to have them in more than one language. So we are seeing that members are taking the lead in translating and recording the videos in their own language. Then we need the short-poster production activities to be done and we will share them in as many European languages as possible. Another activity that we are doing is to interview open education champions and we have Catherine Browning in the room and she's one of the champions that we just interviewed and so really grateful because she was great as always. And we are going to interview more. By the end of the year we plan to have 12 to 15 interviews done and to of course share them openly because the idea here is to involve being a librarian network, involve champions who are working as teachers, instructional designers, decision makers, any other role that dives into the open education scenario so that our librarians, but every librarian can benefit from those videos having insights from other perspectives. We can only bring this together. And together is a keyword that comes to my mind quite often thanks to the picture book done with other people in this room. So thank you for being here. The activity that I'm more proud of it's been a real struggle to build the process here and we are going to share it openly as a practice is the work that we are closing now around the sharing tools that enlighten which are the open education benefits for different stakeholders. We've been working with the students in mind, teachers, institutions and the citizens at large so far. And we are also going to develop benefits or collect more than develop benefits for librarians. But so far we've been working with those four target groups in mind and what we are sharing very soon in October are slides, Twitter cards and leaflets that anyone will be for sure allowed to reuse and adapt. The idea here is the process more than the result because in the final result of those benefits tools there will be no logo, no logo from Spark, no logo from the NOA. Our idea is that the main result that we are going to share are the templates. And our own version will be an adaptation of the template. So the NOA is providing templates that anyone can adapt changing the colors to their institutional ones adding their logos and maybe tweaking the order of the benefits according to their institutional needs. So we think about librarians who needed to print the leaflets and put them as posters in their libraries or the need to have a ready to be used slides for their presentation or Twitter cards that are already prepared and ready to be used or also adaptable. And the focus here is not on having our best graphic version possible. The idea is to create a process in which the tool itself speaks about open education. It is built to be reusable. It is going to be as simple as possible so that anyone with no proprietary license software can adapt to them. And there is no need to remove anything. You can just add your own personality, your institution image, et cetera. And for sure, you can tweak the orders of every benefit that you think might fit more for your target users. So this is something that I'm really happy about. And members have been doing an hackathon also to work on those leaves. Members also are looking up to create a learning path for librarians. And the preview of the infographic that you see here on the right is done by librarians, for sure. And the idea here is to curate more than create, curate learning path for librarians around open education, providing them the best link that we can retrieve so far and adapting the content just when you did it because we wanted it to be very practically responded to the needs of librarians. But we are not creating anything we are mostly reusing and maybe adapting. And the idea is to provide something that is a big tool to be reused and it is always connected to the other tools that members are building. And we are going to share all the links to all our resources in a wake alert page. Wake alert is an open pool and we have librarians can show from the NOL creating and curating the page there where all the resources created by the NOL, all the resources adapted by the NOL but also resources that librarians find to be very useful for their work in order to enhance the open education opportunities in their institutions are going to be shared here. And it's gonna be public soon. I mean, it's not even to be honest but it's something that we want to wrap up at best during the October again. So you see many things are happening but what I would like to share with you is I said at the beginning it's a journey that we are doing together and journeys don't come without challenges. Challenges are always there. For example, not all members in our network are comfortable with taking action at the same time. So we needed to balance and to be patient and to coordinate the times and efforts and to be ready to be in some other people's food and take action on their behalf when they need us. And also sometimes it happens that they are not ready to actively contribute. So we are finding many different ways to enlarge the active members, member number, so that people can always feel welcome even if the contribution at the beginning can be very tiny. There's room in practice for any kind of contribution and members feel this. And this is really helpful to have them on board. And well, the activities are increasing widely, I would say after summertime we've been crazy busy because people are creating anything you will see. And also we have the language issue which is something that is really common at global level but sometimes it's not, if you think about networks, in our case English still is the second language for most of the members and some of them don't talk in English so they need specific meetings, interpreters or translators and in other moments they need to have the transcripts to go back to the meetings and understand them properly. So we have to take care of all those issues. At the same time, this is really enriching because facing these issues at the European level can be then a practice that can be enlarged globally. So it's a very interesting experience also with one. As I said at the beginning, what helps us overcome the difficulties is mainly welcoming approach and a lot of patience with each other and the attitude to listen which was really something that I noticed all along the last nine months or so. So I'm really happy to be with those people and I think that we will continue to share, to negotiate and to pull efforts to do our best. We meet monthly which is not, I mean it's a commitment for them, okay? Because in between every day's working agenda it's not easy to find room for all the conferences and also all the meetings that you already have to manage in your working schedule. But people are there and if they can't be there synchronously, they go back to the recordings that are always shared. So it's working, let's say. What we are trying to do then is to build capacity. Every academic librarian is welcome to join us and our next goal together with sharing everything in the next couple of months. Starting from what members are creating is to have more countries represented. We are still looking toward many of the missing countries and we really would like to be representative of all. And if we don't have members from other countries it is difficult to understand their issues properly and to address them together. So it's a call for new members, let's say, okay? And that's it. I think that I'm done with this presentation. If you have questions, I'm here. Great, thank you very much Paola and that's well within the time, so well done. Are there any questions from the audience for Paola? I see one from Katrin in the chat. I don't know if this is... I see this, which is the last one maybe. For those who may not be in the network but wish to support your work, how can we do this? How can we help and support? Well, wonderful. Sara is on the same question. So first of all, write me. And we will arrange a meeting, we can talk about this and we can find the best way to support the network. Katrin, you've been already very kind with us because your expertise shared in an interview is already very helpful to have an overview. But again, if anyone wants to get in touch with us and you are not a librarian but you are willing to collaborate, just write me a name and I'm going to write my email address here in the chat so everyone can... I also type this correctly, which is not usual. Any other questions from the room? Yeah, well, people are still thinking. I actually have one question from my side and I think this could be something addressed by you, Paola but also jointly perhaps with Sara considering that Sara is also the dean of the libraries at a respective institution. So what was the rationale for creating the network of librarians, of open educational librarians in the first place, by focusing on librarians as the main stakeholder groups to drive open education or OER forward within respective institutions? Well, I'm grateful for this question because again, I am not a librarian and I am mostly, as a profile I am more an instructional designer and a project manager, okay? So working with open educational resources on a daily basis in practice. I know that I have many gaps, skill gaps, okay? Because librarians have a different profile and who better than librarians can help everyone who is creating open educational resources to catalog them properly, to understand how to share them properly, how to organize them in a way that they are searchable and retrievable properly. Who can help you at best to find the right image that you want to add to your video when you are unable to find it or a paper that supports you in motivating why it is important for you as a teacher, as a faculty member to properly share your results openly. And I think that having librarians in the picture and I was not there when the network was created but in my imagination being the oil global again, the scenario, I imagine that they met there in depth and they looked at each other saying, okay, we are not in this picture enough yet. At least at European level, okay? And it was interesting for me to look at the documentation that they collected in advance before I joined to see how different it was, their perspective on working on OER compared to mine and compared to the faculty members that I know are interested in open education. And if I think about my role in Polytechnical, I think that we would benefit enormously at the institutional level to support advocating for OER with the decision makers having librarians on our side. So they are in the cross path way. They are really in the middle of everything that goes around open education. I really believe they are key. Great, that was a lovely contextualization. Thank you very much, Paula. And Sarah, would you like to add anything from your side? No, I'm delighted to hear that. I was just asking, can we get that as a sound bite and broadcast it? Because in trying to explain, I was just giving a talk yesterday to, it was at a lecture in our honors call is talking about open and all of the different components that go into it. And we really are, as librarians, we really are in the middle of it looking at licensing and fair use and media type and then how users and learners can engage with the content afterward. And so we're kind of stretched across all of these different areas and are wildly collaborative because of that. Because I know some instructional design, I know a lot about licensing, I know a lot about curation and formatting and whatnot, but for that depth, we're so appreciative for the collaboration with other instructors and particularly instructional designers who know how to put together all of the content in a way that is formatted for an optimal learning experience because you can't be an expert in everything. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, so it's where the collaboration in these relationships and consortia and whatnot that are being developed are exactly where our hearts are at. So, thank you. Thank you. All right, thank you very much, Sarah, as well. And by the way, just to address your question around the soundbites, so the recording is going to be available shortly after the session, so feel free to do your edits as well and just leave whatever you need. Thank you. Some additional questions here or comments from different participants. I'm not sure if you would like to voice them directly here or if Ola, you would like to just read through them at your leisure during the session. Oh, okay, thank you. Perhaps we can then address them also during the bigger discussion time, but I think that one of the sort of key takeaways here for people to consider is that librarians are actually your important allies and also in many respects drivers of open education efforts at different institutions and here, in the specific context, I think this is also important for those who are actually thinking of starting a specific open education initiatives in different institutions. So always think of the librarians, important allies. Thank you very much. I think that we can now, so congratulations, Ola. Thank you for your presentation and we're also looking forward to seeing the outputs that you were mentioning in your presentation that are going to be released sometimes in October, the various tools that you have been mentioning that would assist different stakeholder groups in advocating for open education. So thank you for that impactful overview and the meaningful work that you've been doing. Thank you very much. We can now move to the next presenter. So essentially with the next presentation, we are moving from the higher education sector to the case three to 12 sector or primary secondary education sector, just to be inclusive with the terminology here as well. We have here with us Margrethe Thresme who is from the Norwegian Digital Learning Arena and she is going to be talking our shortly NDLA and she's going to be talking about NDLA as a sustainable organizational model, right? So this is coming in the context of sustainability. And if I'm not mistaken, we also have the CEO of NDLA present with us here too, so welcome as well. Thank you so much, Egor, and please, Margrethe, you can proceed. Thanks a lot, Egor. Can you see my screen now, all right? Yes. Good. Yes, so I'm very happy to be here. I would like to have joined you all in France instead of being here, but it's okay this way as well. I was warming up to maybe France in May. Okay, so I'm going to talk about the Norwegian Digital Learning Arena and to look at it as a sustainable organization model. So this action area about creating sustainable models for OER, I have been pondering a bit about it when I've made this presentation and try to think about different ways of looking at it and what it could be and I'm going to focus on this on how we are organized. But I also think that towards the end of my presentation I'm going to get into more other issues or other aspects of sustainable OER. Let's see if I have the time at least. Okay, so just a short geography lesson. Here we are in Norway and I am on the western coast of Norway but our organization NBLA is scattered across Norway. We don't have a main office anywhere. We work mostly digitally and then we see each other only a few times a year and then we are very happy to see each other as well. So we are a small country when it comes to inhabitants and the one major point about Norway is that education is publicly funded and I'll get back to that because that is important on how NBLA is organized. So what is NBLA? Well, we could call it an OER repository and it's financed, governed and owned by the majority of the Norwegian counties and you can see the counties here, the counties of Norway and we need to go into a very short history lesson as well because in 2006, two very important things happened in Norway. Norway got a new curricula for K-12 focusing on digital competencies and digital skills for the first time, the first curriculum actually mentioning digital skills and digital literacy. So that was the one thing that was happening and the other thing was that the government decided that even though education had been publicly funded earlier as well, now it also should include textbooks and resources for upper secondary school because upper secondary students had, they had bought their own textbooks until then. But now that was also going to be free and the responsibility for providing them with their resources was given to the counties as they also had the responsibility of providing the education, the upper secondary education. So then with those two things in mind the counties decided to make the Norwegian digital learning arena as a means of both providing learning resources for free and to enhance digital skills and digital competencies. So that was kind of the start of the NDLA. And today, this is just some numbers. We have more than 140 subjects for upper secondary students. We have approximately 25,000 learning resources. And last year we peaked when it came to visits not, I guess a lot of websites concerning school did that last year because of the pandemic but the numbers have stayed very high for us. And every day about 60 to 90,000 people visit us a bit changing a bit about which day it is and which time of year it is. This is a typical page on our website. It's the most of our material is organized into subjects but you will also find some into the disciplinary cases and you will also find a toolbox where you can find things like how to tutorials mostly like how to make a great presentation and how to work with the social environment in your classroom and so on and so on. Early on in our history, there was a lot of text but these days we have moved to a much richer content with a lot of interactive resources a lot of simulations, videos and also the tasks have changed to becoming more encouraging the active learner and the active student. So there was a lot of new tasks that are more not that much of what did I just read with more active and research questions. Yes, I'm also just do a bit of just mention that H5P if you're interesting using H5P to make interactive resources you could look up my good colleagues presentation on that which I also have linked underneath my presentation sites on the platform. Yep, then we are where we were supposed to be this is the main point today. So this model shows different schools in Norway and different teachers in Norway. So our model of organization is that if you work as a teacher in a secondary school in Norway you can come to work for the LA for a period of time. So you don't quit your job as a teacher you just take leave of it for a while and then you come to work for us and then after a year or two years or three years depending on what you do in our organization you go back to your school. And this I have called a sustainable flow of competency and what I mean by that is that this ensures that in our organization we get new teachers with a fresh experience from the classroom into our organization that have recently been there with the pupils and know what's going on and have kind of the pulse of the classroom with them as they come in and that is really important when you're making learning resources for pupils. And then when they get back they take the competency they have gained in NDLA back into their schools and that competency can differ quite a lot and most teachers work with making resources into subjects in our in NDLA for instance history teacher will make resources in history but also we have some specialized departments in NDLA for instance working with quality checks working with ensuring that we have a universally designed resources that the quality of our pictures is okay and our videos that the language is proper and correct and so on and so on and we also have a department working with user experience and that is both developing our webpage but also testing our resources for teachers and students going to schools, school supplies to be a test school for us and then they go there and test resources so we make sure that teachers and students find them useful and interesting so there are very lots of different types of competency that our co-workers get and that they bring into school again so in this flow, this circular flow we don't drain the schools of their best teachers that they never see again they get back and they share what they've learned and also as I said we get fresh impulses from school and some of them quite a lot of them actually work part-time NDLA and part-time as teachers at their schools so that is also a very good combination for us because they stay at their school all the time as I said earlier, we don't have a main office so they just stay at the school, they have their work as at school as they work with NDLA as well so that is also a way that they maintain the contact with the school yes, so that is the model and I'm also going to say a few words about because I think that is hugely important for the sustainability of our organization the fact that we are publicly funded by the counties ensures that we are closely in touch with the Norwegian democracy the politicians on county level and we have this governing committee which is made up of these politicians as well as county officials and they are the ones that decide what we are going to do in NDLA, how we could spend our money and how much money we will get and so on and so on and this cooperation with the democratic institutions makes sure that what we make is what people want us to make and also that public money is of course spent on public service which I think is hugely important I have been my salary has come from taxpayers money or my life and I think that kind of you need to treat that fact with a lot of respect I think you need to make sure that what you do is worthwhile and that you really are doing public service so and when we make our resources they stay in the open they stay in the public domain as they are licensed with an open license all of it so this is really an issue when it comes to making it sustainable I think yeah let's see what challenges do we face in Norway when it comes to providing open educational resources for secondary students Norway is a very modern country but it is very much into the old paradigm of educational resources as a scarce commodity so that you have to pay for it and if you pay a lot of money for it for a long term the money is only in price I link together and open educational resources