 So, now this event is actually being recorded, I can actually start on a more formal basis to welcome you to this on Eden webinar this afternoon, which is number nine in the series on the use of OER and OEP as open educational resources and open educational practices in the online pivot. And it's a great pleasure for me today to present our two speakers, Kathy Cronin and Martin Wallin. I think there are people who are well known in the OER, OEP arena, and it's a great pleasure for us to have them here this afternoon. Catherine is a strategic education developer at Ireland's National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, which collaborates across the educational sector supporting digital and open education, including the development of digital capabilities, use of OER and OEP, and the development of enabling policies for digital and open teaching and learning. Martin, Wallin is the director of the Open Educational Research Hub at the Open University and also the director of the GO GN Network. He chaired the Open University's first major online learning course back in 1999, seems like prehistory now, which attracted 15,000 students and was the OER's first learning and education management system director. His popular blog, editech.net features his writings on different aspects of educational technology. And fortunately for us, Martin actually practices what he preaches because he's quite a prolific author and his books are also published in an open license and two of them, which are particularly worth mentioning, are a battle for open, which was published in 2014, and 25 years of editech, which has been published this year. So one last final reminder before passing over to our speakers to start is please use the chat for general conversation, put any questions you might have in the question and answer tool, and if you're on YouTube, you can put your questions in there, okay? And a little later on, there'll be a link if you haven't done so already, so please register for this event and that way we can send you a digital badge for taking part. So I'm going to shut up now and say thank you very much and pass over to Martin. Thanks Tim, so I'm going to try to show my screen now. Make sure that I don't share my Twitter channel or anything. That's on old sketch. Okay, so I'm going to get, I need to go back to the start. I'm just trying to make sure I don't see any slides. Cool, good. Are you seeing that okay? Good, thanks Catherine. Cool, yeah, so Catherine and I were asked by Tim to come in and do one of these webinars. I made a discussion about it via Twitter, DM most of the time. And we started lots to do a long presentation to try and do just a short one each at start to kind of set the time and then we're going to have a brief conversation between the two of us really just to sort of like flash out some of the issues and then hopefully open it up for more general discussions and whereas it might be a range of questions. So this is our title use of OER and OEP open educational resources and open educational practice in the online pivots and Catherine very helpfully put together a list of the resources in that Google Doc there as well. So if we're talking about anything you'd like to follow up with that there should be more of that. So I'm going first. So I will talk about open educational resources. And one of the things that I've noticed since the kind of online pivot that many people have been undertaking because of the pandemic, having to shift from the online. Is there's been a big call for like where can we get good quality content from if you're suddenly having to create an online course in a very short time frame. It's very difficult to write that from scratch. I work at the University and we typically take about two years with a multi-disciplinary team to produce a good online course. And many of you might be have a matter of weeks, months, would have to produce a good on the course. There's a one way to shortcut that but still make it kind of high quality is to find content elsewhere that you can reuse and then write your content around that or write activities around that content. So in making the case for education resources, why might you use them? First of all, they're only licensed. I'll come on to licenses in a minute. It means you can reuse them. So you can just take them and adapt them to your context. And that's quite different to say many MOOCs, for example, where they're interesting courses. They're good courses you can send people to but you can't take their content and put it into your own content or adapt it or change it or translate it or take one part from one place and one part from another place and combine them. Open educational resources are usually good quality. They often come from universities. There's often national repositories for OER. And it's been going for long enough now. There's a good range available. And so I thought what I'd do partly to demonstrate that is really just to focus on one OER repository, which is, surprise, surprise, the one that's at the university called Open Learn. So I'll go through that in a minute. But first of all, I'm aware there might be a kind of a range of experience in the audience. Some people will be very familiar with Creative Commons licensing people, not so much. So without making it a full Creative Commons lecture, I thought I'd just quickly go through them. There's a kind of range of options. So typically Open Educational Resources, part of the definition of an OER is that it has an open license and that will typically be a Creative Commons license. And each of these licenses allow you to do different things. So the most permissive license is CC by it. All it means is other people can take it, distribute it, remix it, adapt it and they can use it for commercial gain. All they need to do is credit the original person. So that kind of, in many ways, that removes a lot of pressure. You just you can do what you want with it in many ways. There's a variation of that, which is CC by share alike. So you can do all those things again, all that remixing, all that adaptation. But any new creations must be shared under the same terms. What that helps to do is kind of expand the commons, if you like, that the general pool. There's there's no derivatives. It says you can take it what you want, but you can't adapt. You can't change it. And then there's CC by non-commercial, other people take it, but they can't use it for commercial purposes. And it does sometimes raise the question about what counts as a commercial purpose. And I'll come on to that. And then there's some more variations. And the last one, CC by NC and D, really just says that people can download that work. We can't do anything with it. That's the kind of most restrictive license. So it's worth checking just which license there is on any OER you come across, because it might vary in what you can do with it. But the good thing about it is what these licenses are is permissive. It means you don't need to ask anyone once you've seen what that license is, you can use it in those terms. So that's going to the creative side. I want to use it in this way, so I want you to know they give you permission to do that