 Welcome all to the dynamic coalition webinar on sustainability models of OER. Thank you all for being here. I'm giving the floor to my colleague Aishatu for a very brief presentation of the OER recommendation and then we will continue with our distinguished speakers. Please Aishatu, the floor is for you. Thank you Eleni for giving me the floor. I will make a short presentation about the UNESCO OER recommendation. I will do my presentation in French. So I shall briefly go over UNESCO's recommendation on OER but let us first see what a recommendation is. A recommendation is one of the main standard setting instruments of UNESCO. It is the instrument through which UNESCO is going to indicate a set of standards to member states and then those member states are to report periodically on the principles and standards in the recommendation. The recommendation, this one in particular, will be relatively flexible and will be able to adapt to constant technological progress. UNESCO does not have hundreds of recommendations. There are dozens of UNESCO recommendations just to give you an idea. From 1956 to today the organization has adopted only 35 recommendations and since the year 2000 there have been seven. So let's look at things more closely regarding OER. Recommendation was adopted in 2019 giving definitions of OER and definitions of open licenses since open licenses are contained in the definition of OER. So these OERs are materials for learning teaching research in the public domain or protected by copyright and published under open license authorizing consultation reuse and repurpose and adaptation and redistribution free of charge for others. An open license is a license which respects intellectual property rights of the holder but also gives the public the right to consult, reuse or repurpose the material and to adapt educational material. The recommendation also gives a list of stakeholders and it also clearly defines objectives. So the objectives there are five of these. First of all the capacity building for creation, access, use, adaptation and redistribution of OER. The second objective is to develop support policies and then the third is to guarantee inclusive and equitable access and the fourth which will be of particular interest today is to develop sustainability models. There's a fifth objective regarding facilitation of international cooperation. In 2020 there was the dynamic coalition which was set up in order to support the implementation of the UNESCO recommendation and also to enhance the sharing and to create synergies around the recommendation. So the areas of action of the recommendation that is what you see on this next slide. So if you look at number four which is in a way central to this webinar let us focus on this. So this is quite close to the five objectives I was mentioning earlier and here you have number four to develop sustainability models. So key messages were drafted which are measures and actions to be taken by member states or which can serve as inspiration for them regarding first sustainability models for OER. Here we have revised policies and regulations in terms of procurement, a widening simplification of the procurement of goods and services, creation, property, translation, adaptation, preservation, archiving etc. And then we have the strengthening and capacity building. Then the catalyst for sustainability models so through financing, traditional financing and non-traditional mechanisms to mobilize resources for the acquisition of OER. It also refers to the promotion and raising of institutions in countries of other models of creation added value through OER, stressing participation. Also a call for innovation and common courses also support to linguistic translation of open licenses and the creation of mechanisms for the implementation and the use of OER and optimization of budgets and existing funds. So this covers a lot, quite a few actions and measures which have to be implemented by the member states. But we only have an hour so we won't be able to go into every detail but through the presentations that are going to begin we'll be focusing on the most important points in order to give some idea of the sustainability mechanisms, funding and also the sustainability models for OER in higher education. So now I should like to turn to our distinguished panelists so we shall give the floor to our first speaker, Mr. Amil. It's a pleasure to be here, thank you for the invitation to my colleagues at UNESCO and for spearheading this important initiative in the dynamic coalition and trying to get us moving forward with the very valuable goals of the UNESCO recommendation from 2019. I have a short presentation about 10 minutes to get the ground, set the ground and the discussion a bit on economic models and sustainability factors for OER. I basically divided this into two, I think which are two fairly common ways of setting up this discussion around sustainability when we're talking particularly about economic models for OER. The first one is a commercial and if we could move to that slide please. It is a commercial aspect of OER and what I tried to do is to use, I think we have had a few publications that have dealt specifically with the idea of looking at these factors, these possibilities of engaging in sustainable economic models for OER over the years and I think we've had some convergence over time into what kind of commercial models have been tried, experimented with and which ones have been successful in maintaining a lot of initiatives. I'll go very quickly through these and I've indicated a number of examples on the right and these slides will be available later for those that can't find these initiatives just by searching but I just wanted to give you a sense of some of the initiatives that actually exist that have been using these models