especially our resources is seen as a threat to traditional publishers and the general understanding of open licensing in Norway is low so that there are other ways properly one time and then it's open and free. They are very skeptical towards that type of payment models. Also, when you combine this skepticism and the publishers Lobby and the politicians, then you have a rather potent mix and it comes up again and again this criticism that we make resources of poor quality and that we are threatening the publishers businesses. And when we are, as I said, and I looked upon it as a very positive thing, linked to democracy and the democratic institutions, we are also very vulnerable to political changes of mind. So if the politicians decide that we are not in fact worthwhile and spending money on them, we are out of business and we don't exist anymore. So that is of course a constant good in one way because we are challenged by it and we need to make good resources, but also a constant threat. And I would very much like to see a much broader public debate in Norway on open licensing and open resources that would be very welcome and we hope that we can contribute to such a debate in the future. What else, what are we thinking in the future? And now I get to the part where I think a bit about other ways of looking at sustainability when it comes to OER. You all know this, the five hours of open education, of course. And the fact is that these five hours are very much possible to use when it comes to our resources. You can do all this with our resources. We have a very open license on them. But it doesn't happen that much. It doesn't use that way. The teachers doesn't use it this way. They don't remix. They don't revise our resources. They take them as they are and use them as they would a textbook article in their classes. And the students also treat them as the same way as they would that kind of material. So we are thinking we need to do something about that to kind of heighten the level of knowledge and understanding of what you could do with our resources and why it is good for learning. And what we are working on now is more personalized experience so that you can get a choice to log on to our webpage. You don't have to. You will never have to log on because it's supposed to be open to all, but you get the choice to do it. And then you will be able to kind of bookmark resources, find your favorite subjects, and so on and so on. And you will also get to use a platform for collaboration with other teachers and other students. And I think if we can make such a platform work with where teachers can show each other what they do with our resources and how they put them together, maybe that will increase the sustainability of the resources and the way they can be used. And also the knowledge about the five hours of open education. And then this is this. This is more into the future. This is we don't have any concrete projects going on on this as speaking today, but our platform technology is open. It's open so you can take it and use it. We like to say that, but it's not quite true because it's not the code is not well documented enough for anyone to just go there and take it as it is today. So we need to make sure that our code is not only open, but also reusable so that it's really true that you can take our platform code and make your own platform out of it, which we would very much like to see. And then I think we are really talking about sustainability because then we are talking about not having to spend a lot of resources around the world making platform technology, but that you can take this for free that we have already spent money on and make your own resources and make your own platform that is adapted to your local conditions. So this is something that we would really like to see. And I think this type of collaboration and this type of sharing, then we're really talking about sustainability. So as Paul also was into this, I think this is the way to go. We need collaboration, we need more collaboration. And that is why we are here today as well. And that is really the key to further a sustainable development of where we are. I think sharing what we have and truly sharing technology as well, sharing the tools of making it happen. Yeah, so that was really what I wanted to share with you today. So thanks you so much and we'll start with a picture of my colleagues. And you can see how happy we are when we finally get together. So thank you. Thank you very much, Margrethe. I really appreciate it. Just a couple of remarks from my side. Well, first of all, I'm a big fan of NDLA. So thank you for coming here today to get together with your colleagues and sharing your experiences. I really love your sustainable flow of competency approach that you described in your presentation. It's fantastic. And also, actually, it was interesting for me to see how you articulated the challenges that you face, because I can actually assure you that the same type of challenges actually resonate across the higher education sector as well. And I think that many of the participants here can attest to that. The collaboration aspect that you mentioned in your last slide and you mentioned that that's actually why we are here, would you be able to maybe specify what kind of collaboration you are seeking? Well, it would be nice to have friends working with the same thing. That is kind of the large picture, right? Because it's much what Paula addressed, right? To get support and to kind of get to the nourishment that you need, that what you do is really is important. It's probably changing the world ahead and that types of things. But also technology, for instance, H5P technology, that where we are developing new types of, new tasks, new types of types, for instance, escape rooms these days. And we need a community, a larger community to do to work with us and share their tasks. Because it's expensive to develop this type of tasks or this type of technology. But if we could have an international community working on it, that would be really, really great. So that is one thing. And also, if someone really was interested in our platform technology, well, then we had to kind of start working with the code and maybe some people would like to help us with you to do that, so that we could share our platform with everyone. So that would be one collaboration. But I also think that if schools in Norway could, for instance, work with translations of our material in issues where that's globally interesting, for instance, the science. If they could translate into Spanish, French, English, and then put them online to share, that would also be a lovely way of learning languages and a lovely way of collaborating with others. Maybe, yeah. That's just some ideas that I have, maybe Sigur and Johannes have other things they could add to that. Okay, great. Thank you very much, Margrethe. I really appreciate it. And I would actually also like to note at this point in time that we are addressing another area of the UNESCO recommendation, which is international collaboration or cooperation strategies. This was addressed by Paul as well and by you as well, Margrethe. So thank you for doing that. There are numerous comments in the chat, complimentary remarks, appreciation remarks, and there are also some questions. So we will take a few now. We still have some time. So the first one is coming from Sarah Hatten. She says, I would be interested to hear more about the metrics assessment tools used to determine whether materials are useful or learning is taking place. Yes, I think I can answer that one. When we test, we have not got any great methods for testing the learning, measuring the learning that comes out of it really. So it's more on a quality level, if I can use that word. We interview the pupils afterwards or a few of them and in a qualitative matter. So what did you think? What did you get out of it? And they say things like, well, this movie was very okay, but it was very much too long. And I almost fell asleep during the end and things like that. Or the teachers will say, well, this is very useful, but you should include questions about this and this and this. So it's much more on that level. So really learning measurement. We don't do that as for now, but maybe we'll in the future. Okay. Thank you very much, Margrethe. There is another question from Alster who is asking, has there been any discussion of expanding NDLA into higher education? I assume that's in Norway then, or setting up a similar organization for that purpose. Sige, would you like to say something about that? Yes. There are a few initiatives on OER in the university level. It's, I think, more like the one we hear about at this conference. The universities are trying to support the teachers in different ways in order to create OVR resources for sharing. But I think what Margrethe mentioned in the start, the legislation that put the responsibility on the school owner to supply the students with free materials in the upper secondary is not the same. So you don't have this mechanism in the university level. That's probably why there are no such national initiatives. But they are trying to create teacher communities for sharing resources in the university level. There has been discussion at one to ten level in Norway, but there are a couple of municipalities. So the organization model as NDLA has put up is much more complicated. And also there is a fight from the private sector trying to stop such initiative that's going on in Norway. It's a small market and the book companies or the private sector is afraid of their the total supplies of learning materials if NDLA for the one to ten is will be born, so to speak. Yes, but this mechanism that you don't have in the universities, I think that's an important, very important factor for the sustainability of NDLA. And there was also a question about the budget for the downstream. We could say that NDLA is funded with approximately 9 million euros a year. So it's quite substantial budget. And the sustainability is also due to counties that this very has been very decided on. This is something that we will do on a yearly basis. But we overcut of the total budget for learning resources are about 15-20 percent. So the counties spend the rest buying learning resources, digital learning resources and textbooks in the open market. And also we could say that we have approximately 200,000 students in upper secondary school in Norway. And if we divide our budget on those numbers or more precise on 160,000 students that are in the county's member, there is an annual bill for each student approximately 50 euros a year. And for this sum of money we have these 140 subjects and we have maybe six, seven subjects for one-third of the students because it depends on what kind of subjects we have. So we think the model also has proved to deliver quality for a reasonable sum of money. You can go and buy a book in Norway for the same price, figures around the economy. Okay. Thank you very much for an explanation, Sigurd. So I think we are out of time for the Q&A at this point in time. So I would like to thank again Margrethe and Osnoz Sigurd for your contributions to this conversation. Thank you. And for everyone else who is present here, if you have any additional questions as they keep brewing in your head, please put them into a chat window and we will make sure to address them in the discussion session afterwards. Okay. Thank you very much. We can now move to the other presentation which is going to be done jointly by Sara Hatten and Max Mahmoud Varde. They are both located, well, Sara is located in University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Max is located within the Open Knowledge Connective in the United Kingdom. And their presentation is actually also positioned within the Sustainability Models for OER, which is the UNESCO YAR Recommendation Area. But here they are actually, well, here it is mostly, it's a slightly different issue, I think, but often when we are talking about sustainability in the context of OER, Open Education Initiatives, the discussions tend to center on sort of funding model or lack of funding, right? But another important component to consider here is how those initiatives can be sustained through the work of sort of often volunteer communities in a way or networks. And as we also heard, there can be more formal networks as Paula has been speaking about or as was addressed to NDLA as well. But there is potentially a danger of these networks if they are not open or inclusive enough, and this can have some implications on the sustainability of those efforts as a result. So I hope that I got it right in terms of your intentions. And I would like now to give you space to do your presentation bit. So please Sara and Max proceed. Okay, great. Thank you. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. Can you see all right? Is that a yes? Yes. Yes, we can see that. Yeah. Okay, great. All right. Take it away, Max. Okay, yes. Thanks. Thanks again for the intro and thanks everybody for joining us in this session. So our presentation is going to be about the rich, what we call the rich club phenomenon and its impact on knowledge production communities and the commons. And as Igor said, I'm Max, I'm the founder of the Open Knowledge Connective. And actually, as of tomorrow, I'll also be the technical lead of the Internet Production Alliance. So hopefully, yeah, you can look it up. It's a very interesting project. And I hope I'll see some of you in that context at some point in the future as well. Yeah, so exciting. And I'm Sara Hutton. I know some of us have met before. I'm the dean of libraries at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. And oh, here we go. So we're going to be talking about, as Max said, the rich club coefficient and community building in the Knowledge Commons network. So the Knowledge Commons should at its heart be an act of this community development and in this conversation, we'll be discussing this phenomenon known as the rich club effect and how it might be shaping the communities that are being built around the production of knowledge in the commons. Yeah, so what do we mean by the rich club phenomenon? The rich club phenomenon describes a phenomenon basically where contributors with a high number of collaborators are likely to cooperate with other well connected individuals. And we first came across this research on the effects of this kind of rich club behavior, especially as it relates to the Knowledge Commons in the work of Gasperini et al, which we've linked to there at the bottom of that slide. And in their research, what they did is they unpacked the impact of this rich club phenomenon on open source projects. And they did this by analyzing a dataset related to the 100 most popular projects on GitHub, which is a popular platform for hosting open source software projects. And they explored the connectivity patterns in the social graph structure of the collaborations in these projects. And by social graph, it means just sort of the graph of connections between collaborators. And the findings of their research indicate that the presence or absence of what's known as the rich club. And this is measured by something called the rich club coefficient, which is the degree to which this phenomenon manifests. So, you know, if you have a high rich club coefficient, then the phenomenon is highly manifested essentially in vice versa. And they found that this coefficient basically has an impact on the sustainability and robustness of the project, of any of the projects that they analyzed. This is a comparison of two of the projects in this particular study that Max was referring to. So that this coefficient variation in correlation to project sustainability is shown between the materialized project, which is on the left. It's a CSS framework based on material design. It has a high rich club coefficient. And the collaboration's graph for the Swift programming language project shown on the right has a lower rich club coefficient. So you can see how the interactions are mapped differently between the two based on whether or not that coefficient is high or low. And so going into a little more depth on the materialized project, which has that high coefficient, it was the projects established in 2014 by a team of four developers. And it has over 3,800 commits, 252 contributors. However, over 1000 of those commits belong to just two of the top contributors. And you can see that manifestation of that in these two nodes that have, you know, the dark red with a collection of more like, there's just more threads of connectivity between all of them. And so those members of the original team, you know, are connected with most of the commits. And so this project is still clearly owned by its original founders, as opposed to the Swift project, which has a lower coefficient. It was it was a project that started in 2010. And it was publicly announced by Apple in 2014 and open sourced in 2015. It has more than 84,000 commits, 674 contributors with 14 top, and that means 1000 plus commits contributors and 44 frequent, and that's between 100 and 1000 commits more than 44 frequent contributors. So for the top contributors are not affiliated with Apple, so not affiliated with the original founder of the project, indicating that this project has attracted and retained a broader diversity of contributors. And so you can see here too, if you recall materialized with those two like cluster nodes, like this one is much broader and still like a stronger connectivity between all contributors. So looking at them again, sort of side by side, you can see that if there's no rich club in the sense that you know you've got a low coefficient, which is the Swift project on the left there. Then what was found is that the in and this is how it relates to governance essentially is that the project maintainers have to make sure the project information still flows to all members because you don't really have these contributors who are considered sort of strong nodes in the network. It means that the information in the network is much more diffuse. So the challenge then becomes to make sure that everybody in the network actually knows what's going on. And on the other hand, if you have a high rich club coefficient, such as with materialized, which is the example on the right, then governance policies have to be put in place to guarantee that you don't end up with this sort of clustering of decision making where important decisions that require broad community participation actually find a way of drawing in the community and you don't end up with these sort of essentially centralized decision making by these sort of well connected individuals. And so, you know, what tends to sort of bring me back to the definition of the phenomenon, what would tend to happen if you're not careful is that those four sort of nodes will just end up talking to each other and excluding the rest of the community to make key decisions. And these are two examples that can hopefully show you that this is a kind of phenomenon that can have a really direct impact on nurturing the creation of inclusive sustainability models in the production of the Knowledge Commons. I mean, any kind of open knowledge project, whether it's software or otherwise. So this phenomenon is nothing new. And one of the reasons why we want to bring it to the attention of folks who are working in open is that we're seeing this rich club phenomenon, which has appeared and been discussed much earlier on in academia, we're seeing that being replicated in open projects. So looking at research that was conducted in traditional academic publishing and how institutional and researcher status impacts funding, there's a study that we've linked here and it's also on a pub site we'll share later on. Sel and Sinatra discussed those social relations and dynamics within scientific research in a 2015 study of this rich club effect, this phenomenon on fund allocation and scientific research. So they found that there was a distinct correlation between funded projects and institutional status. This is no surprise for those of us who do research, whether it's in science or scholarly publishing areas, you have those familiar institutional names, which I won't name because I don't want to call anyone out directly, but the better funded institutions are heavy hitters in publishing. And it's been researched for a long time in academia. Again, the higher the reputation of the university, whether it's due to social or financial capital, the more funding they would continue to receive. So it would just grow that coefficient over time. So why does this matter? It's been going on for a long time. Why does it matter? We see some of the biggest problems that are facing us currently that we're researching and developing projects about educating about climate change, environmental degradation, food insecurity. These issues are disproportionately affecting the very same people and populations that have traditionally been excluded from institutions of knowledge production. So this is in private public sector academia everywhere. This is inequity. Yeah. And so those of us that are taking part in this event, of course, appreciate the role that developing the Knowledge Commons can play in mitigating a lot of these issues that Sarah mentioned and solving a lot of the resulting problems. But it's really important that those of us who are involved in the building of the Knowledge Commons take into account the existence of this rich club phenomenon and in the networks of collaborations that we're building and through which we're producing this knowledge. And we feel that just understanding the effects of having both high or low coefficient rich clubs within these networks can help project maintainers mitigate the effects of this sort of rich club phenomenon in how the knowledge is being produced in their projects by ensuring equitable and inclusive contributions. Just to reiterate the two points that we've made. We've been talking about this rich club coefficient and we don't want there to be that automatic assumption that it exists and it's horrible. It exists. And again, as Max was saying, we just want to bring it into the conversation, the high and low. It's more about governance and bringing it into the consciousness of conversation in managing these open collaborations in knowledge production. So the first point is we want to highlight the barriers that exist in these collaborative projects that are concerned with the