automatically. And that's kind of a big weight off a lot of people's minds. You can take this, we can do what we want with it, and that's fine. We're not breaking any laws. And I was going to know companies going to come after us with a big commercial lawsuit. So I said, I'll talk about open learn. So that's the URL there. www.open.edu.com and this was set up in 2006 from the University with funding from the Hewlett Foundation. And what we do is we contribute a certain percentage of all the new courses we produce into open learn to kind of keep it going. But also they create kind of bespoke content. And there's some stats there. So they get around eight million visitors a year. A couple of people come in there and it contains courses, individual learning chunks, if you like, bad-stoping courses. You get a badge to start selling some of them, videos, those kind of things. And they've seen a real uptake since the sort of outbreak in the pandemic. So around 500% increase in traffic since then. And it's got a really kind of high recognition rate amongst the UK population, about 19% of people sort of know the brand of open learn. So it's become a kind of really solid repository. And since in the UK anyway, the national repository that was run by JSC was closed down. It's now our kind of biggest repository. So if you don't know it, it's certainly worth going and having an explore. So what you can do there, these things you can explore, lots of different subjects, study free courses, get digital badges, explore programs because we have a link with the BBC as well and boosts in probability skills. And also we have a link into kind of further study for this one. But the good thing is, as educators, if many of you registered, you can take this content and put it into your own course and adapt it for your own teaching purposes. So the really good thing is you can download it in many formats. So it's a Word, Kindle, PDF, EPUB. So you can just take and download any of them. And then this is the range of topics that we cover there. So pretty much most of the curriculum, most of the disciplines. So just to come on to that license issue. So our use, our license, and we went round a lot with this. Partly it was the version we came down with was CC by NC, share alike. So you can't use it for non-commercial purposes. And this is from the Open Universities from the frequently asked questions about Open Learn. So it means you must always cite the university and turn the language division off as you can't pass off as your own work. The share alike part means you need derivative works to come out from that. You should share under the same licenses. And that can be a bit tricky if you're then combining it with, say, copyrighted material, which you can't make back up when you're talking to your available. But right mainly it's there to say, you can't take this stuff and then put a license on it and say, no one else can access it. The most interesting part is perhaps the non-commercial. So it says there you can see there's non-commercials include education institutions, commercial companies, individuals making use of open-earned content on a cost recovery basis. But basically you can use it as an educator with the fact that if you're charging for your courses, that's fine as a university. But what they don't want is for people to take all of the open-earned content and then try and sell it or put a firewall in front of it and say you've got to pay to access it. But that's different if you're taking it and creating it. So what this means is you could go there, you could find any content you like from the university we've got there. You could just take it and download it in any of those formats and then the way to create your course, if I was to advise you on creating courses would be to have ours as the kind of content and what you devise around that are the activities. So you might say, go away and read this piece of material on say calculus and then come back and I'm gonna ask you some questions about it or we're gonna discuss it in a group or those things. So what this sort of content can do is not just at university, it's lots of other open education repositories out there. It can do a lot of that kind of heavy lifting for you to kind of conform the basis, the spine of your course and what you then do is create the work around it, the activities and the interaction and the discussion and maybe the testing, those kind of things. But it kind of takes away the effort for you to have to create everything around it as well. So that's my pitch for open-earned and OER and I'm gonna pass over to Catherine now to talk about OEP. Okay, many thanks, Martin. That's great. Hi, everyone. As Martin said, we're just gonna have a little chat maybe before the Q and A session about OER and OEP, but before that, I just have a couple of slides just about OEP open educational practices. Martin's given a good overview of open educational resources which is more or less the content of the education as you described and open educational practices brings the focus more onto the process. What can we do when we use openly licensed content and we work in open spaces on the web? So open educational practices, one definition is this. It involves the use, reuse creation, et cetera of OER and collaborative pedagogical practices employing social and participatory technologies for any of these interaction, peer learning, knowledge creation and sharing and empowerment of learners. So if we think about opening education in any sense as widening access and widening participation and removal of barriers, there are various ways that we can remove barriers. So the open university where Martin works and some of you who are here likely work at other open universities around the world, they remove barriers in terms of previous qualifications, time and distance and so on. Open educational resources remove barriers of cost because the resources are available for free but also restrictions around what you can do with the content. So with OER you can do whatever you like. And then with open educational practices, we're talking about opening participation in the process of learning. So opening the teaching and learning processes themselves and there are multiple ways that we can do that to build, share and co-create knowledge. So three of the advantages that are often talked about in terms of open education and OEP are the three items at the bottom of the screen there. The OEP enables enhancing access, enhancing the effectiveness of teaching and learning and also enhancing equity or reducing inequality. And before we go on to kind of the nuts and bolts of OER and OEP, I did want to say just a couple of things around equity because I think in the context of COVID-19 and the current institutional closures, this is something that we're all paying quite a bit of attention to just now. Okay, the definition on the screen here from Sen also used by Thurborn is just a definition of equality as the capability to function fully as a human being. And Sen goes on to say that this entails survival, health, freedom and knowledge to choose one's life path. Excuse me, stay on the slide for a moment. And the second item on the screen