 Hello and welcome to this very special session at the Old Winter Conference this year. I hope you've had a good second half of your day with us and I'm looking forward to kicking off the afternoon session now with developing and enabling two learning policies, sustaining ethical and equitable digital and open practices. And I think you will all agree that we have an absolutely stellar lineup of speakers for this session. So please do say hello in the chat, wave hello and put your hands together to say hello now to Catherine, Lorna and Jane, our presenters for today. Welcome all of you to the Winter Conference, fantastic to have you with us. Thank you so much, Marin, delighted to be here and thanks everyone for tuning into this session in what's been a wonderful conference so far. I just want to say about that mouthful of a title, apologies for that, Marin, any of you that have worked with Lorna or Jane or myself before will know that we often speak about open practice, but today we're speaking specifically about policy and particularly about how enabling teaching and learning policies can be developed to support ethical and equitable practice. So I'll ask my co-presenters to introduce themselves and then we'll get started. Okay, so I go first, my name is Lorna Campbell and I'm speaking from Glasgow today, but I work at the University of Edinburgh where I'm a learning technology service manager and I work primarily with the university's open education resources service and I'm also a trustee of ALT and Wikimedia UK. And hi, good afternoon everyone. I'm Jane Secker, I'm a senior lecturer in educational development at City University where I teach the modules about digital education, just teaching the module my final day today with digital literacies and open practice. So very relevant to be here today, talking to you all. I also co-chair the new special interest group, the ALT Copyright and Online Learning, the coolest gang that's out there, so. Fantastic, thank you. Yes, Lorna and Jane and I have had opportunities to collaborate before, but we're so excited to kind of talk about three different initiatives today and talk about their intersections and as a prompt for wider discussion. I, as I said, I'm Catherine Cronin and I work for the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. And I will say as a PS that this is my last conference presentation on behalf of the National Forum because tomorrow I'll be finishing my three years, three wonderful years of working with the National Forum. So yeah, really delighted to be here to talk about some of the work we've done. So just to kind of set the stage, we thought we would start with this slide and just because one year ago when we gathered at the ALT Winter Conference and we talked about 2020 as a year like no other, we were very focused on COVID and it's quite remarkable that today, COVID remains a crisis and evolving crisis. And we've had an extremely challenging year and it's still very much an issue for us. UNESCO's response, of course, and this is from back in April, 2020, is was especially relevant at that time and is still relevant now in the sense that UNESCO called on use this joint implementation publication to call on the community to support the use of OER for sharing learning and knowledge openly worldwide. And following April, of course, this was, this call was added to by the ALT Open COVID pledge and action by many people in our community. But we also want to recognize that it's not just COVID that we truly are living in a time of crisis. We have, of course, the ongoing pandemic, the climate crisis, deepening inequalities, local and global that are both multiple and intersecting. The rising challenge of dealing with surveillance capitalism in our lives and in our teaching and learning, rising authoritarianism around the world. And of course, the multiple challenges and tensions within higher education itself, which certainly were present and increasing prior to March, 2020, but are, you know, or even some, which are even more extreme today. So we just wanted to recognize that this is the wider context of HE, of FE, of, you know, all of our work really, all of our lives. And so we want to just kind of position our policy discussion within that, within that acknowledgement. So a couple of sources that Lorna and I have used in our presentations, if we think about, you know, how do we sustain positive, generative, equitable practice within institutions, within sectors? How do we sustain it? It's impossible to sustain it really without policy at some level. So this is an article from, you know, from the most recent one of Halabitha Manrona Sharps, rethinking pedagogy for a digital age, publications, talking about the fact that, you know, while many individual teachers and learners adopt open practices, they're generally not recognized values are rewarded on, you know, on a wide basis in higher education institutions. There's a lack of policy. And in the case of open practice, specifically there's a lot of evidence to back up the fact that we know that individuals, both students and staff, if they engage in open practices, if they go on to the open web, you know, with their peers, with their students, with