production of knowledge and participation in open projects. And these barriers have the potential to prevent a more inclusive and diverse range of contributions. And so we need to be mindful not to replicate these barriers in open projects. And that has a lot to do with communication, governance models, and more participatory governance models and conversations about how to maintain that open dialogue. Yeah. And the second point is that even when we sort of solve that first problem, even when we have networks of contributors that are more inclusive, we still need to be aware of the impact of this phenomenon, of the rich club phenomenon, so that we can reduce its effects regardless of whether the project we're working on has a high or low rich club coefficient. And project maintainers need to keep in mind the rich club coefficient when they're reviewing contributions from the community so that they can prevent the replication of the sort of the negative effects of high rich club coefficient projects, which can create a lot of barriers because of sort of the centralization of decision making. And at the end of the day, any kind of knowledge creation project has some kind of inherent value judgment about contributions in terms of the quality of the contributions. And project maintainers have to strike this balance between ensuring that the contribution that they're assessing is relevant to the project and useful to the project on the one hand, but also not creating these sort of artificially high barriers to contribution on the other. And in this context, sort of the maintainers into institutional culture and the understanding of things like credentialing, for example, especially in an academic context, can establish a lot of biases. And these kinds of systemic biases can exclude contributions from these underrepresented groups who've been systemically prevented from gaining these kinds of credentials are the necessary to be welcomed into these kind of academic projects, as well as sometimes even into sort of non-academic peer-to-peer production spaces. And that's, I mean, going back to the quality piece that Max was just referring to, and this was discussed a little bit when we were talking about NDLA is that that quality assurance is very important, especially in the development of open content. And many of us have been involved in developing open educational resources or teaching materials. And so that assessment of quality is essential. But again, you don't want to make it so stringent that it then excludes people to participating due to that credentialing process. And so, in my experience as an educator and researcher and student and librarian, many different roles, you know, what does that that decent sort of balance look like? And one of the areas that I have experience, one of the areas where I've experienced like a good, a good balance in the development of open educational resources is in the Rebus community. And some folks are maybe familiar with this. It's, you know, in the, in the development of open educational resources, educational content, there is a tendency for those smaller groups of content experts developing materials. And there's less of a focus on inviting in contributions from the wider community, because you have content and subject experts who are the ones authoring these textbooks, and these ancillary materials that are, you know, teaching a particular subject in depth. However, you can, through that thoughtful consideration and the governance of balancing content, contribution and quality control and review, while maintaining that open invitation, you can, you can maintain that. And so I found as an author and an editor in, in texts created by the Rebus community, that's a good balance. So this community is supported by the William and Hula Foundation. Those aren't familiar. And because of support by foundation, they're not affiliated with any specific institution per se. And so that helps to diffuse some of that, you know, clustering around an institution with greater social and financial capital. The peer review process is transparent and open, and all the materials are published open online. It's very open and transparent process. And, you know, in particular, like there are these calls to contribute, you know, in brainstorming, in exchange and meetup, it's a very open project. And that being said, you know, one of the questions I would ask folks to consider in contributions to these types of projects, how open is too open? When you're, when you're creating educational content, especially if you're mapping to particular competencies or standards, you know, do you think that, oh, the development of some of this, these curriculum materials would suffer from too many cooks in the kitchen, having too many folks like trying to drag the content in too many different directions. That's something else to consider as well. One of the pieces that we see potentially missing in this, and this might just be the semantics of language, is that there isn't, you know, a call for consumers of content to participate in the conversation. You know, we're wondering if it's the exchange component, but also, you know, to make it more participatory across different languages and understanding, you know, would it be better to change the way that the language is framed to broaden that invitation? Yeah, so what we're, sort of what we're doing with this, with this presentation is really hoping that it's going to start, be the start of a dialogue. And what we'd like to do is to invite any kind of project maintainer, whether they're working on an OER project, an open scholarship project, open data or open source software even, I think the NDLA sort of software call for contributions, if it was very interesting in that context. Then, you know, what we're doing is inviting you to basically join this conversation. We've created a form online that there's a link to there and we'll provide another link at the end of this presentation as well. And what we'd like to do really is sort of explore this concept of the intersection of sustainability inclusiveness and these governance models and how they can affect this. And what we'd like to do is really just sort of start to aggregate these responses and create a longitudinal conversation essentially about this idea. And so we have this and I'll just open up the live pub. Let's hope this works. It's always a risk. So this is our open publication. It's on pub, pub. And as Max was just mentioning, you know, this is the place where we pose those questions to help facilitate a longitudinal conversation. And so the questions that Max was just referring to, we have embedded here is a Google form. We invite any of you and any of our colleagues at the other events that we've presented this concept at to answer these questions. Just more about, you know, how can we open up the contributions to knowledge production. We invite people to, you know, talk about different projects they've been involved with where they have noted a rich club coefficient, whether high or low, and just, you know, some of those, some of those experiences that we share as colleagues participating in open development. And our intent, you know, as Max said, is to establish this like ongoing dialogue. And so within this publication, here's today's event session details and we'll type up the takeaways after this and some of the responses to the form in aggregate. We have discussed this topic at the Creative Commons Global Summit this year and at the International Association for the Study of the Commons Notch Commons Virtual Conference as a part of a panel. And so as we continue the conversation, we're going to be including, you know, these are the folks that were a part of the discussion. This is some of the stuff that we talked about and welcoming people to contribute their thoughts to that to really just make this a long conversation that we can carry across, you know, geographies, time and spaces. And the intent is really to use this discussion as a way to dismantle some of these barriers with the emergent themes that we see from this ongoing research. I'm going to go back to, okay, there we go. Thank you. Just one minute. You've got one minute left. Yeah, thanks. So yeah, that's, that's it really presentation. There's a link there with it's just a simple page with it with a form. It's like a general feedback form. Of course, we've got the pub that Sarah just mentioned for the sort of the more detailed responses. But if you just wanted to get in touch, then that's the greatest. Just visit that URL and fill in the form and let us know how you'd like to engage with us on this. Yeah, so there. So there goes my, I'm going to stop sharing it. Thank you very much, Sarah and Max. I really appreciate you bringing this sort of rich club phenomenon to the attention of the attendees here. I think that it was, in some way, you issued a warning, something that people really need to be mindful of and considered about. And I really like your invitation for people to participate. So thank you for sharing all of these resources to you. And by the way, I think, well, this particular framework probably has got applicability across a range of different contexts. But I mean, that's a that's a larger discussion probably that you would have to spend more time on. Please update those, those relevant links also under your session on OIG Connect that would be appreciated. Thank you very much. And we have got time for a few questions here. So I would like to just Okay, so there was one question from from Chrissy and she was asking, like, how does the rich club behavior differs from clicks? And well, the clicks is, if I understand properly, like a group that is kind of tightly controlled and does not let someone easily in. So I think she's asking about the difference between clicks and the rich club phenomenon. Yeah, I think I mean, that is one of the I think one of the important things about sort of this rich club phenomenon is that it is it is a it's a phenomenon of human social networks. So I think it manifests in a lot of different ways. I think sometimes it can manifest as clicks, you know, and in different sort of it can be given different names. And I think part of it is also and I think this is one of the things that we read we'd really like to emphasize is again, you know, there's no sort of value judgment in whether a project having a high or a low rich club coefficient is good or bad. It's just that if you if you're paying attention to what the topology of your network looks like, you need to know how that affects your interaction with your community of contributors, and as well as the decision making within your community. And I think the way that in my mind, this relates a lot to sustainability and perhaps the, you know, development of clicks is in a lot of open projects, for example, when it comes to the way they're funded, quite often these sort of nodes in the network tend to be the people who are getting either paid salaries to be able to work full or part time on a project. So it depends, you know, the sustainability model itself and the funding model can create these kinds of clicks, essentially, and that can become sort of hardwired into the way the network operates. And again, it doesn't necessarily mean it's