 Hello, hello. Hi, everyone. It's our great pleasure to spend some time with you all this morning to give you some insight into who we are and what we do at the Université numérique, the French National Digital University. My name is Caroline Stéphane, I'm based in Strasbourg in Alsace, Eastern France, and my disciplinary focus is foreign languages and humanities. I'm joined by my colleague Jacques Dong from Paris, who is involved with business and economics, and together we lead Université numérique's outreach initiative to the global open education community. Jacques, can you explain the rationale behind our support from the Open Education Global Conference as well as for our membership in the organization? In short, why are we here today? Thank you, Carol. First of all, I would like to say how glad we are to be participating in this great event. I remember expressing my regrets last year that I could not meet our colleagues from Taiwan nor visit the National Palace Museum and its magnificent collections of Chinese art. Today, I regret that we are not actually welcoming our colleagues from around the world in not just yet, but it seems that we probably will do it doing so next May, thanks to Colin Leidera and his team. So we've been members since 2017, representing at first business and economic departments at French universities, and I had the pleasure of meeting several presidents, past presidents, Larry Cooperman, William von Walkenberg, with a special mention for Sophie Tuzet, whose enthusiasm and vision were key to involving us in this community. Since I met Sophie and Igor in Cape Town in March 2017, and even more so since December 2018 when we met Paul at the Open Education Leadership Summit in Paris, we've been fortunate to improve our understanding of the global open education community, its strengths and its great achievements. In addition to our meetings in Cape Town, Delft, North Sea, Paris and Milano, as well as online, we've been given the opportunity to better understand what worlds of knowledge and experience, each of these great personalities brings to the global community. And we'd like to thank you so much for the insight you have provided with us with since that time. At the same time, we are also fortunate to benefit from an increasingly confident support from the French Ministry of Higher Education, with Anne-Sophie Barthes, its Director General for Higher Education, her senior advisors, Luc Messou and Mehdi Garzala, as well as from the conference or university presence. Finally, we're also very glad that we have a better understanding from our member universities, as well as a partner from Africa, from UNESCO and ICBE, or what we can bring and share with our colleagues outside France. So I believe the past four and nearly five years have allowed us to build a solid foundation grounded in institutional and human understanding. And we are ready to move forward as a sustaining member for open education global to explore how we can cooperate further, both on overarching approaches, as well as on more specific operational collaborations. I think now, Carol, it would be a good time to explain who we are and what we do in order to give more ideas to our viewers about possible areas for cooperation. Yeah, thank you, Jack. Université numérique is first and foremost a meeting place where French universities and elites, they call share their expertise and experience in the field of open education, and receive advice and support when implementing the pedagogical and organizational transformations that digital technology is bringing about. Université numérique federates several discipline areas, business and economics, healthcare and sports, science, engineering, the humanities, sustainable development and technology. While they were organized initially as separate entities, there are no working in close cooperation as Université numérique. The joint operator for the French Ministry for Higher Education Research and Innovation, with the mandate to represent French higher education in international bodies involved in open education. As taken together, we represent over 29,000 open educational resources and a staff close to 40 full time equivalents. I would like to stress the importance of scientific experts expertise. All of our open educational resources are validated by thematic committees, who played a vital role in our organization and operations operations. As Jack mentioned earlier we have extended and strengthened our international partnerships. He has described how our involvement with open education global is evolving. We also have a very strong strategy partnership working with the ICDE and UNESCO and OER in Francophone countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. We are working closely with the OER Foundation on a course dealing with corporate intellectual property rights and licensing. We also have a strong presence as some international conferences online in Berlin and e-learning in Africa, for example. And together with European universities or networks, we have been partnering in European Union funded projects with the most recently a focus on competencies and skills, microcredentials and mutual recognition agreements. Moving on specific projects we are currently involved with. In the past two years, actually starting before the onset of the pandemic, but also as a result of the pandemic, we have been working in four different projects funded by the government that have one thing in common. They are willing and our capacity to enrich our catalogs with OER that can be used by universities in the curriculum of national degrees. They are granular in design, focused on one concept, and no longer that's 30 minutes in student reading time. They are reusable in different contexts, bachelor level or continuing education. And they are based on H5P technology. As mentioned earlier, we have a strong focus on cooperation with Francophone countries in Africa. We are involved in several initiatives. The most important one being the joy of working group on the implementation of the UNESCO OER convention with ministries, universities, sorry, virtual universities, UNESCO, UNESCO national conferences, NGUS and companies. We are adapting to the Francophone context a course offered by the OER foundation to the global community and corporate intellectual property rights and open licensing. And we also contribute to the UNESCO Dakar side initiative, and we have implemented several bilateral projects in Congo, Côte d'Ivoire and Senegal. Jacques will now distribute a number of distinctive characteristics of French higher education on OER contexts that can give a better understanding of our goals and the constraints. Over to you, Alex. Thank you very much, Carol. So just a few words about the French higher education system. It's a dual drug system with both state universities that represent the larger part of the student population, and public or semi public elite grand cycle that are focused more on employment in the corporate world and recruitment for the decision making tears of the civil service. The public university system is more centralized than other countries. We do have a ministry in charge of higher education and the autonomy of university is a fairly recent trend. It started in 2007. At that time salaries and academic and staff will still manage some fully. And today in many