their colleagues, and things don't go right, they wonder if their institution will in a sense have their back. And in the absence of policy, or rather the absence of policy speaks very loudly in the sense that it quite often acts as a break to either engaging or increasing open practice. So how prevalent are... Sorry, I just wanted to... Sorry to interrupt you, Catherine. There seems to be a bit of a lag in terms of the slides, whether they're displaying correctly. So I just thought I'd interrupt you for a minute. It might be worth us just trying to just share them again. If I share the links, maybe someone else can share it, because I mean, I'm in the West of Ireland, so I sometimes have lags in my internet coming to me. No problem at all. No problem at all. I just thought we'd just pause there for a minute. If you can put the link in the private chat, then we can do that. Well, we have a link that we wanted to share with everyone. Anyway, I'll put it in the chat. Okay. And the link to the slides is in this document, as well as all our references. Awesome. Okay, right, here is the link. Apologies for that, everyone. No problem at all. We heard you loud and clear. So... I suppose this is a tradition now, because last year my computer crashed when I was doing my presentation at the Altswinter conference. This Catherine Jinx is us every year. Okay, awesome. No one should ever collaborate with me for the Altswinter conference. I was about to hand over to you, Lorna, for the next slide. So... Lorna, did you want to try and share the slides yourself, or do you want me to try and bring them up to the screen? Could you try and bring them up to the screen, Marvin? Yeah, certainly. If you don't mind, Marin. Yeah, I've got it. Just going to... And so we're on slide seven now. Yeah, no problem at all. I'm just gonna put them up. So if you just bear with me for a minute, then we should be there. I was thinking it might be my computer feeling tired, and it's feeling the end of year blues, I think. Okay, awesome. Right, it's just coming up now. It's just loading. So I don't think Catherine, it's you, by the way. I think it's this event because one year the Hall of Janet went down, then another year the Hall of Institutional Internet went down. So I don't think it's anything to do with you. So, awesome. Here we come. Let's see if I can make it happen. There we go. Okay. All right, that's what moderators are here for. I'm glad that I can be useful. That's still loading. Thanks so much, Marin. Yeah, that's just should come up now. Excellent. So we've been there. Just going to see if I can forward it to the correct slide. So we've put the link in the chat for all of you. So you'll be able to look at that. So if you just give me some verbal cues, I'll stay in the background and I'll just forward the slides for you. Yes, okay. Go on. Just go forward to the map slide, Marin, just after this one, yeah. Brilliant, that's great. Thanks very much. Thank you for saving the day, Marin. That's what altar good is. So as Catherine said, the presence or absence of policy does speak very loudly when it comes to encouraging open ethical practice. And the reason we wanted to show this particular illustration, this is from the OER world map, is that it does illustrate that OER policy, open policies relating to open education resources, are pretty thin on the ground. This map isn't necessarily comprehensive by any means, but it does give a visual idea of the fact that there are not really that many OER policies in existence. If I could have the next slide, please, Marin. That's brilliant, thanks. So at the University of Edinburgh, we believe that policy is really important and we also believe that sharing our policies under open licence to benefit the higher education community is fully in keeping with our institution mission and vision to discover and share knowledge and make the world a better place. And this suite of open licence policies is based on a significant body of research and consultation and it represents a considered response to changing circumstances in digital education and the shift to remote and hybrid teaching and learning. In addition to providing guidance to the University of Edinburgh's own staff and students, we hope that by sharing these policies under open licence that they've helped institutions across the UK and beyond to respond to the challenges of teaching and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. And we're really delighted that these policies were recently awarded Open Education Global's 2021 Award for Open Policy. And I want to pause here for a minute and give a shout out to our Education Technology Policy Officer, Neil McCormick, who I think should be in this session. I think Neil might be in the chat. So if you're in the chat, Neil, maybe you could say hello because Neil was actually directly responsible for bringing many of these policies into being. Neil was a policy officer who did all the hard work of gathering consensus and doing the writing of the policies and getting these policies through committees. So it's impossible to underestimate what an important job that was. If I could have the next slide, please, Mara. Brilliant, thanks. So we created