bad. It's just that you really need to be paying attention to this and to know how you can mitigate its effects in terms of the community and the contributors. Yeah, it's, I'm sorry, I've been looking at the questions too, and there are so many different interrelated threads. But I mean, yeah, going back to there is no value judgment. I mean, the rich club coefficient really is just a formula. And so it's a way to bring into conversation how these social networks cluster. And one of the things that I'm doing on the on the pub site is compiling this list of resources to read more about how this phenomenon manifests and how that coefficient is applied in other conversations outside of open project development to show that like, this is just how things collect. I mean, even, you know, mapping networks and synaptic connections in the brain, the rich club coefficient can be applied. And so it's really just a tool and mechanism to facilitate a conversation about the necessity to look at how this happens in open projects and discuss better communication and governance models that can help to kind of untangle on a pack some of that before it causes issues. Thank you. So we can I think there's quite a lot of buzz happening here right now. So but I think we can have take another question or two. So well, Chrissie has another question, but you have already answered that in terms of writing up some materials around the topic which you have already shared with us too. And there was a question from Paul, how do we balance the need to to faster decisions or to make decisions making faster, making processes and avoiding the reduction in the number of nodes? And that's and that's where more on the governance comes into play. I've talked about this a lot with Max and some of the open software development projects that are in library land, particularly within the future of libraries is open project or folio. I know that for some people that'll make them shudder because it's a very complex governance model. And it's an ongoing conversation, you know, where you have technical council, product council, community council, and the intent is to have it be an open conversation, but you still have difficulties in connecting points of view. It slows down conversation slows on development. And so it really is this balancing act of, you know, how much conversation and discussion and, you know, part of that, you know, democratic process is enough to move forward. And it could be based on like, you know, in order to meet the needs of your stakeholders or your constituencies or whatever, but how much is enough before you just kind of like, basically talk the thing to death and then you're, it never gets released. I mean, that's what a lot of us are looking at. Like we have deadlines for development releases. And we have to meet also different, you know, curriculum standards and different government standards or institutional standards. So it really is like this very delicate balancing act. And the conversation that we're trying to have is where do you see, you know, beneficial governance models in your open projects? Let's start collecting them together in this long discussion to see if there is something that we can map out that is useful for all of us in many different situations where it has that flexibility to move fast or slow depending on context. If I may just quickly sort of pick up on that point that as well is that I think what we've imagined is sort of being able to create this kind of taxonomy of governance models. And so, I mean, anybody who has any knowledge of any research, for example, that they can share with us and so we can share within this conversation, it would be great so that you know, you can actually start to understand that if this is what your network looks like, then these are the kinds of governance models that you might want to be looking at. And creating that kind of mapping would be, I mean, that would be sort of the ideal scenario that we can imagine. Okay, thank you very much. So thank you again to both Sara and to Max for your presentations and for answering those questions. We have reached our time limit for Q&A. So in the meantime, I encourage you all to please, well, specifically Sara and Max to scan through the different comments and questions in the chat. If we do have time at the end of all the presentations, we can still address some additional points, but we can now move to the next presentation. So thank you very much again, Sara and Max. Well done. And thank you to everyone for your active participation. Now I would like to invite Leo Hauman and Javier Atenas to take the center stage. Well, so both Javier and Leo are going to be discussing a topic that is relevant for another UNESCO ERA recommendation area and that's developing supportive ERA policies, both at institutional and governmental levels. And Javier is now based at the University of Suffolk in the UK and Leo is based at the University College London, UK. Well, they both have got so much expertise and experience in sort of open education policy space and not just the open education policy space, also open data space that we would have to spend quite a bit of time here discussing it. But yes, they have got lots of experience and they've been participating and driving in different initiatives in this regard and published quite widely on that as well. Recently, they have also been published a fairly large publication on open education policies that use guidelines for co-creation, so using co-creation as a framework of action when people work on open education policies. And they've also been leading the open education policy lab activities. And here in today's session, they are going to be giving us an overview of the state of open education policies, where we are at the moment, with a presentation entitled Landscapes, Maps and Territories of Open Education Policy. Where do we go from here? So Javier and Leo, please take the stage. Thank you, Igor. Thanks very much, Igor, for that lovely introduction. And let me just get these slides, make them visible to you. I hope you see them now. And so thank you. Thank you very much. Yeah, today we're going to talk a bit about landscapes, maps and territories of open education policy. And so what do we mean by this? We've been doing quite a bit of work on mapping policies. And that's partly about figuring out what kind of policies are emerging around the world, at what kind of levels these policies exist. And working towards a kind of a landscape understanding of a big picture. And that's kind of very much ongoing. And this got me thinking about the phrase, the map is not the territory, which is a quote from the philosopher Alfred Krasinski. And it reminds us that it's really hard to know reality, that whenever we simplify and summarize the real and make a representation like a map, or try to produce an overview of it that we might refer to as a landscape, we remove so much. And what we actually select is so little. And so it's actually sort of appealing for trust to say I've selected the most important things here. But we really need to think about who does the map making, what makes it through their filter, and the fact that maps are often designed to privilege certain kinds of things, like borders, like highways, or superstores. And these can fail to represent or even see the things that are most important to someone else who's kind of not in that position of being the map maker. So I wanted to talk a bit about policy with this in mind, because in some ways, making policy is like a kind of roadmap that's supposed to show us how to get from A to B. And sometimes the policy map we're making is of a little known or unseen territory. And as you can imagine, if you're trying to follow a map that doesn't adequately represent the territory that you're in, and that you're trying to find your way through, this could be a real interruption or delay to your journey, or you might have to turn back. And we think this has some relevance for the idea of policy making, and how do we know that policy is going to be appropriate, is going to work, is going to be well received, and as Catherine Cronin says, enabling. So in my work with Javier on this, and also in my current PhD research project, and also some of the works in the higher education institution, I've been really interested, in particular in the local level policy making that we're doing in institutions, or that we hopefully will do in institutions around open education, and the relationship between policy and practice there on the ground of the territory, and between that policy level and national and supranational levels. So I think in order to think about this better, we also need to engage in the first place with the thorny question of what do we actually mean by policy. And of course, there's many different ways of talking about and thinking about policy, and what we did in the, for the guidelines for co-creation that we produced that Igor mentioned in the introduction, was we actually came up with our own definition of open education policies. We wanted to work with quite a nuanced definition, not only focused on resources, but also on practices, and also not only considering policy as written policy texts, but also thinking about those unwritten policies that actually are the way that we do things, that the normal way that we do things or the way that we've agreed amongst ourselves, that this is going to be handled. And also things that may not seem to have a written policy attached, but where, for example, there might be funding directed towards an activity. So we have to think about that as also being a form of policy, even though those kind of undocumented kinds of policy are a bit harder to discover. So thinking about policy in open education, it's just advanced too far, as a kind of pyramid. I think that this represents, this is a graphic designed by Javier, that that represents how, in a sense, how policy is supposed to be working. When we think about it from the point of view of super national organizations like UNESCO, they're providing recommendations and kind of a vision for open education. That's a foundation for national policies, and then national policies should provide the, not just the kind of foundation, but also maybe funding and really support to enable the activity that should be going on within institutions, because that's kind of where the thinking particularly about higher education here in the higher education institutions, that's where you've got the academics, the students, the people who are going to actually do the activity and who are currently doing open education activity, often in the absence of policy. And the absence of policy, you might say, well, if they do it in the absence of policy anyway, then do we need policy? But I think what we see is that it's very much a sort of more of a niche activity most of the time. So policy really is needed in order to enable so many more people to participate in this kind of activity, I think. So what we would like to see to activate more activity at the institutional level would be a much stronger commitment, not least in terms of unlocking vital funding streams at national or also state or similar levels, but progress here seems to be really slow. So we've got kind of a