 Okay, so thank you for joining us today and welcome to the quarterly membership meeting. Now again, we have quite a full agenda today. Let me quickly go over then. So first, we're going to talk about promoting OER at your institution. Then we'll introduce a concept of OER State of the Field Report to get your feedback. And then we'll demo the Open Education Professional Directory, followed by updates on the Consortium's Open Milk Initiative. And then we'll talk about planning for the Open Education Week 2015. And we'll have other general updates during which Marie-Anne will also give an update on her VNPAC problem. And lastly, we'll open the floor for questions, comments, and discussion items from members during which you can use your microphone to participate in the discussion, or you can use a chat window. You can enable your microphone by clicking on the microphone icon on the top menu bar. However, I'll keep all the microphones muted when someone is presenting. You can use a chat window then to type in your questions or comments on somebody speaking. Okay, so for the first part, promoting OER at your institution, we have two guest speakers today. Linda Talks from the University of Cape Town and Professor Talway Lee from National Southam University to talk about their efforts in promoting OER projects. Okay, Linda, then, it's all yours. Okay, hi everyone. Can everybody hear me clearly? Yes, great. That's wonderful. Okay, I will go ahead then and get through quite a short presentation. So I hope it's not too much of a whirlwind. So good morning all and welcome from a blustery rainy spring day in Cape Town. OER, an open access initiative at UCT, are currently in an exciting transition. So in 2010, the Open Content Directory was launched and it has been sustained through steady hard work. It contained almost exclusively open educational resources. The open landscape at UCT is illustrated here in this rather complicated slide, which I won't get into any detail. However, it shows that we started our agenda in 2007 and currently the library is becoming a key stakeholder. And I'll talk a little bit about this at the end again. Last month, we launched our brand new institutional repository, which now includes both research and teaching and learning materials and we're very excited about this new development. Our team, well, I am a member of the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching, or SILF, and I work with my colleagues Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams and Thomas King. We all work on a part-time basis and draw support from our colleagues in a sort of ad hoc way. We have a very strong research interest and meet regularly about research into OER. We also have an Open UCT team which was funded externally by the Mellon Foundation and that project ends in December and they were responsible for launching the repository. Our director is Laura Chernowich and she is a champion of Open and OER. So we have a multifaceted approach to creating awareness and this slide is a list of just some of those practices that we use. And as I go through the next few slides, I'll elaborate a little bit more on some of these points. So for example, we support our champions. We have a newspaper that goes out for the university every month. We have regular open access and open education week events. We have a conference where we present. We use social media quite extensively. We run workshops. We have student projects and we have OER grants. So you'll see we really do kind of do whatever we can to promote OER. So we began this whole process with our enthusiasts, with people who are already sharing in the most wonderful way and drew them into this process of sharing. So we had a very nice example of a guide that was created for first year students that has been used at UCT but also other universities in South Africa. We have a very nice little case study here of an open content resource that became a journal article. So that was really a nice initiative. And Matuma Rafaken, the academic involved, also received an open education award. We use our Monday monthly newspaper. Whenever we've got some news or something significant, we like to report on it. And that goes out to our entire UCT community. As I mentioned, we have award winners. We have received three ACE awards from the Open Education Consortium. And the support of the Open Education Consortium has been phenomenal in this regard and has helped us to raise the profile of openness at UCT. Recently, Joan Klopper has received an Educator Award. We host several events that coincide with International Open Weeks. So for example, in 2011, Open Access Week, our vast Chancellor signed the Berlin Open Access Declaration. We also do events in Open Education Week and we're looking forward to the one coming up next year. We use social media extensively. Here you will see a website that we have created that has regular blog posts, tweets and also links to our Facebook site. Then it should be noted that a lot of our funding has come from external funders. In fact, the Open Content Directory and the Open UCT repository have been externally funded. However, we were very excited to receive a small amount in 2013 from our Vice Chancellor's Fund. The idea was to employ students to support lecturers in creating or preparing OER and that project has been extended out, so we're very pleased with that. Here is an example of one of the resources that was created. We host a series of workshops suggesting why academics should contribute and these workshops always include an introduction to Creative Commons. We also give out OER grants funded by the Mellon Foundation. These grants are worth around about $1,000. Academics use these to employ students or web design specialists to prepare their teaching materials for contribution as OER. These have been very successful