universities, it is still the case for buildings and infrastructure. We have mostly national degrees with a curriculum that is approved by the ministry. And we have also a centralized approach to the table track system and the management of careers of academics. On the other hand, academics enjoy a fairly high degree of freedom inside the university. In the given field, we can have a great diversity of academic content between different universities within highly regulated administrative framework. And final characteristic of the French system is that we put as much emphasis on teaching, which is traditional, as well as on learning. This is a very specific state regarding OER landscape in France. She is the second most taught language after English, but it lacks very much behind English Mandarin in the number of open educational resources that are available. Furthermore, the legal context about civil law versus common law. I have a contradiction between the non revocable credit common licenses and also non revocable moral right of authors to withdraw of intellectual work. So there are need there is a need for mutual trust for us in continuing relationship with authors so that they so that we ensure that their content is up to date. The underlying technology that to date, and that he also does not feel the need to restore his work from what is public publicly accessible. We also have no open university because the ministry feels that an open university would compete with existing traditional university in delivering degrees. We have a coexistence of various types of education, and also the focus of the portfolios in state universities is sometimes more about self reflection than about exhibiting competencies and skills to potential employers. Finally, we have probably a blind spot in open textbooks because there is no financial incentive nor nor is there a great need felt by the students to use open textbooks. So this is definitely an area where we can learn from our colleagues across the world. So how does this impact how we can partner with colleagues around the world in the field of all we are that importance of trust as I mentioned earlier in our relationship with open education global, which builds over a period of time, and he's as important at least as at meeting specific objectives. Doing something that can be used by the general public in the general interest, rather than for specifically targeted audiences is also important. The timeline for deployment can be also longer, because they need to achieve a balance or compromise in several areas, political administrative cultural financial. So we have a tendency in France to favor absolute thinking versus operational deployment when I first worked on an EU funded project. My colleagues told me that we in France tended to not work on operational deployment before solving the abstract theoretical problem. That is true. And they also told us that we appeared to like it when the abstract solution is as beautiful as a quick tempo. So this is, these are one of the few things we need to keep in mind the constraints we face when dealing with OERs with French partners. Having said that, I think we share common belief, especially the western east and also the North Atlantic between not which is not so far from the Bay of Viscay and the Chesapeake. We share a strong belief that acting together as individuals and networks of individuals as organizations and networks of organizations and nations as a whole. We can, especially in the field of open education, make the world a better place for learners. Thank you very much and we are open to all the questions you may have. Thank you very much, Paul, Jacques and Cahol. It's really impressive set of activities that you have just articulated during your presentation. And also from our side from open education global side, we are really pleased about these collaborations with you, and we are looking forward to continued collaborations into the future. So I would like to encourage anyone who has some questions to please post them into the chat window or you can just unmute yourself and ask directly. And I would like to actually ask a couple of questions from my side and coming back to the digital thematic universities. I was wondering, I think many participants here might be wondering what kinds of resources have these universities been producing like how many educational resources exist under the auspices of these universities. And if you are perhaps able to share any information about impact metrics of these resources, where are they, where are they being used by whom that will be quite insightful and helpful. And the second question is related to the support that you mentioned of the Jacques of the French Ministry of Higher Education, Innovation and Research. And I think I'd like to hear a bit more about what you mean by support. You mentioned that this, this initiative was launched by the ministry, and it has been supporting this initiative for a number of years. And as we know, part of the one area of the recommendation of the US call your recommendation speaks about creating supportive policies. Now, the way that governments can tackle support for your varies. Some have put in place regulations or legislations, some have opted for more economic instruments providing funding for different initiatives. So that different approaches from different governments, but the fact that the ministry has been sustaining this kind of support for a number of years now. What is the rationale why does the ministry continue supporting this initiative or the number of years. Thank you. Okay, on the first question we have about 29,000 open educational resources at this time. With a very, very in degree of granularity, it can be very short video clips, or they can be full pledge 30 hour courses. In the past years, we have been moving towards more core content that can be aggregated into full 30 hour courses that are aligned with the curriculum of national degrees. And this will make it easier for to speed adoption by universities. And this also is something that African universities ask of us that we have full courses that can, they can then aggregate into a curriculum. Full courses are interesting for in terms of development for teachers, but we have, we now have a requirement for authors that they can be reused by other teachers and aggregated into full courses. Oscar has more insight into how they are used. And I will address the second question. The ministry support has been has varied in intensity over the past 15 years and, and it's only since just before the pandemic that we convinced the ministry that it will be useful to have a global usable repository of indexed content, which is also from a scientific perspective. So, at that time also the universities were engaging into their pedagogical transformation relying on digital technology. So there was a convergence between universities, the ministry and ourselves. And to give you an idea of the level of funding we have, I mentioned that we have 40 full time equivalents they fund about eight to 10 full time equivalents. And we found the additional to membership fees but mostly through projects specific calls that we answer at the European or the national level. Carol, perhaps something about usage. You are more keen on statistics than I am. It depends on the sources. A part are