super national level, really kind of strong message, especially from UNESCO, and we've got kind of leaders and advocates and really enthusiastic participants at the institutional level and currently, I think, struggling to get the attention of those government governments that hold the pair of strings. So this is just a really high level kind of headline overview of what do we know from the landscape. And a key thing here is that open education policies are still fairly thin on the ground at the national level around the world and also at institutional levels. So we have some great examples which really show a path forward and one of the great things about organizations who produce open policies that they very often openly license their policies so that others can adapt them. And I'm sure even if they haven't openly licensed them, they would be pleased to see some of the elements that they've put forward as key being echoed by others. And also open education policies where they exist currently tend to be quite OER focused and there's also a kind of a wider realm of open educational practices that relate to and support OER, but also other practices that are around opening up aspects of education, opening up access and participation. And is this an issue that these are less discussed or less well understood in the kind of policy discussion? I think maybe yes, because if we consider OER in isolation, then I think that it seems that the overarching goal of open education is to produce and use OER rather than to open up access and participation in education. And I think an analogy is that if open education is kind of thought to be limited to OER, it's kind of like implying that education is really just the library. So at the policymaking level, I think we need to think about a wider range of practices in the capacity building that we need to support people in taking up those practices. Otherwise, actually, none of it's going to work, not even OER, because we need people to have a lot of capacity for doing all kinds of actually digital as well as specifically open things in order to make this kind of open education work. So I was hoping I could call on Javier to join me for the next part of the presentation to talk about some of the types of OER policies that we've encountered as we've been reviewing the landscape. Hi, everyone. Thanks, Leo. Basically, this typology it comes from a study that we did with Fabio Nacimbeni and other people who backs it for the JRC a few years ago. And it's been a bit adapted of what it's kind of the current landscape of open education or where you can find open education within a policy ecosystem. So first, you have the classic dedicated open education OER policies. That's kind of the most classic policies you can find around. Then you have policies derived from the National Government Action Plans. So Yangonzo has some examples, I'm sure about it. So it's basically policies that may come from a national commitment that a country has been made within the National Action Plan in a timeframe with ODP. You can find some open education embedded in ICT or digital education policies. I called it ICT. I think I need to kind of update that petal in the flower and call it ICT dash digital education policies. In some of them, you can find a component of open and open education. There are stories and Gemma, who I saw listed in the colleagues here, she has found some examples of open education embedded within open access policies. And also, you have some policies like general education policies like big huge chunk of national strategies or education strategies for our Ministry of Education that have a component of open education within normally the ICT environment. And also, oh, I noticed that I've made some, I messed around with the titles and the flowers. Then I connect them well. I just noticed that I just changed the petals. And then you have policies with focus on the labor market that have a component on skills development through OER. So this is basically the kind of landscaping in the policy environment. Leo? Sorry, I'm just advancing the slide. So basically, when we've mapped around 300 policies or strategies as they're asking for strategies, it's actually this is one of the tricks to find them around. We found out that the most common and that comes from strategic priorities is OER policies and open textbook policies. And also, digital education policies have a component of open education. So that comes from normally the strategic institutional or national level. Some policies that come from a strategic strand, yeah, but are less common are policies that talk about practices instead of focusing on the resource, it could be textbook or OER. So this is kind of where it looks more. Then you have least common ones are labor market ones and policies that talk about open education within, for example, the open science context. And this comes normally from mandates at university level. So you have to do open access and open science. It comes normally from the mandate for getting publishing and publishing awards and stuff like that. So this is kind of least common, but there are some OTP very little and very little in the last round of OTP commitments. And some common also that come from mandates are the open access policies that may have a component of open education, normally in the context of repositories of open access that now accept OERs. So basically a bit of landscape, Leo, and this is distribution at world level. So I just pass back to Leo. And so in this one, we can also see some some indication of the links of policy types with their kind of geographical region, where they are more prevalent. So as we can see the OER policy, open textbook policy, is in the top right corner there, most found in North America to some degree Europe. And educational policy with an open education component, sometimes with more of an emphasis on practices. We've seen more evidence of this in Latin America, which is interesting. And we will share the slides so that there are a few more that I will kind of do a quick overview. How are we doing for a time, Leo? Sorry. You've got three minutes left. Great. Okay. So it's important to think about some underpinning structures in open education policy. Copyright is key here. You don't want to end up creating policy that which is in conflict with the way in which you need to handle copyright other kinds of agreements that you have for kind of laws that need to be complied with. Open education policies need to work with your wider thinking around educational innovation. Overall policy coherence with other policies which touch on aspects of open practices like open science, open access, open data. And your other policies which are not open again like copyright or the ways that you kind of governance around use of data and things like this will need to come into play when you're thinking about policy development in this space. And we've highlighted here six key elements of policies. These are in the document that we've mentioned earlier, the guidelines for co-creation. But it's important to note that we're not really saying what policy you need to ultimately create because that's not the purpose of co-creating policy. It's really about what are the areas that might be really important to consider. So this is what we consider the key elements areas that you want to make sure that your policy has some kind of, you know, make some effort to address. And again coming back to the topic of kind of governance around technology and data. All of these issues are really becoming hot topics around what's happening with people's data, around their privacy. And the idea of, you know, if we move to much more open ways of doing things is that are we automatically good in terms of the way that we are caring for student data, for example? Or do we need to, you know, consider those issues even in the context of using open tools, open platforms for what we consider valid open purposes? So finally when we're thinking about co-creation, there are some key elements working together that are vital to it. It's about collaboration. It's about engagement with the community. It's about bench learning, which is about making a link between benchmarking, finding out what's been done elsewhere, what worked for people elsewhere, and using that learning and the development of your own policy. And so in terms of the co-creation roadmap, don't forget to start with mapping policies that you want to review before starting to create one of your own. And when you get to the end of the process, don't forget to share your policy back with the community so that others can benefit from your knowledge and your expertise. This is a policy canvas that we've used in workshops for people to think through their planning towards policy co-creation. And we've provided, say, some relevant literature that might be of interest to future viewers of the slides. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you. Thank you very much to both of you, Javier and Leo. It's a really super helpful overview of the types of policy developments to date related to open education and also the typology of policies. I have seen quite a few compliments in the chat window. Also, thank you. Well, thank you for the shout-out also to Jan Gondol here. Well, as far as the was quite instrumental in embedding open education commitments within the National Action Plan in Slovakia under the Open Government Partnership Initiative. And also, thank you for highlighting the principles of the co-creation principles on one of your previous slides. I think this is also something that was highlighted again during the Monday webinar by the dynamic coalition members. I think it was also one of the UNESCO chairs who mentioned that actually co-creation as an approach to policy creation is really important. So it definitely is really useful, an important framework of action. And please share those links also in the chat window, if you can, to these relevant publications and the slides as well. And if I may ask you to please also update your relevant spaces on the OEG Connect space, too, that would be super helpful for everyone. There have been some questions in the chat. And I think some, okay, let me just go through it. We have got a few minutes for questions. There was one question, I think from Chrissy, who was asking whether you're using policy and strategy interchangeably or whether there is a difference. So please go ahead and try to address it in the meantime while I'm scanning for the rest. I did respond in the chat quickly, as Javier was talking, that yes, we do generally speaking see policy quite broadly. And that was kind of part of that discussion that I mentioned at the beginning around wanting to have quite a nuanced view of what policy is, and not necessarily as a written document. Of course, the strategy can be a written strategy as well, but it can be at quite a high level, quite generic about kind of values and principles and the kind of things that we believe in. And not necessarily at the more kind of roadmap to how to get there kind of level that you might get from policy, but not necessarily always. But so we include all of those things. And also because it's the way that we basically mind and out, we've searched, we already