and so if you look at the creator pays model which is the idea that whoever is furnishing the either the book or the music or whatever it may be will pay to make this resource available. You can look at a music example from Jamendo which is a music platform that's been fairly successful where the creator pays to have their content there or a portion of their profits to the platform to have them available but you can look and I just chose two initiatives. You can look at publishers, book publishers that have been doing this very successfully for a very long time. These are two small publishers from Brazil, Filos and Pimenta but I just wanted to give you a sense you know African Mines is another one that comes to mind. There are a bunch of other initiatives that have been working like this for a very long time and in this in this model the creator will pay whatever fee is necessary to make the product become available and it can be available with an open license. There's a very strong model around commercial use and I think one of the most successful ones that I that I think people don't really quite know about is film music.io. A lot of their resources are available as YouTube tracks and the way film music.io works is that they license their tracks which are really great quality. License them openly with a cc by license but if you're going to make commercial use of them or if you want to donate you can do so and it's been very sustainable. You can pay for extra features and I just decided to use an example of a software here but it's a software that we use in education quite a bit. The productivity software like Holy Office which is a substitute for an improvement to other initiatives like the office suits that you might be regularly using and depending on whether you pay for for for a monthly fee or an installment or a user per head you know per user you will get extra features and so the base of the software is open it has some limitations if you pay you get a little bit more but the base of the software the code itself is free the the system itself is free and open. You can get commercial models that are based on customization this is a model that's incredibly successfully used and free and an open software and it happens in an editorial in publications as well so you might get a base text or book or a course and you can have people pay for customization so whether it's just to put the logo of the institution or a school or a university but they might pay also to have certain features that they need or plugins that must be installed or content that needs to be translated and that's a very successful model that's been around for a very long time. You can also pay for extra services and that has been consolidated as a model for OER big OER platform so Lumen and Coursera are good examples of this where a lot of content in the case of Lumen I believe all content but Coursera some content is available openly and you can pay either for data analytics or you can pay for a certification and that that model has been also around for quite a long time. Finally advertising is one there is there's a lot of I think people are put off by the idea of advertising and educational content as they should be and so I don't have a very good example but I decided to stretch it a little bit and look at what OpenSpotify does because Spotify is a platform for content and if you look at podcasts that are streamed through Spotify a lot of them or a few of them have open licenses and so OpenSpotify supports itself in partially through advertising you can qualify that some of these some of this content that's available openly elsewhere is distributed through OpenSpotify with an open license and is generating revenue through advertising. It is a model that I think in our next talk we're going to have some ideas of this but I think it's a model that people are generally not fond of for good reasons. Finally direct sale is a model that many publishers started working in the beginning and it was unsuccessful for many of them but I decided to pick one example of an author who's from Spain and she has an incredible manifesto around publishing openly and she publishes her books which are incredibly high quality and available all over the world that have been translated in many places. The books are available with an open license and you pay for the print version which is a model that has shown to be unsuccessful to many large publishers but sustains itself through small publications this is just one example there are many others. So this is just a general overview of what the generally commercial space has been done to provide some financial sustainability for these services. If we can move on we can just move two slides over we'll talk a bit about what I'm calling here reciprocity models and reciprocity models are a bit different and that's a generic word for a lot of the things that are going to be here but we find a lot of other ways to sustain repositories which are not necessarily based on on advertising or commercial use and one of them is obviously subscription I mean paying a monthly fee for something so you know flat world knowledge moved in that direction from a previous model if you look at LeMonde and LeMonde diplomatique here in Brazil and in other places you you have a newspaper that's licensed openly but you pay for it through subscription you support it through subscription and the user base then you know the large user base sustains the publication but it's available to everyone so there's a model here where it's not necessarily getting the largest amount of people to subscribe or to pay and only they get the benefit but the sustainable base of continuous subscription of paying users that will allow the the publication or the content to be available to other people there's obviously the donation model