there is from the Sustainable Development Goals, number four, which is ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education. Quite often the value premise for open education is linked to various ones of the Sustainable Development Goals but most often this one, number four. So I want to be clear about my use of equality and equity here, they're used often interchangeably but when we talk about wanting to reduce inequality in education, we can do that through means of support, enhance support for people so that they can access education and reduce the barriers as we've said. But equity really asks us to focus not just on equality of treatment but equality of outcomes. So I think in the current climate, many of us will know from our students, from our peers, from our family and friends that there are uneven effects of the current crisis on our lives. So people, students for example, might be relying on their personal access to technology, their personal access to wifi and internet access. They may have greater caring and support responsibilities which we have no knowledge of and they may have serious collapse or financial support either directly or indirectly. Again, we may have no knowledge of those. So this is part of our work always as educators to seek to offer equality of education for all but I think in the particular time of COVID-19 and the institutional closures, this is even more extreme and needs to really be part of what we're doing. So whether you use the term open educational practices or open pedagogy or any of the other terms that are used to talk about these kinds of things, the focus of OAP is open participatory critical equitable pedagogies. What can we do with these means to enhance equity for students, to enhance the quality of teaching and learning? Some of this will be through the use of open educational resources and some of this will be by using open tools, facilitating students use of the open web and so on. So I'm happy to talk about some examples because I think the examples completely depend on what context you're in but we just wanted to use this as kind of a general introduction, particularly for people who might not have no background previously with OER and or OEP. And my last slide is just this one before the discussion. The changes that are taking place right now in our higher education institutions are rapid. Some of them are based on limited information and our role right now is to try and make sure that we rebuild institutions that as Audrey Water says value humans minds and lives and integrity and safety. And that's always important but no more so than right now. So with that, I will finish and maybe hand over to you Tim as the moderator and do a time check and see where we are now. Thank you very much to both the presenters. That was a very clear and interesting introduction and use of the slides I might say. We're 20 minutes in now. So if you can take about maybe 10 to 15 tops to have a conversation around the topic you brought up and then I can start to introduce some of the questions that are coming up in our Q and A channel also on YouTube. Thank you. Okay, I had one question for you Martin actually and that arose I know from, you know we'd known each other for a long time. I've seen you engaged in many discussions with people about the value proposition of using OER and for any person in any context they will be weighing up the potential benefits of using any OER with the disadvantages or the burden of doing that. And of course this depends on the context but do you see in this time of COVID-19 institutional closures that that kind of balancing act has changed in any dramatic sense? Yeah, I think so. Some of you may remember the idea of learning objects at the end of the 90s, the idea of learning objects was why do all institutions recreate multimedia materials say about teaching the same things when you could just create three or four really good ones that everyone shares. And learning objects never really took off because it took too much time to invest in making them yet to describe them with metadata and you could say OER was the next generation of that and this kind of shareable content. But I think in the current times when nearly all universities have to do some shift online they may not be going wholly online they may be going blended. They all suddenly happen to kind of grab this idea of online. Then the sort of underlying premise of learning objects might well come to the fore again or it doesn't make sense to kind of have much more cooperative modern higher education while we're rushing off to rewrite exactly the same, not exactly the same but similar content. So I think the proposition for where we are has never been stronger in many ranges that you can have this good quality content that you can take in the depth to your specific context and do so for it and sort of shorten a lot of that production time. So I think that's kind of a good proposition for lots of people and I can see lots people take up. The dangers are is that some type, it's never defined the precise thing you want amongst where we are, there must be something that does just what I want over here and you can often do, there's a study that I forgot what it was, someone did a study like they're trying to create course just some information where we are. At least when so much time searching and evaluating content, that's it, they could have just written it themselves. So it's not necessarily as short as you might want it to be that process. But also I think there's a certain, so you never just find exactly what you want. So you do have to accept that you're gonna get something that's maybe 80% as good as you want and then how much do you then spend adapting it or do you just use it as it is and then write some content around it. So it's much the same way you might do the textbook. You never have the perfect textbook and I should have mentioned that particularly in North America then OER is often represented by open textbooks. So people, these opening lessons, textbooks. So you can find one that's good enough for what you want and then you sort of write around it. And there are sort of bigger issues as well. There's issues around kind of cultural and periodism. I think, you know, a lot of this OER content comes from the global north, for example. So you often just say, so you might not always be precisely for your content, your context but you can at least adapt it and vary it. So I think there are, so it's probably not as easy a sell as I might have made out and it's always, but I think it is still quite, there is still quite a strong case for it in many ways and just helping people, particularly people who are unfamiliar with shifting the teaching online. It's like writing a book or something. It always helps to have something to start rather than having to go straight from scratch and the big blank page, I've got to create this course, well, okay. But get this content in from here, here and here. At least I've got something to work with them and I can form a basis around that even if I end up having to adapt. Okay, that's helpful. Yeah, as you say, it depends so much on context, but certainly that's kind of a