and we still have funds for 10 more of these grants. The Road Ahead, so the Road Ahead for us is very exciting. We've made wonderful strides towards open access across the entire university. However, we now have new stakeholders in the library, so the new repository will be owned by the library and they will do all the day-to-day moderation. This means we need to advocacy work now with the faculty librarians to engage them in OERs and to help them to believe in the importance of OERs as well as open access. So my role and my colleague's role will continue to be around training, support, some advocacy, and then ongoing research into OER in the future. So we really don't know how this is going to pan out. We're not sure how the librarians are going to take it on and we're in a particular phase of transition. So that was my brief presentation. I hope I kept to time. I wasn't timing it. But you'll see a link on this page to a book chapter. So if you're interested in reading more about open education and the Open Scholarship Agenda at UCT, I've included this link to a pre-release book chapter. Thank you very much for... Thank you very much, Blanda, for your presentation. It was really helpful and timing was perfect. Okay, so let us now invite Professor Lee. I'm Tao Wei B, the Director of Open Education Office in National Jiao Tong University. I'm going to talk about how we promote the experience of how we promote OCW. We start our OCW in 2007. This year we have only three classes, one calculus, one physics, and one chemistry. After eight years, now we have 171 courses, only 146 video courses. But still calculus one is still the most popular class in OCW. For students to study those fundamental classes, they usually ask if we provide certificate exam to help them to judge their study results. So in the end of 2007, we give the certificate exam and for those good students, only probably 20% to 30% to get the certificate. But our university did not agree to give the credit for those certificates because for those good students, they still lack of the learning record. That's why we moved to stage two. Stage two, we incorporate with the model system and we put all the video linkages in the model system and open the internet courses in our campus. During the semester or during the summer vacation, we encourage professor to give those internet courses because those internet courses provide the learning record. So the university agreed to give the credit and the normal credit to those internet courses. Most of the internet courses still from the middle sense. And last year, we moved to the FRIP classroom. The former director, Professor Pi, she used calculus one and calculus two, the most popular OCW course and tried to start the FRIP classroom. The main purpose is students listen to the OCW video at home or in the dorm and do the problem solving in the classroom. They like that class very much. So we try to do some organized workshop to encourage our professor start to use OCW courseware to give more FRIP classroom this year. And we also do some publicity. We put our video probably once to a third of the video on the YouTube, which attracts different levels of the people. For example, the most popular class in the NCTO OCW wave is calculus one, but in the YouTube actually is the inquisitive. So different level of the people use different video. And also we put our community on Facebook, try to organize a student and also let the user to publish their user story and help the people to understand how they can use OCW courseware. I will give you two examples in the last slides. This year we start to put the best courses in edX and try to use the open MOOC, which will start a new way of using our OCW. We will investigate how the usage in the open MOOC and we may be organized our new future of OCW. Every year we will print DM and send to the older senior high school in Taiwan because those certificate of fundamental science classes will help the good senior high school to get the entrance permission of the good university in Taiwan. So most of the students, especially the best students of the senior high school will come to take exam. Also during the orientation of NCTU orientation week we sent those freshmen souvenir gift postcard or any some survey and to help them to understand NCTU provided at OCW will help them to study during these four years. Finally, I just give you the two examples of the user story. One is hearing impaired student. They should use our OCW class repeat again and again to overcome her study barrier and finally she get the permission of graduate school of applied mathematics in our university. Another interesting story is one grandma almost 70 years old start to learn calculus from our OCW by herself because in order to help her grandson to pass the calculus exam in the senior high school also try to get a certificate of the OCW that's why she start the calculus. These are the experience of our OCW and I hope people can enjoy those our experience. I'm happy to answer any question now. That's my talk. There are some great stories. Thank you, Professor Li for sharing your experiences. I'll open the floor for some questions briefly for two presentations. Igor is asking, Linda, can you please explain a bit more about the transition to the under the library and why the library is specific? And Linda has a question to Professor Li. Hi, Igor. I think it's probably easier to just chat about it than to try and type. My typing is not that quick. So traditionally in universities institutional repositories are managed by the library and this is why we feel that they should own the repository. As I tried to mention, we're quite a small unit so we don't have the capacity or the resources in our unit to continue managing the repository which would also include all open access material as well as other collections as