and shared our learning recording policy in 2018, following extensive consultation with students, academic colleagues, legal services and the unions. And this policy formed the basis of a new virtual classroom policy that we have developed and approved in September 2021. And that was very much in direct response to the rapid shift online following the first phases of lockdown. Both policies focus on rights and licensing, what recordings can be used for and safety and identity. And the approach taken by both the lecture recording and virtual classroom policies is that everyone involved in the recording retains their rights, will agree to license the recording for specific purposes that are clearly defined by the policies. And of course, rights are nothing without responsibilities. So to accompany these policies, we also have a comprehensive set of digital safety and citizenship resources that was developed by Dr. Vicky Madden, which include a digital citizenship guide designed to be read alongside the virtual classroom policy. And our digital safety and citizenship resources are also available under open license. Next slide please Madden. And of course, we also have our open education resources policy. And this was approved by our Education Committee in 2016. And we actually updated and significantly revised this policy earlier this year. One of the things we did, for example, was we brought our definition of open education resources in line with the UNESCO definition. So the important thing about this policy is that it's informative and permissive. It doesn't tell staff or students what they must do. Instead, it encourages staff and students to use, create and publish open education resources to enhance the quality of the student experience. And one of the main benefits of having a policy in this area is that it helps colleagues to make informed decisions about creating and using open education resources. And of course, the policy itself is shared under open license as a form of OER. And in order to support the policy, we also have an OER service. And that's a significant part of my role is to run that service. And amongst other things, one of the things the OER service does is we run a comprehensive program of digital skills workshops focused on copyright literacy, open licensing, OER and open practice. So I'm going to pass back over to Catherine now. Thanks, Lorna, that's great. I'll just go really quickly through these few slides. I'm putting a link, I think it's just gone into the private chat, but someone might pop it into the comments for me. The National Forum published a kind of meta guide to developing enabling policies to support digital and open teaching and learning. And the OER policy at University of Edinburgh is one of the seven case studies cited in the guide. So there's a link there because we're very aware of all the work that's been going on at the University of Edinburgh. And this guide, which was just published in October after really two years of national conversations is a guide to developing any institutional policy in the whole domain of digital and open teaching and learning. So virtual classroom policies, OER policies, digital assessment policies, and so on. And what we did as shown on the next slide is we came up with a definition. This is really a community definition developed by students and staff across the higher education sector in Ireland. What does it mean when we say an enabling policy? So in addition to conversations and workshops and webinars over two years, we also did a literature review of what makes effective and enabling policies. And sometimes all these things are meshed together. What makes a good policy includes things about content, about process, and so on. So we disaggregated those and we identified specific aspects of policy content, for example, that make a policy enabling. It's aligned with the institutional culture, for example. It's aligned with other policies in the institution. There's an awful lot on the process, what makes a process enabling. So of course it's collaborative. It's marked by student-staff partnership. It's democratic in terms of being diverse, inclusive, and intentionally equitable. And in terms of form, as Lorna mentioned there, we're really encouraging that enabling policies be generative and accessible policies rather than overly legalistic policies. And allied to this we also have on the next slide just the five steps for developing enabling policies. I won't go into much detail on that. The link to the guide hopefully is there. But I just want to stress the fact that it's, this wasn't developed in isolation. It kind of came up from the community and we also referenced work that's been developing in the meantime, like the Open Education Policy's guidelines for co-creation by Javier Atenas and Leo Havenman and others. Mahabali and et al, their definition of intentionally equitable really struck a chord with students in our higher education sector. And that's something that's now being used in some other domains as well as the ethical framework developed by ALT. So we reference a lot of existing work. We include, as I said, seven case studies. One of them is a policy on IP because copyright