global and change that really affects everyone just now. So much more online learning. So I guess my question back to you, Catherine, would be in terms of OERP, particularly in terms of different pedagogies that people may have used before. There was a bit of a debate that went around about this a long ago in that lots of learners are in an unfamiliar situation moving online and would that be compounded by giving them a kind of radical pedagogy that they may not have encountered before? So if you were trying to advise people who were trying to make the shift online that's unfamiliar for them and unfamiliar for the students, kind of what are the small steps in open pedagogy that they can do with that sort of kind of radically scaring everyone off at the same time? Yeah, that's a great question. No more so than OER. I think there's just so many lenses that we can look at OERP through. So OER you could be thinking of like an open course like you talked about with the open learn example or an assignment or an image, so it's a different conversation and a different balancing act goes on depending on the granularity of the OER. And with OERP, likewise, there are just so many practices under that umbrella. But first of all, let me maybe talk about educators using OERP, because OERP doesn't necessarily apply to just what we're doing in terms of in the classroom, whether that be online or in person. So so many educators, for example, are sharing on open blogs and sharing open resources about what they're doing in their classrooms, what's working, what have they done to make the online shift work best for them? So that actual open practice of so many educators has been really useful information in the comments, as you said, that educators who've never taught openly and online before can learn from. So that simple act of sharing your teaching practice openly is an example of open practice that certainly you can see it everywhere on the web. In terms of with students, I think one of the key features of OERP is enhancing learner voice, choice, and agency. So students often have to separate their formal learning identities and practices and networks from their informal learning identities, practices and networks. And open educational practices provide a way for us to bridge that. So if students are in a module, is it possible for them to reflect on their current situation or what's going on in their community in the context of that module? Can you help them to connect those formal and informal? As I said, practices, networks, identities, are there any open spaces where students are working that you could help them to bridge to? Writing Wikipedia articles, creating resources for their community, using open data that's published in relation to COVID-19 or otherwise to create resources for others. In this moment, I think many students are not only wanting to continue their education, but also very aware of the context that they're studying in. So if we can help students create any bridges to the other parts of their lives from the modules that we're teaching right now, open practices provide some way to us to do that through open tools, open platforms, social media, blogs, open educational resources, and so on. Yeah, I think as you were talking then, I was thinking one of the things I've noticed with the online pivot is it's really made people rethink or at least examine certain aspects of their education or of how they teach. And I think one of the ones that's really from under scrutiny is assessments. For a number of reasons, I think just the classic exam represents quite a weak point in the whole kind of higher education process because it happens at one point, you bring everyone together for it and as the pandemic has illustrated, if you lose that, then it kind of throws out the rest of the course. I think lots of people are rethinking what assessment might look like post this. And as you were talking then, I think that assessment, in many ways, assessment is the thing right, the sort of crown where it is in higher education. It's the thing that matters most often to students. And I think both OER and OEP, that might be the sort of the area where that which is richest for people to explore, I think they can start to do things that are David Wiley talks about authentic assessment and Jesse Stommel talks about this idea of ungrading and not getting the actual grades. I think people aren't beginning to explore that. I wondered if you'd, whether you thought that was a rich area for OEP to mine. Absolutely. And I mean, I'm just thinking of one example as you're speaking there in my own practice, teaching in IT, information technology. And of course that I took on a number of years ago, there was a digital media project that had to be produced. And so often because we work in these very strict structures within institutions we're used to completely defining the terms and the parameters of what that assessment must be. So over the course of a few years, just peeled back a lot of those layers and we just, together with the students we created a rubric of how any form of digital media could be assessed. What was the objective of what was to be communicated? Did it do that? How was it communicated online? How was it tagged? Who with the audience it was being shared with? And then assessing the content itself. So I invited students to create some form of digital media that communicated something to or solved a need for an audience outside the bounds of our classroom and even the university. So students just took their passions, whether it was guitar playing or sports or dance or a section of animals or whatever it was. And some of them did audio projects, some did video, some wrote blogs and so on. And then we use this rubric that we had developed to so that they were all assessed using the same criteria. And again, that just notion of, when you provide choice around the subject, around the digital media and so on, you can actually have wonderful authentic assessment that where not only is it more enjoyable but students learn a huge amount. And I think that you've probably seen me marrying about this on Twitter. But I think one of the things that this also revealed is that lots of people think about online learning or diseducation in quite a deficit model about whites, not as good as faced effects. But I think particularly in the sort of work you're talking about, it kind of gives us an opportunity to explore what you could do differently and what you can improve upon in this time and with these resources. So you shouldn't try and modify and model and replicate face-to-face approach rather take advantage of the different things you can do in that context. Should we do our poll? Do you want to interrupt us? We would do so well. I thought I'd just keep quiet and let you carry on. I mean, I was fairly entertained. I think it would be a great moment now if you could, if we could have the poll questions, please. And then we can carry on forwards afterwards. Yes, I see there are a few questions. That's great. Oh, we've got lots of lovely questions. Okay, here you are. If you're within the Zoom environment, the question should have appeared. For the people in YouTube, so that