and you can look at a number of successful platforms that have sustained themselves through large donations both from foundations and government but also small donations they're open to get small donations and open stacks and is a good example on FET which has I call it FET it's in English it's P-H-P-T but we it has a very long track record of providing quality content openly for physics math and so forth online a crowdfunding has has been a really great example for for small publications and educational material as well you know for production of videos of educational content documentaries Catarzy is a platform for for crowdfunding in brazil but there are many others around the world every country has a bunch of them that are out allowing for crowdfunding we've had very successful examples of people willing to fund educational content children's books platforms documentaries through crowdfunding and it's a it's a when you when you found that kind of niche it's very easy to keep it going another one is crowd sourcing is this idea more aligned with with free and open software where you get people to contribute so again I use only offices as an example but it could really apply to almost any free and open source initiative is this idea that you get people to contribute and participate in the process of creating content and joining you know there are other examples in the OER landscape as well finally one that we don't really talk about much because it seems self-sustainable but it isn't it's public funding you know we have we have done surveys from countries in South America Latin America and we know that public initiatives die very often I mean they don't sustain themselves very often but it's it's a when they do last it's it's a very viable funding method for large very large nationwide or regional repositories and so we've had some successful initiatives around the world and keeping the public repositories open and available they mutate and they change but public funding continues to be at least in our region of the world a major source of of availability of content and repositories finally partnerships establishing partnerships with existing players and creating a consortium is a really good way to do this so the archive dot org does this with you know libraries and people that have content that they want to share online european is a great consortium example and finally working through recognition it doesn't seem like it's an economic model but putting your content for online in some examples you can look at it as working through to get you know a public display or participation in a community or to just get recognition for the work that you do these are important I think they're important ways to look at the more economic side of this and just very quickly to finish I'd just like to just bring on the next slide some other considerations that we've we've been unearthing here doing some literature reviews on sustainability trying to get a sense of what other factors are involved beyond the idea of just financial sustainability and if you can move to the next slide that I appreciate it so we know that you know financing and whatever in arrangement we come up with is incredibly important to keep particularly repositories open but even the creation and the sharing of OER but there there are a number of other factors that are that I just wanted to share with you first to think together is this idea that you know particularly repositories and places that people should visit should have this idea of collective values of promoting the values of openness provide some support for people to produce and share and many repositories and sites do this so OER Commons for example does this very well open stacks does it as well incentives for engagement are particularly important we know this from any scenario that we work on OER incentives are incredibly important to sustain and to have always have content for people to produce content quality criteria are important not only for OER but for any content and so having clear evaluation criteria and mechanisms that's always been an important thing so people will look at the repository of the content expecting it to be high quality and we'll come back for it and we'll contribute to it a focus on openness and OER we have a lot of hybrid solutions we have a lot of repositories and services that are not uniquely open and so going back to the idea of values when people people are more likely I think to contribute to something that's very open in principle rather than something that's hybrid that mixes content that's open and is not providing mechanisms for auto-organization a community to build you know people to manage themselves in a community is an important feature having a clear policy and this has a connection with everything else we've mentioned before I mean making sure that people know what exactly this service is supposed to do and whether it really ascribes the principles of openness investing in OER development which we know is incredibly difficult to do but investing and not only just providing the service or having a repository to provide this content but investing in production is incredibly important and finally having some sort of support for teacher professional development uptake you can provide the best content possible but nobody will use it if they don't really know how to if you don't have opportunities for people to learn how to use it there are many more these are just some that have come up in recent literature reviews that we've done and I just wanted to put those out there as a way to dialogue beyond the idea of just financial sustainability so this was meant as a brief sort of introduction you know spreading out all of these ideas so that we can continue the discussion thank you very much again for the opportunity and I look