 is going to be, the first presentation is going to be done by Andy Lane and Bobol Ivan and it's going to be about colonizing the curriculum. So I would like to now ask Andy to please comments and also a reminder to the participants if you have questions for the for the presenters please pause them into the chat window. Thank you very much. Andy please go and welcome everybody you'll see there are three names associated with this presentation. Rachel cannot be with us today but I will start off this talk and then Bobol will complete it and we're talking about as I say colonizing the curriculum or decolonizing the curriculum is obviously a very hot topic at the moment and it's very much about how different people take on or are not really acknowledged or their traditions histories and not very acknowledged in the curriculum that's provided for them and of course that often comes from a lot of colonial histories around the world in terms of these these things types of developing but what we want to look at here is what is happening at the moment so it's not what's happened in the past but what's happening at the moment and this is in particular one developing country this is Myanmar as we come on to and it's through a particular element of of education which is education for sustainable development which we've already heard about in in both previous presentations this morning and the sustainable development goals we've already heard about I'm sure you're all aware about them there are 16 sector goals and there's a 17th on partnerships they cover a big area all these things to be achieved by 2030 so this is this is a big agenda globally and it's how does open education fit into some of these we heard in the last workshop about how open education is is trying to be open this is trying to be incorporated into thinking about the sustainable development goals again I say we want to talk about a specific element of it and it's particularly around goal for and quality education so goal for it has lots of different targets there are 10 targets so here let's move on to that from that quickly because I won't talk about them all we want to talk about one specific target says by 2030 ensured all learners require the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development including among others through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles human rights gender equality promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence global citizenship appreciation of cultural diversity and of cultures contribute contribution to sustainable development now I think that that's very important to read that out in full because it is not just about education about sustainable development but it is about all these other things and the cultural contributions from around the world so it's not just one cultural contribution it is cultural contribution and the sustainable development goals themselves were determined by a big consultation process and so in terms of implementing we've also got to think about how do different countries nations work together to actually provide education for sustainable development that is both globally relevant but locally important I've already said what we're talking about are going to be two projects that are working in Myanmar some people may know it as Burma that's historically how it's been been called now Myanmar has obviously got a very long history but its most recent history has been one of difficulties and conflict so it's only had a sort of crazy democratic system about the last nine ten years after 48 years of dictatorship so to allow that time it's had a prolonged isolation from the international community and it's also had and still does have quite a bit of political unrest and civil wars happening between the army and ethnic armed organizations that's been going on for a very long time since for at least 70 years and throughout all this education was manipulated and controlled since there's been these crazy democratic reforms since 2011 and the election of the National League for Democracy taking the majority of seats in the government they've initiated education reforms this can be seen in a national education strategic plan from 26 to 21 and a new one is being developed to cover the next five years so this has been a time for education reform and for the reconstruction of the higher education institutions in Myanmar so the first project I'm going to talk about where we're trying to look at these issues is called Tide Transformation by Innovation and Distance Education now this is UK aid funding from the Foreign World Development and Development Office and it's nearly through it's nearly four years of operations we started in March 2018 going to 2021 and we're aiming to improve the quality of distance education in Myanmar this time and trying to also catalyze higher education reform by supporting development of the second national education sector plan so it's focused on underpinning the distance education provision through teachings, technical skills and capabilities and open and distance education but also by developing knowledge and capacity in education for environment and sustainable development as we've termed it in within the project so the project is a consortium it's led by the Open University but it has the University of Oxford and University of Manchester from the UK also involved it has three Myanmar universities Yangon University Yadunabon University and Yangon University of Distance Education as well as an international non-governmental organisation near a body policy exchange which is helping in country with what we're doing now the importance of this is that we're working with 40 higher education institutions out of about 170 higher education institutions in Myanmar but these 40 are involved in distance education and they teach about 60 percent of all higher education students so it's very big the way it has been structured is