awareness is such a big issue. And when I say copyright awareness that means I have to mention Jane Secker and I'm going to hand over to you, Jane. Thank you, Catherine. So that's my cue, isn't it? Copyright. So recognizing the importance of copyright in online learning, ALT's created a special interest group last November in 2020, the Copyright and Online Learning Special Interest Group. I think what we were seeing across the sector is an increasing need for copyright literacy across the institution. So something that had been, I guess, a fairly niche area. The role of copyright specialists has obviously always been important, but the need for a wider awareness of copyright and for the knowledge that kind of was in those specialists to get out there as well as for us to develop helpful supporting policies in this area. So I think the kind of key thing is that it goes way beyond just understanding issues to do with open licensing. It's about developing a more critical approach to copyright and to copyright education and the need really to kind of come together as a community to develop the confidence so that we can interpret copyright exceptions that we have in the UK as broadly as possible. If I can have the next slide. So one of the main activities many of you will know that the group have been involved in is running some webinars, a series called Copyright in the Time of Crisis that moved to uncertainty, but maybe we're going back to crisis, who knows, but launched by myself and Chris Morrison initially in March 2020 with alt support and something that now continues on a regular basis. Our last webinar actually for this year is going to be tomorrow at 11 o'clock if you are free to join us. If I can have the next slide, just a little bit about what we've been doing in those webinars, the tomorrows will be number 45. So there's been 44 webinars, 17 were held this year, more were held in 2020, but we tend to run them now every month. A lot of page views on the website, we tend to get about 60 to 70 people coming regularly to those sessions, answering, asking lots of questions, doing short presentations, et cetera. But what we've also seen is the community that had been on a disk mail list, the list copy seek list has grown and the number of posts, particularly last year, was actually double what it had been in 2019. I'm about to start working on the stats for 2021, but that is where a lot of questions have been coming up related to online learning and copyright issues. So some of the people, if I could just have the next slide, some of the people that have been coming along to speak at those events include people from Creative Commons, for example, Bridget Verzina, who is their head of policy there. Kyle Courtney, who is the copyright advisor at Harvard University, but also very much kind of leading the way with broad interpretations of fair use as they have in the US and supporting, he does a lot of work to support the US copyright community. So we're learning a lot from him. We've had fantastic contributions from Dr. Emily Hudson, who's at King's College London, where she's a reader in copyright law. But we've also had many people from the international community join us. So, Karis Craig and Bob Tarantino are Canadian copyright experts. They published a paper on copyright in the time of COVID, detailing the experiences of the Canadian education sector, which very much mirror our own. We're really pleased to have people from the rights holder bodies joining us at those events to talk about some of the arrangements that they were making and particularly had some interesting discussions about audio visual works, teaching using film online and the challenges that that might present. So learning on screen and era part of that. Also, a British library contributed a lot because certainly at various points in the pandemic, actually getting access to collections has been a huge issue as you can imagine. So if I could just have the next slide to sort of lead us in why all this focus on policy. I think, you know, there's a lot of activity going on in the community, but actually it is about policy, I think, and actually trying to come together in a sensible way to talk about what we do as a community. I think I'm handing back to Catherine. Thanks, Jane. We're at the point that we wanted to break and we have two more slides. So I'm just gonna really show them very quickly. The point here is that we started out with a very wide lens talking about our context and then we talked about some specific examples of policy and now we're just widening it out again and we're highlighting work that was done back in 2017, the Roar4D project research and the use of OER and the Global South by Cheryl Hutchinson, Williams, Henry Trotter and others. And this figure is in the conclusion, concluding chapter of that report and it's a mapping of degrees of social inclusion, access, participation and empowerment to OER use. And we think it's really fascinating the next slide Marin just shows where institutional policies fit in here, that many of us are engaged in a lot of these steps that are listed on the left there, raising OER awareness, making sure there's more availability of OER, increasing