forward to the continuing conversation thank you very much for this excellent presentation we are now moving to our next speaker who is Mr. Ahmed Tilly welcome to you Mr. Tilly is co-director of the OER lab at the Smart Learning Institute of Beijing Normal University and he will speak about insight and evolution of OER sustainability models based on on the result on offer study over to you thank you so much for the invitation good morning good afternoon and good evening everyone so today we will be talking about a very important topic that has been highlighted by UNESCO in their recommendation in 2019 which is about sustainability models so actually our presentation will be a continuity of Dr. Amir our colleague has presented which is about the type of financial models that has been reported and in this context we will be talking about insights from both the literature and the experts so we will start by the basic definition of OER I think everyone is familiar with which is OER our learning teaching and research materials which has been or which have been published in the public domain under an open license and here I would like to clarify one misunderstanding of OER which is is not like free pizza what do we mean by that means like people think that if something is free they can use it the way they want but actually it's not how OER works so basically for OER we need to respect the open license under which an OER is presented so that's why taking into consideration the open license is very important when we are talking about open educational resources and especially for sustainability models what's the challenge of OER as we all know that OER like we said is free is free of charge however for universities or for schools when they provide OER they need to pay for too many things including for instance infrastructures designers teachers etc so the question is how can they earn money if they need to provide OER for free so this is like one of the challenges that has been reported with OER we can like take one one example which is about John Mitchell so John Mitchell is the overseas Stanford universities and he mentioned due to the sustainability of open courses and OER Stanford may turn away from offering free online courses and here we can see the importance of coming up with sustainability solutions and financial solutions which could help providers to earn money but at the same time respect the definition of OER and providing resources for free as we all know UNESCO at the end of 2019 has published the OER recommendations which focuses on five areas or like five objectives and one of these objectives is OER sustainability and one of the sub-objectives is as you can see the first one is about reviewing current provisions for current policies and regulations to expand and simplify the process of creating OER etc so this is for the first sub-goal which is related to OER sustainability so the second one is about catalyzing sustainability models not only through traditional funding sources but also through non-traditional sources by mobilizing like different partnership networking etc so in this context and in line with UNESCO recommendations and to fulfill at least those two sub-goals we have focused on developing this study so this study focuses on the use of triangulation method what do we mean by the triangulation method the triangulation method means using different sources to collect one specific information about a particular area and of course in this study we will be focusing about sustainability models so first in line with UNESCO sustainability sub-goal one which is about reviewing like sustainability models and policies etc we have conducted a systematic literature review and we will see we have obtained eight OER sustainability models then in order to catalyze sustainability models what do we mean by this means we all know that technology has created new opportunities for different sustainability models maybe they were not they did not exist let's say 10 years ago or long ago so in this way in order to further catalyze OER sustainability models we have also involved experts and we have used the DeFi method in order to validate the sustainability models the first process about the systematic review we have our research questions to answers so these research questions are mainly in line with UNESCO goals and sub-goals about what are the sustainability models that have been presented in the research related to OER and then we will be using different search keywords and databases third we will be using inclusion and exclusion criteria and at the end we will talk about paper quality to search for different sustainability models in the literature first we have used different keywords such as open education open educational resources open educational practices open license open access so here we have used different synonyms for open education or OER and then for models we have also used different synonyms such as sustainability models funding models business model financial models so we have combined those terms in order to conduct a systematic and a comprehensive review and identify as much OER sustainability models as possible and we have used different databases such as Science Direct Taylor and Francis IEEE etc then so we have used these keywords and we have obtained a lot of studies then to filter these studies we have used what we call inclusion and exclusion criteria for instance we have mainly focused on papers in English we have focused on papers which gave enough details about OER sustainability models and one of the things that that we would like sorry for that that we would like to point out for it is the exclusion of MOOCs so as you can see in the exclusion criteria we have excluded MOOCs why you have excluded MOOCs because now at least there are a lot of tension in