well as student DCs. So it really should be the ownership of the library as opposed to us. So this is why the transition has happened to the library and we think that this is a very good way ahead to get the library involved in open access and open education. And I imagine that there are some other institutions around the world that have done this and we'll learn through it. Yeah, I agree to speak is easier to type in than typing. Oh yes, we get good support from the top of our university and we have an office and fixed grant annually but in the beginning like 2007 to 2008 we have an effort to struggle a lot to get recognition from our university until the internet calls get recognition from all the senior professors and they think OCW is quite important, especially now. So in the beginning those senior professors they're quite against OCW. They think face-to-face class is more important in those OCW courseware because OCW courseware may distract the students to come to the classroom. But now those senior professors they know because students they study in a different way but probably because the iPad or mobile phone student watch those things during the classroom but if you provide a good OCW courseware students like those courseware and they come to the classroom to discuss the problem they meet in the video tape. So that's why our university quite treat the OCW very significantly. Professor Lee, there's another question from Igor about the certification option for your open courseware. I'm not sure what is the advanced placement. It's a program where high school students can take university level courses. They have AT system in the state. Oh I see, in the United States. We have an entrance exam, yes. We have two different systems for the entrance exam. During the winter vacation we say it's a general high school exam and if you pass that exam you have to do the application process that in the United States you have an interview. You have to provide a supplement to show you your ability. That's the first winter exam of the senior high student. But if you didn't get good record during that winter exam then you can move to the summer entrance exam which is more rigorous and more difficult than the winter exam. It's like you pass this exam then we're ranking you and you should go to some university and then that you don't have much choice during the summer entrance exam. So most of the senior students in Taiwan they like to take winter exam then they have more choice of the university and they can show their ability to get some specific department. Is that your question? Okay, thank you. I think we're going to have to take this conversation for another time because I'm really interested in seeing how high school students in Taiwan are using open source web to approve of their ability to carry on studies in universities. People are asked whether you have numbers on how many certificates were issued and how many students gained entry to universities based on such certificate. Do you have any more information? How many? Actually, I don't have such a record because I know some students try to get our entrance permission of our entrance application I saw those certificates but we don't have such record how many students use certificates. They get a certificate we didn't follow up those things. I think we should do some survey. Wait for one more comment from Mary. Right, I understand. It's a combination of many things for a college entrance. Let's move on to the next item on the agenda which is the OER State of the Field Report. There are quite a few reports and surveys out there but we feel that the field is now ready for an overview of the progress of open education. So, for example, we need an overview of numbers such as numbers of projects, numbers of resources, number of languages of resources are offered in, etc. We would also need opinion statements from stakeholders such as what do administrators or faculty think about OER and what is a user experience or what is a presentation. So, we, the consortium, we're in a very good position to embark on such a project. However, in order to avoid duplication and whatnot, instead of creating our own brand new survey, we think it would be wise to kind of piggyback on other surveys. So, we would add a couple of questions to those to exist in surveys and then aggregate all the responses to create a comprehensive field report on open education. So, a question. So, we would like your feedback on this project. We, what we would like to ask our community is, is this something that we should be doing? So, do you think this is needed for the field? And secondly, what reports and surveys are you aware of that have one or more questions on open education? And lastly, we're looking for people who will help us steer this project and the task would involve things like locating existing surveys, performing needs assessments, defining the scope of the report and designing questions. So, if you have any feedback or comments, now, you're more than welcome to give us your opinion now, or we can wait till the end of the meeting so that you have a little time to think about it. Okay, go ahead. Hi, yes. I think that, I know for certain, Igor is aware of the Role4D project that is coming out of sort of being led by Cheryl Hodgkins and Williams here at UCT. It's funded by the IDOC and other funders. And it's a global South project. And part of that project includes surveys in South America, in three countries in Africa, as well as several countries in Southeast Asia. And I know that for a fact, we would be interested in talking to the consortium around how we could work together. And we'd be very happy to have a session where we can chat to you about sharing our survey questions so you can have a look at those. So, we're very happy to work with you in this regard. Okay, that's great. So, I'm