you can actually think about these questions, I'm going to read them out to you, okay? So the first one is, do you think the pandemic will make you more likely to use OER in your teaching? And the suggested answers you have here are yes, no or not sure. I'll give you some time to answer that. Do we have the second question, please? And now we have the second one. Do you think open educational practice is applicable to teaching in your discipline or area? And once again, we have three answers, yes, no, or not sure. I'll give you a minute or so to think about that. So we'll have the answers, these questions in a little while. So I'm going to have a look at the questions we've got coming in, because there are quite a few of them. It's interesting. Right, here we have the answer to the first question. And so the majority of people are saying that they think they are more likely to use OER in their teaching practice. I think that's a good service pitch, I should say. Yeah. They've still got 20% to convince them. Okay. 21% in the second one. And once again, good, solid result. Not as good as Catherine though. Catherine has obviously the more convinced She's done a wonderful job there. 78% are saying, yes, I think OEP is directly applicable. Okay, let's start to introduce some of the questions. There are several questions that sort of overlap. So I'm going to ask them together as one general kind of question. And that is if you like the difficulty of discovery of appropriate OER to use. Because I mean, you did a great job. And definitely if I was looking for OER content in England, in English, I'd go to open learn to look for it. But in general, if people want to actually to do that and trying to save time. I mean, how could we go about that? Do you think it's the time, for example, that at a national level, each country starts to think about some kind of OER network and starts to actually put together easy searchable repositories? Over to you, Martin. Yeah, so I was just trying to type in and find the address. There's a good search engine called solvenolts, which looks for OER. So we'll do some of that search for you. But you're right, it's never quite been as... There've been several projects around to want to do this. So it's sort of harvesting the various OER things together. And there's a lot of different sites. There's the OER commons and stuff. But it can be a bit of an effort. So someone mentioned Merlot, I saw. So Merlot is a good open educational repository. But you often end up, I think, to sort of scout around a few of them and try and find what you want. But you can do... So creative commons will do a search for, particularly for things like images and that, which help to track on your license. There are a number of techniques and tools that will help you with this. But it's probably not... I think it's ever quite become as easy as it should be. What you want is just the kind of Google for OER. And then just you can put what you want. But a number of people have worked in that. And I think I'm always getting involved in different projects that are proposing a new OER repository for EUR or something. And I'll put some links in the documentary for different repositories, I'm going to do that, sorry. So yeah, I take the point. It's probably not as easy as it should be. But I think once you... It's like a lot of these things. There's a bit of initial investment. And when you first start doing it, you think, this isn't worth the effort. But then once you kind of get a certain... Someone said OER commons.org. Thank you, that's what I'm trying to think of. Yeah, so there are a number of these tools out there. But I think once you kind of get practice of doing it enough, actually, it's not that difficult. And it becomes a source of habit to you. It's a bit like for people who use social media, I guess. I think often when you first start using social media, it sort of becomes a bit of an effort. I've got to put stuff out there and I don't just get anything back. But after a while, there's a certain tipping point, I think, when actually it becomes a really useful tool for you and you can kind of save time by asking people questions on there or the network does not work for you. So I think it's like that in many ways. You have to kind of have to divert the habits and almost invest some of that initial time in that setup. And then it begins to pay off. OK, thank you very much. A question for Catherine here. It's a simple question, but I think it might be difficult to answer. I mean, do all OEP have to include OER? Simple answer is no. It's a wonderful question, actually. And I did PhD research a few years ago in looking at whether, why, and how educators in higher education used open educational practices, OEP. And most of the ones who did, using open educational practices is independent of OER. So the term itself really kind of think the etymology of the term. I think the term OEP arose out of the term OER, where people realized, hey, let's talk about what we can do in terms of pedagogy and so on when we're using open educational resources. But in practice, I think many people have found Helen Betham, myself, and others that OEP can arise simply across, as Martin says, through our networks, through people who become familiar with open practice, for example, through their research practice. Because open access of research has become quite a mature area now. And realizing, oh, I see so many benefits in this, I think I'd like to translate this to my teaching. So some people come into it through that path, not necessarily through OER. It doesn't have to include OER, no. Can I just follow up on that? I didn't really look at this, actually. We did some research, which was quite a while ago. It's probably 2014, but was on the teachers. And we asked them about, did they know what OER was? And hardly anyone, it's less than 5% But when you ask them, do you share resources? Oh, yeah, we all share resources. We'll do that. So I think there is a kind of terminology about this after a new cycle. We can probably use simpler terms like sharing. OK, I think that leads on quite nicely to the next question. Because when we think of open load, we think of an amazing amount of resources that can be downused and modified slightly and used by teachers. But the $50 million question is that, do you ever kind of begin to get the snowball effect in the sense that a particular educator will download a resource, maybe they'll localize it into a different language, or add some content to it? And do they then push it back up to the portal so that other people can actually use their extensions? Is that me again? Yes, sorry, that question was for you, although I mean, I think so. Yeah, I mean, so like I said, the open load site, we asked for a share-alike license. So you should share it back somehow. And one of the sites you can share it back on is we have an open load create site. But you need to necessarily do that. It just means that you shouldn't lock it away so anyone else can access it. But I think that there is an extra step. It's an extra piece of effort to kind of share that back into the resources. And often people are quite reluctant to share what they've done back. But