the literature related to MOOCs are they OER or not are they in line with the definition of OER or not this is one two for MOOCs they have different sustainability models which could be similar or also quite different than OER sustainability models so in order to stay out of this type of confusion so we have excluded any sustainability models which which have been talking about MOOCs and at the end we obtained so this thematic review we have obtained eight OER sustainability models so the first one is institutional model the second one is governmental model endowment model membership model donation model freemium model creator pay model and sponsorship so this is for the first part of our study so we have conducted a systematic review with specific keywords and with specific inclusion and exclusion criteria and we have identified from the literature these eight models but like we said these eight models are not enough now we will move to the second stage where we will be talking with the experts and to validate it so in this context we have chosen carefully experts based on their profile which should include OER as their research interest good publication record in this area and relevant position in active OER organizations and as a result we have obtained 30 experts who are OER UNESCO chairs in several countries editors of OER journals professors and the researchers working on OER in several leading organizations such as UNESCO called ICD and Alexa actually some of our colleagues are also here today for the experts we asked them first do you agree or disagree with those eight models that we have identified from the literature this is one two we have asked them do you have any other models maybe which have not mentioned in the literature but these models could also be efficient in maintaining the sustainability of creating OER and third we asked them to rate the maturity of each model so for instance we can see like some of the examples that were given by our experts so for instance in the previous classification where governmental and institutional models were provided separately most experts highlighted that many universities are having many governmental funding so at the end the government is still responsible on both these models therefore separating them is not an accurate way so here our experts suggested that we combine both governmental and institutional models because most of the money coming from institution are basically coming from the government especially when we are talking about public schools then also another example from the inputs given by our experts is they are suggested by donation and endowment models should be merged together as they have the same goal so here as you can see that they have given us several inputs and based on these inputs we have revised our sustainability models and we have come up with a new taxonomy at the end we have obtained 10 OER sustainability models that have been validated by our experts the first one is through internal funding means the university covers the cost of creating delivering and disseminating OER as part of of each annual budget in line with its mentioned mandate means that the the university will be focusing on creating and disseminating OER from their budget the second model is by practice participating in OER networks so here the university pays to be part of a larger consortium that handles the university OER related activities such as the creation delivery and dissemination of OER and here one famous example is OERU consortium the third model is through public funding so OER are funded through international national or local public funding typically through grants and funded projects one is through endowment donations so here OER could be supported by providing charities or collected through private donations or crowdfunding the fifth one is through sponsorship or advertisement so means we could give the resources for free but from time to time we will promote or advertise for something in return the sixth one is about providing services to learners means we provide them the resources for free but at the same time we can ask them for some services and they need to pay for it for instance I could give you the learning materials for free as OER but in return for instance if you want to get your certificate at the end of the course you need to pay for it so here we are respecting the definition and the concept of OER but we provide some paid services so if you want to use services you need to pay for them also the seventh one is about offering learning related data to companies so here the cost of OER is addressed by selling data and analytics about learning activities so but then we have the by producing OER on demand means if someone asks for OER then we will do it for them and they need to pay us ninth by relying on OER authors means the authors of OER will take the responsibility of creating OER and they will take into consideration everything including their time like payment and everything and finally community based model so then the university relies on community whose members bear the cost of producing OER as a combination of any of the previous models so as you can see here we have obtained 10 different models by the experts some of them are already mentioned in our literature review and others are newly mentioned by our experts and in the next slide we can see like when we ask them to rate the maturity of these sustainability models so as you can see here we ask them would you please like rate the maturity of each model and we can see that the first model is through public funding which is the most common model that has been used or implemented by most universities each which is sustainability through public funding and interestingly we can see that the last model which is the least used model is by offering