used directly by the students. And the most part is reused by teacher to prescript the resources on the student or the use of the contents for the teaching. I would like to acknowledge the presence of one of our colleagues, Deborah Arnold is involved in many the several European EU European funded project I mentioned and she can perhaps she can also say a few words about addressing the questions that are raised. Deborah. Thank you very much Shaq and very pleased to be here with that with everybody. Just perhaps a few words about the European level projects that that we're involved in we've just completed the one that Carol mentioned thank you very much, called a length for life which was about soft skills and active learning for employability. We recently published a list of 10 key takeaways which are open educational resources in their own right with recommendations and findings from the from the project. I can, in a moment because I'm not very good at multitasking share the link to that in the in the chat with you. And also, we know that the question of micro credentials is a is a hot topic at the moment there are several sessions at a global on that and that this is a plug for Friday. I'll be joining forces with that Lena Patterson and Tannis Morgan for a session, which in Central European summertime will be eight o'clock on Friday. So that's my Friday evening sorted. But obviously, we're flexible in order to connect with our colleagues around the around the world. And with Lena and Tannis we're going to be looking at open futures for micro credentialing. So not so much focusing on the technical aspects of micro credentials is a lot of work being done on that. But really bridging the narrative between open and micro credentialing as a process. So if you're interested in that topic then then do come along and that's related to our work in the echo project at European level, which as Carol said we're focusing on recognition on the the really technical and organizational aspects of what does it take to actually issue a micro credential and what are the benefits to learners organizations and employers. So that's just a brief summary of those activities. And then of course the other projects on open virtual mobility which we continue to build on. So I don't know if it questions about those activities or others but I think the presentation already given by Jack and Carol gives a very, very good picture of the situation in France the specificities and the links with the rest of the activities on a global scale. And in the chat about result reconciling common and civil law in relation to intellectual property. Well, the solution for other is quite simple is to incentivize both financially and also in terms of cooperation the author in order to convince him not to withdraw his work from the public domain. Because he would be, he would need to reimburse us the exploitation rights we have paid for. So, I would say in a more positive way we focus for the goal of updating the content of and keeping the work available to the public. We also want to have a good long lasting relationship with the author, and we also want him to be involved in the community that we try to build around his course. I'm not sure. Oh, open textbooks. Colin Laguerra for not explaining to me that when he sends students from France to the US. Well, they go to the library and pick up a textbook for two weeks. And but that is not what the teacher in the US expects, expects the students to buy the textbook and have it available at all times. Because there is not that strong a pressure from the teachers to the students to ensure that they purchase the textbook so they bought the textbook in the best case, and the teachers also focus very much on the PowerPoint presentations and and the cases, the give out to the students. So, in my opinion, it's a blind spot because we need to ensure that students have available textbook, and we need that for their learning. And we also need it for the teachers to be interested in providing it so it's a blind spot it's something that we have not addressed, and that we should address to improve the student learning. And there is also a question from I la here where she asked so many students specifically in Africa, have challenges with digital access, what provisions are made to assist with these other courses downloadable. So here I think I like referring to the digital to the content of the digital thematic universities. I mean, it's, it's great that it's all digitally and accessible to just leave but that's not the reality for many people and for many reasons. So, you know, accessibility is an equitable issue as well so yeah just wanted to. Yeah, thank you. I can understand the issue originally there were the content was distributed amongst the variety of service in France, and in some cases not downloadable so this was an issue for us, as well as for learners elsewhere. We have entered into partnerships with various entities. If we take the Republic of Congo in Brazil, we have set up with partners fully accessible freely accessible platform base in Brazil, so that all the content that is available on French service is replicated there. We are in for the university check on that job, which is the main university. We have copied the content of our service to their own to the local service. And we also have in parallel partnership with the University virtual to Senegal for them to host the content. I believe they hosted in cooperation with Orange Middle East Africa. So that is not one solution that is fit for all the situations. But the goal for us is to make the content more locally accessible. Without undue interference and undue pressure from telecom operators, we do not. We are not there to provide another reason to purchase for G connection from commercial providers, we have here to extend the educational opportunities for learners in Africa. But we also welcome any additional solutions in to go. We've seen solutions that download to micro servers, which have which are battery operated in case there is a problem with electricity. So, we are open to a variety to a range of solutions, and we are there to offer the support and to offer it freely so that the goal of access to students in Africa can be achieved. Thank you. Okay, do we have any additional questions from the audience. Because if not, then I think that we can conclude. I'm also just putting the link again into a chat window for more information about university numeric. Thank you very much again to you, Jack and Cahol and the boy for your, for your participation today and also for your support of the conference as a platinum sponsor, it's highly appreciated. And if you have any additional questions for Jack, Cahol, or there were I think you can reach them directly on the original connect space or otherwise feel free to to share your contact details. Thank you very much for the window. And Deborah, thank you very much also for the pitch for your session and thank you for your commitment for the 8pm session on your side on Friday. You will, well actually will be doing it with our president of the board because Lena Patterson is now the new president of the board of open education global so that's also great. Thank you very much. If you have any closing remarks. Thank you very much everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, everyone.