technical skills, using open educational practice and so on. But institutional policies is a linchpin in our kind of ecosystem of practices if we want to reach the highest levels, not just of OER use, but of social inclusion, the highest potential of what open practices can enable. And what the Roar4D research shows is that OER engagement can be a form of empowerment but we need this very considered approach which must include policy. And with a nod of course to our beloved Bell Hooks, it's about again realizing education as the practice of freedom. So that is all we had to share. We shared a document with you. We were hoping we put links to everything that we've shared in this presentation. We were hoping that we might have a little bit of time for people to share their own resources and ideas. And I just want to say thank you on behalf of Miss All and open the floor. Thanks everybody, wonderful to hear your thoughts on that. That's amazing. And I have posted some links in the chat. I think we've had quite a few comments earlier on as well. I know there's a link to the cool special interest group in the link as well. So if you haven't already joined it, definitely go and check that out. I know that we have got a little bit of a lag between the chat coming in and also the comments coming in because obviously even the internet isn't totally immediate. And I can see Kersti for example making a comment there to Bell Hooks as well. So great to have a shout out. What's the next perspective in this piece of work? What's the focus for next year? Katherine, I'm gonna take chairs prerogative to ask a question and then we'll take some of the questions from the audience. So are you asking what our focuses are what we recommend or what's the question? Well, I was thinking because you were saying how this year has been another very difficult year and institutional policies play a big role in moving practice forward. Is there a particular area of focus that any of you or all of you are hoping to explore next year? Well, I'll say one thing. And then I know Lorna and Jane would like to add. I just think that this particular conversation about policy fits into a broader discussion about the importance of structure and that if we rely just on people's goodwill and ability to work extra and express care on an individual or whatever, we cannot sustain that and we won't realize the true ambitions of what we're all working in higher education and further education for. So policy is part of a broader effort to embed these goals in structures and have the institutions take responsibility in specific ways. That's all I have to say about that. Lorna and Jane. I don't know, Jane, did you wanna come? Oh, sorry, Lorna. Jane, on you go first. Yeah, I mean, well, I mean, it's been a busy year really, I think, the copyright community certainly seems to be gaining confidence, I think, and really working well together to sort of, I mean, one of the things that Chris and I noted was how many of those people had actually felt incredibly isolated being a sort of specialist and the one lone person that everybody was coming to with all their questions was a really difficult situation to be and most learning technologists work in a team so they don't experience that isolation. And I think it's kind of also because if you are working on your own, the temptation is then to be quite cautious. And what we've seen is that it's not just about confidence in the answers that people are giving but actually the community can be a bit bolder as well. You know, we really, I think we do have the potential to kind of, you know, make a real change after COVID and say, no, the way we were working before, you know, wasn't right on lots of levels but particularly the way it's been so difficult, things like e-textbooks getting access to that sort of content. You know, I think what we're really starting to see is issues, you know, come in much more to the forefront that have always been there but for some reason have, you know, been the kind of preserve of this specialist person sort of championing on their own. So I really hope we can build on that. That's what I really do hope. And I think that, you know, ALT is a really valuable community to bring people together to do that. I think that's a really important point and I think leads on really well to this next question, Lorna. I think this is one maybe for you to start off with, which is from Yvonne. So has Edinburgh seen any impact on OER use as a result of the policy being introduced? I think it has. I mean, the policy is almost six years old now. And we have seen a lot of engagement with OER over the past five or six years, more so in terms of creating open education resources but definitely in terms of reusing content as well and not just open resources created elsewhere, you know, out with the university but also open resources created within the university as well have been reused in different ways. So for example, one of the projects that we ran earlier on in the year was that we took content that had been created for a MOOC about four or five years ago. That content had already been repurposed to use for an on-campus course. Of course, it's about fundamentals of music