learning related data to companies and this is totally understandable because here we are talking about privacy and despite that this model is used we can see some examples for each model so despite that the last model is used but a lot of experts raised some concerns about like privacy of students and it's not quite good like to sell like their data or their like learning analytics performance to other companies so here we can see that the classification of experts have been reported by them and you can see like from the topest model to the least model and this study has led to a publication so this publication was in a journal and also we have a full report published on our smart learning institute university later on I could copy paste the link in chat for you in case you want to have it and thank you so much for for your attention and if you have any questions please let me know thank you so much thank you very much for sharing all this relevant information on evolution of OER sustainability models last but not least speaker will be mrs. Tillie Jensen we are very pleased to have you here mrs. Jensen is assistant professor in accounting at Atabaska University and expert in digital learning technologies and she will be talking about high education perspectives in in some types for the production and use of open educational resources mrs. Jensen you have the floor thank you very much for inviting me to to speak and thank you to the other speakers for their very interesting presentations before we begin I would like to very briefly provide an introduction to my teaching philosophy and OER background in the courses I teach namely accounting peer reviewed resources are key to optimizing a student's educational experience I believe I have an ethical responsibility to remove financial barriers associated with those key learning resources based on the mission of Atabaska University and I personally have the power to do so by creating OER textbooks which I've done to date in the three courses I am responsible for cost savings of more than 2.8 million dollars have been realized by using OER textbooks so it makes me wonder if one person can achieve a 2.8 million dollar cost saving what can all of the or the majority of faculty members across the globe achieve and enhance accessibility for students so what I am going to talk briefly about is my experience and encouraging the production of OERs and the use of OERs and my belief that we need a paradigm shift in terms of the production of OERs a primary barrier based on my experience is finding champions OER champions at the faculty level it is difficult to obtain workload relief creating a a comprehensive OER is a mammoth task and finding someone who is passionate about teaching and learning in their subject area someone who believes wholeheartedly in removing financial barriers is is difficult at our institution in our faculty we are awarded with points we have to keep a tally sheet um based on our intellectual outputs namely publishing in high-ranking journals and the production of OERs is has only recently been valued with 30 points so 40 points for the publishing in a high ranking journal 30 points for an OER but it's a one-time point system so you're not awarded points many points for updating those OERs so it's there the incentive needs to be there the lesson learned is that creating an OER for a a particular subject requires a team of champions rather than just one champion because of the workload involved in producing that by involving people across multiple institutions the adoption rate I believe would be enhanced significantly the buy-in would be there if people are involved the next barrier is publishers pay authors to write textbooks I was a an author with a publisher in North America and I left that role because I found that we were hurting students hurting accessibility so I began managing the creation of OERs in my my field we need executive support for our champions so that they can create those OER resources we were able to get a very large grant from an accounting body in the province where I reside and that allowed us to attract champions you need to partner with corporate sponsors we were able to develop a significant partnership with lyrics learning Inc who provides us with a digital assessment tool and has integrated our OER within that digital platform so it's been very successful our student reviews are outstanding and students have asked actually asked for more of these types of resources the lesson learned here is that we need to reward and recognize our champions this is not done it may seem trivial but I believe that this is one of the better ways to inform the university community as well as the public about the importance of OERs I think it is possible to negotiate that a percent of the cost savings realized by adopting OERs go to the authors for research and study I think that's important that there be financial rewards to incentivize this was mentioned by both of the other speakers credibility of the OER textbook it is essential that these resources are peer reviewed and that it is integrated throughout the production process of that that resource to optimize peer review I think it needs to be done by a team so that it can be advertised that a particular resource is of a quality nature so again a barrier to encouraging the use of OERs is finding champions those individuals who are very passionate about the use of OERs and enhancing accessibility for our students across the globe to remove that barrier again we need to ensure that faculty are rewarded in some way for using OERs and in my particular faculty there is no reward system for the use of OERs and I think by doing that we would incentivize more faculty members to look at and adopt the use of OERs it is critical to have support from the top at the