that is kind of how the global commons grows. But as I mentioned in the talk, it can be a bit tricky. And particularly, people are often unaware of some of the finer pieces of copyright. So you've taken some open license content, but you've mixed in an image that actually has a copyrighted tool or picturing it or something. And then you can't make that opening license. You don't own the license to that. So this is kind of an effect of mixing different media that can make it problematic. But in general, I think if you can share stuff back, then it also demonstrates the value of this. So a lot of the open textbook sites in the US and Canada, so like the open stacks create a lot of really good quality open textbooks that teachers can download. And then they might decide to change a chapter or just a certain terminology or rephrase management systems. You can then upload your revised version of that particular textbook back into the system for other educators to share and download and review. And I add a note there. I think that's great, Martin. And many people in open education talk about the fact that open is not binary. It's not just a switch that you turn and you say, now it's open and now it's not. So as Martin was talking about, there's variable licenses that can be assigned to resources. But even in one's own practice, it's not binary either. So quite often using more open licenses comes with open practice. So many people I know, I'd say, including myself, started out their blogs with a particular license. Maybe it was non-commercial. Maybe it was share alike. And as you work in open and you realize that it's much easier to use material that's very openly licensed, you become more committed to that notion of the comments and so on. So many people, not everyone, migrate to using more and more open licenses. But for people who are just starting, you don't have to worry about that. It's about seeing what's there that's useful to you, remixing if you need to, just being sure that you're correct about the use of licenses. And a lot can be learned in these networks of all of us as your practice then evolves. OK, great. Thank you. Two great answers. Let's start with you this time. Katina, it's a great question from Scott Conner. And I think this reflects a classic prejudice you can pick up from students sometimes. And they can even voice them in email or course forms. And they're saying, hang on a second. Why am I having to pay to do a particular course with you if the contents OER and it comes from another institution? How would you answer that? Well, this gets out to this very root question, is what is the value of what we do? Is it the content? Is that why people come take a course in higher or further education? Or is it the learning experience and the value of sharing with other people in the learning environment? So I would say that content is only one piece of that. And that, as Martin said, the use of open content means that we can facilitate all different kinds of processes around that content. Students can co-create open content as well. It isn't just something that educators do. But another important point that that question raises is when people make open resources available that are just an entire course or something that even has branding from something else, that's not useful. The more granular those resources are when you share them, the more easily they can be picked up, chosen in different combinations, and re-next by people in different contexts to suit their students and the learning that's happening in their context. So again, this is something that you learn as you become an open practitioner. I don't know if you want to add anything to that, Martin. Yeah, I mean, I take Scott's point. I've seen it myself. Students can be quite conservative in tastes of them or expectations. And even like from embed in a YouTube clip, they'd rather have a badly created one that you've created than like a really good one for somewhere else because that's what they've paid for. So I think, to Katherine's point, I think it depends what you're doing. I think you're actually using that some content in some places, but it creates activities around it and stuff. And you're doing interesting activities with them and like engaging with them and getting them to interesting things. Then that becomes less of an issue because they know that a lot of the work they're doing is just not really the content. But if you're just going, here's a course that I've pinched from the university. I'll see you in eight weeks when we do this assessment then they might cause a complaint. I think that there's a range of those things within them. But I think Scott is right. After you need to judge those expectations within students. Okay, thank you very much. A good question from Rena here as well about the role of OERs in corporate learning and development. Could you both give us some suggestions on how corporate clients could begin to pull in OERs and use them as part of their training program? Martin, perhaps you could start, please. Yeah, I mean, I guess this gets partly to the non-commercial part of a license, depends how they use them. But I think in both ways, actually, so I think both using OERs and sort of finding different content that's out there and they can adapt it to be, so if it's 65, they can use it however they want and adapt it to be applicable to their organization and I think that works. Often they'll be getting quite good content and often the people who produce in-house content isn't always that great. It's probably a good place to go and get other content from. But also I think they can start contributing to a lot of kind of professional bodies and I know that the fin is often with these professional bodies that their content is their cash cow, it's where they get money from all the time. But actually they could start opening up a lot of that kind of content, I think, whether that's through MOOCs or resources to allow people to continue to update their kind of professional skills and so on. And share between them as well, so they're in the same situation all the time as well. We're all doing the same job, health and safety training and paying out money to these corporate bodies to provide this often they're kind of outsourcing some type of training. You could quite, it's a bit like the argument with open textbooks, instead of buying copyrighted textbooks, you pay people to produce ones that openly license that you can then all use for free. So you can see how corporates might do the same thing or pay people to produce an openly licensed course on health and safety or whatever, these kind of things we call corporate culture that we can then adapt and reuse, but it's freely licensed and that will probably end up being cheaper than the team you're buying and paying someone else's content. Yeah, I'm not sure I have much to add there. I mean, the body that I work for, the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education in Ireland is funded by our Department of Education and Skills. It's a publicly funded body and we're very committed to making sure that we share everything that we produce under an open license and also any of the projects that