that there are two distance education universities Yangon and Mandalay universities of distance education who'll be producing the textbooks students have to study and also do some broadcasts so it's a form of distance education that is now becoming less common more outdated as digital infrastructure improves and online education and use of digital tools and techniques becomes more common so part of what we're trying to do then Tide is to help them divert their capacities to create open educational resources to create new programs create ones that are relevant to environment and sustainable development because they don't do that at the moment their curricula are much more traditional so across these universities also known as arts and science universities they may teach geology and they teach geography or chemistry or physics they don't teach environment as such and they certainly don't relate any of this to sustainable development so there's a sort of big challenge that's present for us now this just sets out this project is about four and a half million dollars million pound sterling being provided for this project so it's a very big project involving a lot of people we're working with over 300 university staff from across those 40 higher education university institutions around these three major areas are enhancing staff capacities enhancement of programs and the approaches to strengthening of higher education of distance education systems in Myanmar we'll just move on quickly to the next one because this is an influence diagram that first diagram showed things in silos but these things are all connected and again i'm not going to go through all this but you can see it's color coded for the things that cover programs people systems and structures again but the bottom there you'll see open educational resources so open educational resources have been a key element of what we're doing in terms of teaching them about learning design teaching about creative commons license things about how to use open educational resources to create and supplement programs they're already offering so this is very much important in their own professional development and in terms of also making the curriculum more relevant to the students of today through employer needs the expected graduate attributes for students and other things in terms of competency frameworks that may be beginning to emerge in Myanmar so we're trying to make all these things fit together to make sure that the the education environment and sustainable development practices are can start be started within these institutions as they start their own reforms and as has recently happened is the responsibility for those distance education students has been taken away from the distance education universities and are now centered on all these arts and science universities who are involved in supporting the distance education students at the moment so this is the start of a move to create a greater autonomy through what's called one campus two systems that these arts and science universities have their own campus students but now they have much greater responsibility and have to provide new programs for these new students but there's a question of whose curriculum they are trying to develop here so we're promoting open educational practices and use of OERs but most of those are in English and also come from western universities so while we are encouraged them to provide the relevant local examples and case studies does that truly reflect or fully reflect the cultural traditions and diversity of Myanmar and of course even talking about education for sustainable development and sustainable development there are different understandings on it as well is that the same everywhere can you have the same understandings everywhere do we need to localize those as well so what activities should our education institutions do to contribute to all this we've seen education for sustainable development tested and reviewed and initiated around the world much of this practice is heavily informed by western ideology and culture rather than Asian ones so we needed to have a different look at it this is where Bobo comes in over to you Bobo Hi thank you Andy so hi Bobo from Myanmar I'm doing my doctoral research in UK at the Open University and this studentship is funded by GCRF and here are my three research questions my research we're trying to understand how Myanmar high educations conceptualize ESD and how about the related graduate attributes in our own context and what changes are needed to develop ESD next please and in my research I use two main models and this is the first model I try to make a adaptation built on other scholars and this model heavily focused on looking at how ESD is thought of or implemented in different university in different cultural contexts my literature review I found mostly scholars and university are focusing on curriculum and campus like green campus operations but I try to also think about better goji or I prefer to use and the goji for the university education it can be also applicable integration component in this model but we also need to be mindful how these integration models are in should be interpreted in our Myanmar context next please and the second model is about the education instruction model developed by Ano Ato and this model is very relevant to the countries emerging from the troubled times for example like prolonged civil wars like Myanmar and among the five reconstruction process ideological reconstruction is being highlighted here in order to reflect the tensions between the global or the western perspectives and the Asia or our Myanmar perspectives how ESD should be alike like Dr. Andy mentioned earlier thanks I did a pilot study last December or focus group discussions and interviews with the university teachers and students and this initial study also has given an initial view of some key challenges in the