post-secondary institution you need a champion at that level as well so that people are encouraged and continually reminded that this is part of the institution's mission the lesson learned again you need to celebrate your champions who are the individuals using OERs what is the data of indicating how many are using it the cost savings academic freedom is a barrier often my colleagues when I speak to them about the availability and the potential use of OER resources they tell me it is their right to choose what they want and nobody has the right to intervene in the choice of their resources so that is a huge challenge and the question for me is should executive require OERs when credible peer reviewed resources are actually available the lesson learned and this is my personal perspective please is this a concern over academic freedom or is it resistance to change or a bit of both and I think it is resistance to change it is hard for people to change from a publisher provided textbook very costly and often not a consideration to faculty it is difficult for them to change to an OER resource so we need to educate and show people the OER availability credibility of OER textbooks I can't emphasize this enough this is what I continually hear from my colleagues is that OER resources are not credible they are not of a quality nature part of this is being pushed by publishers publishers have a vested interest in ensuring that faculty do not move to OER it's it would ultimately be their their death if all faculty members chose OER so it is in their interest to discredit OER and that's unfortunate so we need to publish a list of who reviewed OER as well as who has used and uses OER so transparency is is key and and advertising that as much as we possibly can again resistance to change it's related to the academic freedom should executive require the use of OER and I know there are institutions in the United States where the executive has said that part of their mission is to increase the use of OER across the institution in this year we will use 20 percent OER next year we'll try to move to 25 percent 30 percent etc so what's needed here is a global paradigm shift to legitimize OER and it has to be both top down and bottom up so in in summary the key to produce and use OERs we need champions at both the faculty and executive level those champions have to be incentivized in some way financially with workload reduction there are different incentives that work for different individuals as we all know we have found that partnerships are credit critical for my field we partnered with accounting professional accounting organizations as well as corporate sponsors it is expensive to create quality OER resources and at at the Basque University as has already been stated by the two previous speakers part of that the OER production was funded by the institution part by the partners we also need a paradigm shift we need people to believe in the necessity of OERs and the value and credibility of OERs if you have any questions please contact me and I would also like to indicate that we're doing a research project on a massive open online course in introductory financial accounting we have institutional support on this project we have corporate partner lyrics learning Inc and the course will be provided free to all students it's based on international financial reporting standards so should be acceptable globally for those trees who follow international financial reporting standards and we will be reporting the results of this research project within one year but I'm very excited about this it's opening very soon and I think it's a great example of a and potentially successful OER thank you very much for your time thank you mrs. Jensen for this very inspiring intervention thank you to all speakers as we come to the Q&A session of this webinar I'm going to hand over to my colleague Eleni who will take care of passing on the main question we received throughout the presentation Eleni the floor is yours thank you Eshatu so the first question comes from Tarek Benyusev who is asking professor clearly that the OER have a cost and can we talk about OER being available only for high-income countries I'm not quite sure what he meant by that but I would like to say at least like for OER it's true we give it for free but the problem is or the challenge is we need to pay for the infrastructure for instance like the online servers for instance the internet for instance like also we need to pay for designers to design like the repository or like the learning system or whatever also we need to pay for instance for teachers or champions to develop these OER so basically yes we need to pay a lot of money but at the same time we still need to give it for free for our learners or users so this is the big challenge the challenge is how can we maintain those costs but we don't ask users or learners to pay for us so that's why we are now thinking about how to develop OER in a very efficient way and sustainable way by keeping or by respecting the OER definition and concept but at the same time we still get a revenue somehow through these models at least from my perspective which would be helpful to maintain OER thank you professor if I understand him correctly there is a second question regarding incentives and policies both from Huing, Tran, Huy and Val Mendez so what policies could we suggest to governments to eliminate obstacles and generate scalable OER initiatives and how can we support local education ecosystems, local content producers to generate OER instead of proprietary education resources so that that can be answered by all speakers if someone wants to take the floor I'll mention policies because we've done a lot of work with policies at all levels of the government and I think the the idea of working top down and bottom up