sure that others are thinking about institutions, organizations, and surveys that they know of. I think we'll wait for more comments later at the end of the meeting then. So, that takes us to the demo of the Open Education Professional Directory. So, the directory began offering the service early this month. And this is what it looks like. You can browse through by field of expertise or region. And to the right is browsing by region. Or you can look up an individual. Now, of the four categories for expertise, you can go into more specific categories. And the whole time, you see the green button that says Add Yourself. So, if you have not added yourself, if you have not registered yourself in this directory, please do so in the new feature. We would love to add you on the directory. Now, we pulled up one individual, our own Igor Let's Go. Let's see what the directory shows about Igor. So, you see that general fact like institution, location, the contact points, language issues, and areas of expertise. Now, I would like to ask you to help us improve the directory. So, please use it and let us know how you use it. And send us comments on its usefulness to you. And if your contact is through your listing, please let us know the reason for contact. We don't have to know about all the specifics. We just have to know who's contacting for what reason. So, was it for consultancy? Was it for collaborative projects? That's the kind of feedback we'd love to get from you. And also, other general feedback and suggestions. They can all be directed to directory at OdeyConstortion.org. Any questions on the directory? Have you all used it? Thank you, Marianne. Okay, that's great. Thank you. Oh, you're adding yourself. Okay, great. Yeah, it would be great to see everybody here. That's just a great resource for everybody to have. Thank you. All right, then let's move on to the next item on the agenda, which is the open loop update. Okay, so you saw this screen from Professor Lee's presentation. We now have three courses open for registration under the umbrella of OECX. There's a course from National Southern University, University of Cape Town, and Tufts University. And we do think that this is a great benefit to all our member institutions and their key points for participation. Now, the institution has to be a member of the OEC, and the MOOC must be built from existing open content. But of course, it can be enhanced to become more MOOC-friendly. There's no cost for members to participate. The resources need to be allocated to develop and facilitate the MOOC. Now, some of you may have seen this during the June meeting. There are some options for OECX MOOCs. MOOCs can be offered in any language, if you're doing an OECX, and the length can range from two weeks to 15 weeks, although we do encourage shorter ones. The MOOCs can be facilitated or self-paced, and you can work out details to offer certificates with an X. A series can be offered from one institution or between institutions, and we would love to see more creativity with pedagogy, whether it be in remixing content or team teaching or co-offering or sequencing options. So we would love to encourage everyone to participate in this, in our open MOOC project, and just add a little bit of creativity to the teaching and learning process. So we're able to offer more courses to start any time in 2015 now, if you're interested in offering an open MOOC for OECX, please contact any staff member. We'll have webinars on designing MOOCs with OER in early 2015. So, do you have any questions about the open MOOC initiative? We have Willem in the meeting room right now, and it's extremely helpful with the open MOOC project, and he's also an expert in designing MOOCs. So if you have any questions, we can talk about it at the end of the meeting today, or you can just choose the questions right now. We'll wait for Professor Lee's question before we move on to the next item. Will there be more open MOOCs from OECX? Are you talking about more, in more disciplines? Because you are, you participated in the pilot project where the disciplines were kind of limited. Right, right. So we'll be accepting, we'll be, we plan to post more courses in all sorts of disciplines. There is not going to be a limit on what courses we can offer. Right, thank you. Okay, then let's move on to the next item on your agenda, which is Open Education Week 2016. So, we now have a landing page at openeducationweek.org. Please do download materials from here to put them on your institutional website, or even your personal blog, and help us promote the event. It's from March 9th to the 13th next year, and we'll have a call for participation in the planning committee very soon as well. You'll hear from us again, but for now it would be great if you can keep spreading the word with the materials from this website. And we have a couple more updates on general consortium stuff, or the things that we're doing. But before we start with that, I would like to invite Mary-Anne to give an update on her VMPASS project. Sure. Hi, everybody. I hope you can hear me well. Yes, okay. Perfect. So, I'm Mary-Anne from the International University of La Rioja. We're based in Spain. I'm really glad to be part of this meeting today, and I'm going to present to you briefly the VMPASS project, which started in October 7th and 13th, one year ago, and so you nearly participated in this project. So, the aim of VMPASS, as you can see in the title, is to increase the inter-industrial recognition of virtual mobility and open education-based courses. We believe that increasing quantity and quality of recognition processes in these areas will create new flexible learning pathways for students inside higher education. We'll allow institutions to increase the scope of their offer by integrating teaching and learning done at other institutions in their