theory. And we took the same content and repurposed it again to create an open textbook. And that was very much a proof of concept project. See if we can do it and it did, it worked really well. We had students working with us on that project. So it was a real sort of co-creation project. So we are starting to see these really nice kind of like examples of reuse within the university as well. We have a number of courses that have embedded OER creation assignments as part of the coursework. And of course, there's been a lot of engagement with our Wikimedia and residents as well with a lot of Wikimedia in the curriculum. Assignments running across the university. And we very seem that very much has been the creation of open education resources as well. Because of course, all the content that gets created on Wikipedia is open licensed content. So how much of that would have happened without the policy, without the OER service, without our Wikimedia and residents? It's hard to say, but I think just having the policy and the service there, as I said, it is, it's permissive. It's enabling. We're very much there to say to colleagues, yes, you can do this, and we will provide you with support as well. And if I can just very briefly answer the question that you asked Jane and Catherine in terms of, what are our priorities for next year? I think one of the areas that certainly within the learning technology domain in Edinburgh we're very keen to really explore more is the whole issue of ethics and education technology based around the alt framework. And I think we really want to see how we can use that framework to think about our own deployment of learning technologies. And the other area that we believe is very important is anti-racist pedagogy and not just, moving beyond EDI statements, but how can we be actively anti-racist in the development of our teaching and learning materials and how can we use open education resources to decolonize the curriculum as well? Thanks, Lorna, that's fantastic. I can see a lot of comments in the chat. And we have gone a bit over the, a lot of time, I think, because we obviously had a few technical difficulties to begin with. I think it's nice to have a bit of extra time for these comments. So I think there's a comment from the TEL team about being so busy making notes that they're going to have to re-watch the presentation to get all that rich content. And then Suzanne said, completely agree with Catherine, structures rather than goodwill are required. And thanks from Iwan as well and Sam. And then Kirstie said, it's something similar with their MOOC. The research and project teams used the artifacts to create a training course for colleagues in Malaysia to roll out. So that's some great examples being shared as well. I'm going to just give you all 3D opportunity in case there's anything you've missed, anything you still want to emphasize before we thank our audience and participants for joining us. Lorna, Jane, Catherine, is there anything else you'd like to add? Please do go ahead. I'll just say one small thing and just to say, I mean, so many wonderful things have been shared in the chat and I would just invite people to pop any examples that you'd like into that document that we created because we didn't want to come forward with the only three things to say about open policy and the importance of this work. So please continue to add to that doc and please openly license your policies as well like is done at Edinburgh because that facilitated our reuse of that work. Our guide, policy guide is openly licensed. So just as we do with practices and resources, we can work in that same way around in the policy space. Yeah, just a huge thanks to everyone for the input they've provided and once we're finished, I'll nip over onto Discord and I'll share our resources over on Discord as well. Thanks, Lorna. Yeah, please post it in the resource channel and the chat day two channel. Jane, any more of a preview of what's going to happen at the Christmas webinar tomorrow? Oh, well, there is a trailer on the old YouTube channel. If people haven't seen it, I'll pop a link to that in the chat. Tomorrow you might get there before me but it was a fantastic trailer. So just be there, I think. But I just wanted to say that Edinburgh have really actually been having a big impact outside their institution. At my institution, we use a lot of the resources and the fact that your policies are openly licensed, I think is absolutely fantastic. And it's a really, you're kind of modeling this open practice for the best of the community. And I think that's absolutely fantastic. So that's what I want to say. But yeah, go check out the old YouTube channel and there'll be something else coming tomorrow too. Well, I can't wait. And I want to say thank you to everyone who's joined us today and also a particular warm thanks to our three wonderful speakers. This is one of those sessions that I put my name down to moderate immediately and I really, really enjoyed it. So again, from everybody here at the Winter Conference, thank you so much for joining us and enjoy the rest of the conference and hopefully have a peaceful end to the year. So thank you very much for joining us.