has always been a mainstream issue for OER work and policy and and getting people on board I think the first issue which is almost sort of a common sense and it's part of the OER recommendation is that publicly funded resources need to be available to the public and so the the issue of openness in this sense is it's a it's a battle that's easier to win when we try to convince people small spectrums of economic of the economic spectrum that public resources need to be available to the public it's it's kind of an easy win it's not easy to get done but it's an easy argument to make the other issue which I think our colleague just mentioned in the end was we're still quite unbalanced in terms of awareness I mean we we a couple of years back we're a little a little bit more we had this general sense that awareness was not a problem anymore and people are kind of aware what OER is and we can move on to getting them the conditions to produce and share but we're still very far from having awareness of what OER is of course what copyright is and copyright law people are very unaware of this and all of us I think that work with OER know this from day-to-day interactions and making more people aware that can become these kinds of champions and participate in this work together I think is the is the bottom-up thing that that still needs to be done quite often. Thank you, thank you, Ted. Professor Jenschen do you have anything to add? I agree with my colleague that education is of faculty and post-secondary institution executive is key here and as I said we need a paradigm shift and and I hate to use this example but the pandemic actually legitimized online learning because it had to happen that was the only way for post-secondaries to continue and and we need some global event to shift that the paradigm for OER in the same way as the pandemic shifted the paradigm for online learning so I don't wish for another pandemic but we need something to to demonstrate to people that the necessity the absolute necessity of of OER. Thank you. Thank you. So another question for Professor Tritley about his publication if he the models he discussed have been piloted or field tried in any of the countries? Thank you. Actually we have started of course with slow steps and small steps so we have started with our like university context by discussing like the possibilities of having bonuses and getting promoted based on OER publications because as we all know that most of the university systems are based on SSCI and SCI papers so now we are trying like to talk with them in order to include OER and open access publications as one of the criterias to get promoted also for some bonuses if you create your courses as OER and publish them online but also I would like to point out that those systems come up also with some challenges for instance if you are talking about like promotion or advertisement I know some of my colleagues are like from the educational technology background and now if you are talking about like advertising for something some of the experts or like some of the pedagogues also mentioned that maybe those advertisement could disturb the learning the learning process when students are taken an online course for instance so here even the way of implementing those models require us a lot of like careful design and a lot of investigation in advance before we start implementing them so we are definitely we definitely start working on couple of these models for instance with Alexa they have the OER hub Alexa OER hub and now we are working with them to create some champions in the Arab region and how they can use OER in 22 Arab countries so as we said we started slow and step by step but definitely a lot of challenges come with those models thank you so much. Thank you another question coming from Paul West about license there is a risk of license trolls abusing users because of clauses that may be in the legal fine print will UNESCO help to analyze and explain the consequences of custom written open licenses does anyone have a reply on that? I can take that question if you like hello yes please. Yes part of the work of the on the OER recommendation looks at licenses so what we are able to do is to provide links to experts and worldwide who can find you can respond to these issues and also just to say that one of the points of the sustainability in the recommendation is about the the faithful translation of OER licenses into different languages because that's another issue that comes up not just the fine print but the lost in translation or mistranslation or issues such as that so this is an issue that is part of the work being done in the framework of the recommendation. Thank you thank you Jaina would any of the speakers like to react? I'll say something just because I think we've we've we've done a really good job in championing around creative commons licenses as part of the the OER ecosystem and I think that that solves a lot of these problems in terms of standardizing licenses but we also have to recognize that other other possibilities exist and that creative common licenses don't necessarily address all the needs of every government and every institution. We've had discussions with governments that simply don't want to use that kind of license and they don't see it as appropriate for them and so I think that we're going to we're going to eventually have to face discussing the appropriateness of these licenses and whether they in what context do they fit and where they don't and where they don't we'll have to find other solutions. Thank you thank you all for your time on this we really appreciate it and all the speakers for the thought-provoking presentations we will be back in September with a new series of webinars many many events to come and we are looking forward to your participation thank you