curricula. Also, we want to improve resource efficiency within higher education institutions, and hopefully it will lead to an increase in the use and impact of OERs. To achieve these aims, we will build on the results of the OER test initiative, which is a previous project on which VMPASS is based. So, by piloting within a living lab the use of a student health learning passport so to facilitate recognition and mobility. We'll plan a test and create a recognition clearinghouse to support the verification and investigation of learning passports. We'll create a typology of quality systems used on virtual mobility and OER systems so to support the learning passports and recognition clearinghouse. And finally, engage in dialogue with multiple institutions around Europe so we can mainstream the use of the recognition tools created by the project. According to our plan, an institution will use the recognition clearinghouse in the following way. Students ask for recognition of learning from virtual mobility or OER learning experience. The recognition office in the institution checks the student record and the clearinghouse. If the course is already in the clearinghouse, the recognition office can use it, use the data to compare and make a decision on recognition. And if the course is not in the clearinghouse, the recognition office verifies the credentials of the institution and also the content and quality of the course as well as the forms of assessment and then will make the decision on the recognition. And all of this data will be integrated in the clearinghouse so to help all their institutions with their recognition decisions. So you near our university as partner of the project and 100% online university had the opportunity to test the learning passport to support a new approach at our university. It consists in recognizing a MOOC as part of a specific subject of an official master's degree at uni. So this way, students will have the option to take this MOOC and get a number of ECTS when achieving it. A number of higher education institutions that we contacted within the project will do the same and try the learning passport within a living lab which will be launched at the end of this month. Here are the different partners of the project all the European partners and for further information you can take a look at the website or contact us through the project email. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for the wonderful update on the project. Does anybody have a question? Vee and Pat. So it would be really interesting to see how open sourceware from Taiwan can have more weight on their certificates and it would be great to see how the learning pathways can have more OERs turning into credentials or accredited sources. I hope to talk more on that. Okay, so I don't know if you've seen this through social media or in the email but the Open Education Global Conference 2015 from April 22nd to 24th in the beautiful town of St. Albert, Canada so the conference website is mailup at conference.oldyconsortium.org call for papers open now and submission deadline is the 30th of November so I suggest that you make plans to submit very soon and now we have an agreement with which is another MOOC platform to ask Mary Lou to elaborate a little more on this. Mary Lou, would that be okay? Hi everybody, I'll talk quickly because I realize we're running out of time. So EdCast is a provider that will host MOOCs so it's a MOOC hosting service. They actually have a version of Open edX to which they've added a number of interesting features and several very good mobile features for mobile phones and they are interested in having more MOOCs being hosted on their Open edX instance. They will provide full technical support and full support for helping to offer this. They will normally charge $5,000 US to host a MOOC. They will provide full control over everything you want to do with your MOOC including if you wanted to offer certificates or paid tutoring or some other type of paid service. All of those revenues would come back to you. With our agreement, the cost is reduced for Open edX consortium members. It would be $3,750 instead of $5,000 for hosting. So if you are interested in having a hosted MOOC service that allows you a lot more customization than other options currently do, this is something that we've entered into and all you need to do when you talk with them is let them know you're an OEC member and you'll get the discount. Okay, great. So I guess some more options are better. Alright. So the last thing you wanted to update you on was the committee. If you could see, go to this URL and go through the list of committees. So in June we promised you that we would have the charges for each committee and have all the committees formed somewhat. For the most of the committees that you see on the list, we now have the chair, the board liaison, the staff person in charge of supporting the committee, et cetera. If you signed up in June, you will hear from us again on how you can participate and for calls for individual committees. Now, do you have any questions on any of the updates? Alright. This is just to the hour that was promised to us. But if you have any questions or comments of any of the topics that was covered today, this was your chance. Okay, the open call to post early global 2016 is also if you are interested in having your institution post our global conference, do go to the wrong button. Splenda, poke, poke. Alright, so do check out the URL and see if your institution is interested in the other comment questions. Okay, then we'll finish here. We will have the recordings ready available for you so that you can listen to the presenters again. We'll also email you on where you can access these slide videos and other questions that were raised during the meeting today. Thank you all for joining us today.