integration of ESD in Myanmar higher education institutes like ESD awareness curriculum reform teachers competency stakeholders engagement and transformation a leadership or administration mostly highlighted by the students and the teachers next please and like when we think about the integration models it is also important to see these integration models are relevant to our country context Myanmar because Andy already mentioned that Myanmar has recently transformed into a civilian so-called quasi-democratic country and now we are doing educational reform and reconstruction but there is no research on ESD in Myanmar until now so we have a lot of questions like how ESD curriculum I mean formal curriculum has already been set out in the global scale and as an educational resources and how about the informal learnings and to how extend our curriculum design will be shaped or informed by our traditional cultures as well as the global knowledge and is it a kind of dominance by the powerful society over the minority cultures and five minutes left yep and as Andy mentioned already like Thai project has been helping for the capacity development of Myanmar universities but we have a question like is it still promoting a western or global view of open education and ESD or leading to the colonizing of the curriculum although they might have beautiful intentions so but at the same time Myanmar also needs international aid and support for educational reforms and reconstruction but it looks like we open the doors and all the global solutions are brought to the forefront so at this time we have a lot of questions there in the answer but we are very keen to listen to the local people perspective and also we may need to learn from this Thai project experience so to be concluded we have to acknowledge the mutual learning and we also need collaboration if we want to co-develop a curriculum in order to help achieving the sustainable development goals thank you very much there are some references if we should follow some of these up great thank you very much both Andy and Bobo lovely work and you have been getting some really complimentary remarks in the chat window too we have about three minutes left for questions so I would like to encourage all of the participants here to please post questions for for the presenters directly in the chat window or you can unmute yourself and ask that question too but I think I've seen one question I think from used Kormaling who is asking and I think that's probably for both of you did you have some type of basis or quite a basis to initiate OER and then in brackets experience in Myanmar experts policy government question mark so the the Tide project that came about through lots of negotiation and discussions with the Ministry of Education in Myanmar initially and this is before there was even a call for the funding to the Sphere program from which we're getting our funding so there was a lot of discussion about they they knew they wanted to reform this education system they came to the UK they came to the open university and say how could you help us um and so we then started having discussions and talks about this and as as a funding round came available we thought we there's somewhere we can apply for funding we began to work through with everybody you'll see that the partnership involved Myanmar universities as well as three UK universities we already sort of talked about what it was needed and again it was a conversation but it's because of the open university's life experience around open education not just distance education we thought and certainly myself as the academic director for the project I wanted to get open education resources in there because if we're going to do things across that that many institutions and get them to work together or collaborate in thinking about how they can do things then a great way to do that is through open educational practices and not to get hung up on whose curriculum is this and whose content is this and what is the copyright I mean it's also the case that until very recently the copyright law in Myanmar was over a century old it's from colonial times from when the British were controlling uh berman stroke Myanmar and so we're having to do this within a particular framework particularly around licensing which was not so easy so this just just offered so much opportunities to introduce the whole aspects of open education into the Myanmar system as it's reforming I think if we can make these system level changes as well as sort of individual level changes then we could have a significant long lasting impact thank you very much Andy and just one very quick question from beat other man here from Uganda he's asking whether you have any suggestions on how we can implement your ideas on a secondary school level and if you feel like this is a bigger conversation you can obviously I think it is that's mainly because it's all these things are contextual you might imagine from what we've talked about it's not just saying you do this university level you do this secondary school level the context which country you're working the shape of the educational system makes a difference to how you might approach it let me add a little bit because not currently there is also ongoing projects implemented by UNESCO and I think I can support for the secondary level educations and they're trying to integrate EST in the curriculum and also they support a lot of pre-service teachers or colleges like we call education and colleges in Myanmar and now they are also running these kind of EST integration but my research will focus at the university level but we want to try to make sure that the conceptualization on EST in our university and Myanmar context thank you very much Bobo so unfortunately we have run out of time so thank you very much to both of you to end the end to Bobo and Bobo best of luck with your further PhD research engagements and a beat