collected around 320 policies, that it's basically a database for Lee's PhD. And one of the things that we've done is use terms such as strategy, action plan, policies, and then anything that it's kind of in the similar right in other languages. So because in North America, they tend to talk more about strategy. And in the end, in the year, they tend to talk about more policy. And yeah, it's a bit of a complicated landscape, but they are interchangeable. I think we could spend another half an hour discussing conceptual matters. So thank you for that clarification, Leo. And well, Gino, thank you for sharing that link to the OER wiki space, the OER policy wiki space that we developed collaboratively with Leo. There was another question here, someone asking whether you see any impact or effect of the UNESCO recommendation on policy developments at a national level, or whether that's still too early to see or to tell. I think it's possibly a bit too early to see. I know that UNESCO will be the great thing about the fact that it's a recommendation as opposed to the kind of prior instruments that they've produced, like the 2012 declaration, is that it means that they ask the member states to report back on what action they're taking in relation to the recommendation. So I think the next, the first round of reporting back is going to happen in 2022. I may be deluding myself, but I think so. So this is not a process that happens constantly. It's kind of a periodic call for updates from the member states about actions in relation to the recommendation. So I really hope that we will see some more evidence by then. And also, I think, as Gemma was mentioning in the chat, another factor that I think is stimulating more interest and awareness has been the impact of the pandemic and the realization that's happened kind of in many parts of the world, that a lot of our standard ways of doing things are not really resilient in a scenario like that. And so that has provided a moment for people to think about what open approaches could provide. And one that I really hope is going to yield some real results there. Thank you very much, Leo. And Javier, thank you for addressing the additional questions in the chat window directly. That's really appreciated. So we are now exhausted the Q&A question slot for everyone for this particular presentation. So thank you very much, Eric. Thank you very much, Javier and Leo. I really appreciate your contributions and your work. Thank you, Igor. Thank you. Yeah. So we have another, I think, 10 minutes left. This now can open up the discussion for everyone. So if you have any questions for presenters, for all of those presenters, you can ask them now. But otherwise, I also have one general question that I would like to ask all of you and just for your brief input. Okay, so while we are still waiting for any additional questions, I'm just going to pause the question. As I was listening to these presentations, I'm just kind of reflecting on the content of the discussion. One of the central themes that resonated across the different presentations today for me, at least personally, is the role of network and communities. And networks, which can be both formal or informal, are really formed to achieve different goals or objectives. And as we heard today, they can be formed to foster collaborations, to share practices. Networks of communities can also help sustain open education initiatives in the long run. National or international policy networks or communities are also important in the context of open education policy developments. For example, many of the open education or ER developments in different countries have been driven by such networks. And such networks have also been playing an important role in international policy developments. So as was discussed or asked during the session today, here I'm referring to instruments such as the 2012 Paris Oyadek declaration on open educational resources for the 2019 recommendation on open educational resources. But when networks do not function effectively, maybe they may not be inclusive, or they disintegrate over time because of lack of funding or because of other matters, rich club phenomenon might be one of them. This can have or this can impact open education developments and or it can affect their gains that were made or in different countries. But it can also have implications in the context of sustainability of such efforts. So my question to all of you here is really based on this observation, based on your experience and knowledge, what recommendations do you have to actually ensure that networks or communities of open education practitioners, policy advocates, librarians function effectively over time? How can we ensure the sustainability of such communities as well? And I'm not referring here to only availability of funding to sustain operations of networks, but in the absence of funding, what other strategies could be applied. So I know that this is a broader question, but I would appreciate some brief remarks from any of the speakers or even the participants in this session. Sara, are you unmuted? No, I know I was just saying right with what Gino just put into the conversation, because I mean, absolutely. And that's a part of it is that when we're looking at policy development, who are the governing bodies that are coming up with these? And that's that's a part of what I'm interested in discussing. I have no magic solution to that other than making the conversation about the development of the governance as transparent as possible and continually inviting outside of the normal realm of discussion or groups for additional participation. Yeah, thank you, Sara. The co-creation principles to policy creation that were discussed by Leo and Javier actually have some really concrete strategies on how to potentially handle this kind of rich club phenomenon in a way in a way that you share information and solicit input or feedback into different stages of the policy preparation as well. Any other comments from the speakers or the attendees? I mean, I think it is it is really interesting, for example, that in my experience at least there seems, for example, to be a clear absence of students in a lot of these policymaking arenas and in terms of soliciting feedback about these policies and the effect of the policies, even though ostensibly the students are at least in terms of not like sheer numbers the most affected by anything to do with OER. And so these are the kinds of things that I think might be really interesting. And I think sort of I was also sort of thinking about this idea of sort of mapping policy policies to sort of incentives in terms of if we are talking about community building and thinking about how to incentivize different forms of contribution beyond the typical ones that we see in a lot of OER creation, which as you said, they go, you know, tend to be around funding. But like what other types of incentives can we create that can really create this kind of wider participation and what role can policies play in that? Thank you, Max. Any additional remarks, either from Regretta or Paola or Leo seems to be getting ready for also. I think just thinking about incentivizing or encouraging networks to keep functioning and not run out of steam. So not so much in the even in the open context, but in terms of another network that I'm involved in kind of the coordination of, I think one of and it's sort of a it's a kind of local ed tech people network. What we have what we've tried to do is have quite a big group of people who are involved in the coordination. And in the in we've moved to even larger group more recently than we used to have. And it just makes it more resilient. There are a few more people to kind of do some bits and pieces or say, okay, you know, for this event, I'm going to handle it. And when a lot of us, especially over the last year and a half, we're kind of saying, we know we should be doing something, but we don't have any time. And and so it's it's I think it really relates to the same topic that came up in the in the chat earlier in the session. I think maybe it was Chrissy who was talking about keeping people getting more people involved and kind of handing over the the the the leadership, kind of sharing that around more. I think it's about saying you don't we don't only have a small group of leaders in this community. Thank you very much, Leo. Paula. Just one thought. Connecting to what just Leo just said, concept that always comes back to my mind in this kind of activities when they are collaborative, we want to have more people involved. We have to deal with struggles like in our case, for example, languages or anyway being as inclusive as possible means to enlarge the boundaries as far as possible, which creates complexity and complexity often in my mind doesn't fit with perfection. Why should we care for perfection? That's my question. We should care for progressing and being able to deal with the non perfection in everything we do is a way that allows us to think that what we do really matters and can be changed tomorrow by anyone else. So it's again giving away leadership, believing that the next person can add the right piece when the right moment comes. And it's not philosophical, it's really practical. Thank you. I appreciate your pragmatic approach here, Paula. Thank you. Margarita. What I'm thinking about is not practical at all, but I was inspired by the way Paula spoke about the librarian network earlier. So if you lack passion and if you lack vision and if you lack values, you won't get anything done. So I think these kind of networks where people are not meeting up physically and talking to each other very often, you need to spend a lot of time on values and talking about why are we doing this in the greater picture and what are our goals in terms of values, why are we doing this and what's our passions. I think that is the fuel that runs such networks in the long run. Great. Thank you very much. So we are pretty much out of time now, so I'm going to be getting ready to close the session. But first of all, thank you to all of the presenters, you have been fantastic. And thank you for such an engaged audience of participants as well. Everybody has been really lovely. And I would also just like to thank Judith Sabista. Judith, thank you for your comment that you've put into the chat window as well. So as a reminder, Judith is our rapporteur for this session. So she's going to be compiling a report from this session. Thank you very much, Judith. And just to also encourage all of you that you have the link in the chat window for the session description, for this overall session description on OEG Connect. So you can also continue all of these conversations there further. Or if you want to connect with presenters individually, you will be able to find the details on OEG Connect. So thank you very much to all of you again. It has been an absolute pleasure to be part of this session and to help share this session as well. And so enjoy the rest of the conference. There is a day and a half left, depending on where you are connecting from. And yes, all the best. And be safe and take care. Thank you, Igor. Thank you. Bye. Thank you. Thanks a lot. Bye. Bye, everyone. Bye. Bye. And we can stop the recording.