are funded by the National Forum also share their resources openly as well. Yes, thank you. It's interesting what you're saying. I'm picking up in several questions that are coming along and also experiences of people who are here with us today. For example, Victoria Hewitt says that she's been teaching at postgraduate level for around a decade now and still struggled to get her ATI to actually support OEP and OER because of this fear of giving away intellectual property and losing money. I think what you've both been saying makes an awful lot of sense but in a way it seems to me to feel like it's kind of preaching to the converted because it's something you hear a lot at organ education conferences but once you actually start to move in the ATI environment you find a resistance from some of the universities. I mean, I suppose this is politics in a way more than education but do you have some advice you can give to teaching staff who for example now have been forced into this online environment? They're looking at doing exactly what you said but they're also getting maybe lent upon by the managers who are saying, you know, prepare me a course on X. I mean, how could, how would you suggest to them that they try and articulate the need to adopt open educational resources and practices? Who wants to start? Martin, do you want to start? Okay, I don't want to keep jumping in. I think you might. I mean, it's often, there does be a bit of that sort of preaching to the converted with open educational resources sometimes but I think there's a solid case and people have made some done good research on this like and so people like David Wiley and his group in the US have looked at the sort of quality of open textbooks and sort of done the controlled trials and found that there was good if not better than copyrighted textbooks. So, you know, so the kind of quality issue can be put to one side and you can make quite strong, if this is the thing you want to do, quite kind of strong economic arguments for it. So, Cable Green from Creative Commons worked with some schools in a particular state and how much money they were spending on purchasing textbooks every year for all the schools across that state. They could offer something like a million dollars to somebody to write a textbook which is then openly licensed and that would still save them vast sums of money. So there is a kind of strong, if you want to make the economic argument, it's a strong economic arguments way. It's not just, you know, isn't it a nice altruistic thing to do, I think. And also I think you can make an argument around efficiency, you know, better off taking someone else's content and adapting it to yours and creating from scratch particularly if it's not your area but also using what you know, what you can do best in that area rather than things you don't know as well. So I think you can make a kind of a case fit that appeals to management, I think, if we could put it like that, that isn't just based around the fact that I'm trying to find a higher education and we should be sharing stuff that's kind of education is about sharing but I know some people prefer a more kind of neoliberal argument if you like and I think if it was a case, it would actually make it so that OER in particular. Yeah, I'm thinking of some research that I think was done by the OER Research Hub, Martin by yourself and the team there about gathering data on the use of OER and in actual fact, many students enrolled on courses because they had used the resources openly, you know, had been able to access them openly and then thereby find out the courses that they wanted to take or pursue or so on. So they're, you know, again, this notion of the neoliberal argument, there's the whole notion of branding and presence and so on around content but bringing it back to serving our students now and the needs that we, that are particularly invisible now, so much of our attention in all of the people that I'm speaking with who are dealing with this crisis is around communication and caring for students, you know, the students that we see that are struggling and then trying to reach the students that we can't see because, you know, I haven't talked to anyone who said that they haven't, you know, some students haven't been lost in this process, you know, again, for a number of reasons. So much time and effort is required for us to be able to serve and continue learning through this crisis that the use of open resources amongst each other as a way to share, you know, just with each other, you know, in an institution, in a national sector, as well as internationally, makes so much sense, particularly because so many of the people who are teaching online now have never taught online before. You know, we just did an online survey of the digital experience of students and staff in Ireland last autumn and the results were published a couple of weeks ago and last autumn, 70% of people of staff who teach said that they had never taught in a live online environment before and that's on par with results from the UK and other countries. And now it's, what is it, is it 100%? You know, we have very, very, very many staff and students who have never taught and learned online before and open educational resources are a key way that we can, you know, share what we're doing, support one another so that we can spend time on the work that's really vitally important now so that we can continue because also the commitment that staff have made and faculty to continue teaching in this way is not something that can be done, you know, at this level continuously. You know, many people are, you know, just utterly exhausted. So to the extent that people are looking at what's happening now and saying, oh, this is great, we've done this, isn't this terrific? You know, there's an awful lot of people who are on their knees at this stage, you know, because they've done such a good job keeping teaching and learning and assessment going. So we need to have a bigger picture and I think OER is a huge part of that picture. Thank you very much. I'm gonna push on because I'm conscious of our time disappearing now. Another constant that's come up in a few questions that I can like to put together is the question of quality. I mean, for example, I mean, if not Kumar Yadav asked a specific question, how can we actually handle the issue of quality in OER? Because by analogy, if I go and buy a textbook from a world-class publisher, then I can be pretty sure the contents is gonna to have been heavily revised and it's gonna be good. And I'm pretty sure if I download some content from Open Learn, it's going to have passed through some kind of quality cycle, quality control cycle. But in general, in general, what kind of, what advice would you both give us about ways of actually being careful of being sure of the quality of what we're actually downloading? Now, Martin, perhaps you could start there, please. Yeah, you know, it's an issue that often comes up. I think, so the first thing is to start by going from trusted providers, you know, as you said, if you get it from Open Learn, plus some people like Open Stacks, we can get these open textbooks from and that they've been through a similar kind of review process, or people like BC Campus have been producing them for Canadian higher education. So there are a number of kind of good providers out there. And secondly, I think, you know, as an educator, you can trust your own instincts. You'll know if content is good and is applicable in your particular context. So you can make that adjustment yourself. Sometimes it might just be a, you know, a simple video that explains something very neatly, and you don't need to know anything about the provider. You are often the expert in your area, so you can get that, I think. I guess the only issue is sometimes with Open, it can be adapted a number of times, you know, and so several iterations down the line may be some of the kind of original messages been lost or adapted, you know, can even be in the opposite. So there's perhaps a danger in students kind of find stuff that isn't valuable. But I think, again, you know, perhaps Catherine will probably speak more to this, but there's certainly a lot of value in helping students to understand and evaluate content themselves, you know, to understand what represents good content and what are good ways of judging where it's come from and the particular bias it might have, you know, so people don't know that Mike Caulfield writes very well about this and he's got this framework or the SIFT framework for looking for misinformation, those kind of things. I think anything that gives you an opportunity to kind of teach those digital skills is actually a very useful thing to be doing as well. Yeah, 100% to that, Martin, absolutely. And, you know, I do find myself sometimes challenging also the premise that, you know, textbooks from publishers are a perfect thing. I mean, they may be very well produced and they may not have any, you know, errors as such in them, but are they, you know, appropriate to your cultural and disciplinary and local context? Sometimes there's bias in there in one way or the other. So, you know, to find open resources that are perhaps produced by, you know, national bodies or national projects or, you know, others in other countries that you find out about through your networks or through good sources, but to be able to adapt those, you know, for your students, for your context around language, examples, case studies and so on, results in something sometimes that's much better, you know, than a set open textbook produced by, you know, a well-known publisher. Okay, great. Thank you very much. Right, we're very near to the end of this webinar. I'm extremely grateful to our two speakers. I think it's been very, very interesting and also extremely grateful to all the questions that I've tried to group together to get as many answers as possible. Let me just ask, try to get the two particular questions that I've seen and also invite you to make any final comments. So, we've talked about OER and OEP in general, how it's been used in this time of the pandemic. So, the obvious question is what's going to happen afterwards? And I think we can do this by pulling together the questions from Dorita and Sadia that says, in a way, what's going to happen now to the future of education, specifically schools? Will it be replaced to some extent by OEP? And also, what are the implications of this forced online emergency teaching in terms of changing to open pedagogy, in terms of general openness and accessibility? I mean, what's going to be the role of OER and OEP in the post-pandemic era? Catherine, perhaps you'd like to start, please. I don't know. And to an extent, that's really up to us. But I think my role in my day job and in my conversations like this around open education is just trying to shine a light on a huge body of work that exists already in open education. This is a field that is fairly new in terms of the context of education as a whole. But there's an enormous body of research, practice, and people who've been doing this for quite some time that we can learn from. So, this is not new. Online learning is not new. And to those who, to whom it is new, I think I'd speak for everybody in open and online education to say that we're happy to share resources. That's one of the reasons we created that document for the presentation. I'm gonna be happy to go back through the questions that I missed here and pop some resources in there because events like these are, it's a drop and perhaps we've answered some questions, but I'd like to see these kinds of events as an ongoing conversation of us supporting one another. I don't know the context-specific questions that may arise here, but I'm happy to have conversations to help solve those problems. Yeah, like Catherine, I also don't know. You shouldn't trust anyone who says they do know because who knows how it's going to pan out and this kind of thing. I think there's both an opportunity and a risk for open and disadvantaged education online, education online. The kind of risk is that everyone's done a very sudden pivot to online. And I think students were kind of sympathetic when that was a kind of emergency and what if you do it over a week or two? But come the new term in September, October, it's still not very good quality and it's just like streaming lectures and we'll get lots of online learning. It's terrible. It's only near as good as face-to-face learning and let's never do that again. So in some ways, you could set it back a long way. The opportunity is that actually if people do well, people will begin to see that actually there are different affordances, different opportunities that you can, I'll take you to online learning and do different things that might help us rethink some of those kind of fundamentals of education that we often don't question because they just seem normal, how you do assessment and those kind of things and how you give students the textbook rather than getting them to co-creator and open text for all those kinds of things. So I think that both of those things exist simultaneously at the moment. I'm not sure which way it'll go, it'll probably be a mix of both, I think. That's great. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you, Catherine, and thank you, Martin, for a very interesting and entertaining webinar this afternoon. We're very grateful to both of you for having been here with us. Thank you also for everyone who's been here listening to these presentations and participating with your questions. I'd also like to thank my colleagues Lisa and Diana for the support in the background with the questions and the Zoom tools. And just to remind you that on the 21st of the 24th of June, as shown in the chat, we'll have our 29th Eden 2020 Annual Virtual Conference. So please, the registration's open for that and you can see some of the speakers coming up on the screen there. So please take part with us in this conference event. And also, in a couple of days' time, on Wednesday the 27th of 5 o'clock CEST, we have our next Eden NAP webinar on designing online courses for digital skills and competencies for the creative industry. So please register for that and I think it's going to be another interesting event. So thank you very much, everybody, and goodbye. Thank you. Bye, everyone. Thanks.