 And welcome everybody. And there's our fantastic opening music for this big day. And hello everybody out there. I see a big crowd in YouTube and it's really great to be here. And we're excited to be doing the OE Global Awards of Excellence for 2023. I'm Alan Levine and I am merely your host in trying to press all these buttons. We have a little bit of a technical issue as technology goes. But really we wanted to convene and have a conversation. And of course this excitement about the winners but really we wanna celebrate everybody who's been part of this. And I can already see that spirit in the comments in YouTube. So while we're hoping that Parine, our board chair is able to fix her connections then this is what happens when we decide to go live. I wanna just welcome our guest and start with two people from our review committee. And so hello and welcome Delmar. Hello. Who are you? Delmar Larson, professor of chemistry at the University of California Davis. I'm the founder and CEO of Libre Text. The probably the hardest working man in open education as the saying goes. So thank you for being here and being part of the show Delmar. And then zipping down to Austin, Texas. Good morning. Good afternoon, Judith. Alan, thank you so much. I am just so honored to be here amongst this auspicious company, including our nominees. And as we're gonna find out soon, our winners. I work as independent consultant but I'm also immediate past president of the community college consortium for OER which is one of the nodes of open education global. And I'm so thrilled to see the festive atmosphere in the chat, including mentions of Lizzo and someone said they're here to party. So I'm here with you to celebrate and thank you so much for having me. And of course I have to welcome my colleague and the person who really like made this program go for so many years and was kind of willing to let me fumble along with it Marcelo Morales, their current co-director of OE Global, hello, bonjour. I said, I'm getting my languages mixed up. Hola. Thank you Alan, you're so kind. I'm also as Judith super excited to be here together with Delmar and you to celebrate this new set of winners that we have. And I'm so excited that you have been such an important part of this process this year because your contributions have been just amazing. And I'm always happy this kind of the year that we get to celebrate our community and the work that they do all around the world. We never have enough time to review all the words we want to invest more time and this is a time to celebrate today here on live. So thank you very much for having us and leading us through this process of celebration. And just very briefly, before we get to the big reveal one thing that was added this year is there were 173 nominations. And so we kind of are able to go through a process with our review committee that Delmar and Judith represent that get down to the short list of 30 that we shared two weeks ago but we just really thought it was important to honor everybody and every project that was nominated. So this link will be available for everybody to see and you can check out all the projects that are in the mix there. And we're welcome back, Perrine, our board chair. Is your technology working now? Yeah, well, this is the internet part. And hopefully we're going to get to the we want to get to the reveal. So right now again, one of the things that that sort of we thought to do is currently we're going to go to the individual award winners first the people in open. And so this has been kept under wraps. So I'm going to ask someone out there in my studio to help like initiate the process to update this list. So can Marcella, can you press the button for us? Absolutely, so I have my super powerful button and we will be relieving now the individual winners are. Yes, they are going to be coming up on the screen now. So there's a little bit of technical configurations that are going here. And just so you know, and we'll be putting this into the chat. And so the first round awards. So the page has been updated that we can see and we're gonna be getting the chance to talk about very briefly and just introduce to you all of our individual award winners here. So first let's just say cheers to the whole group. I mean, we always like to start with the people in open because that's really what's important here. And so this has been done now. And so the individual awards are linked so you can read all about them. But really we want to celebrate and congratulate everybody that is here. So we're just going to make sure that we get a chance to, you know, highlight them and talk about them in sort of, you know, very quickly open status. So first of all, we're gonna recognize a Calis Award people know very well, Jenrim Wetzler's work through Creative Commons. Yeah, congratulations to Jenrim. I don't think that anybody in the open community doesn't know her and her work. Oh, and we have Karim back. I think we're okay. Sorry about that. Hello, Parine. Hello, everyone. I'm very happy to be there. I'm very sorry that I have this connection issue. We did the test, but obviously it was at work. So it does change a little bit the connection. Very, um, I've been recently, I've been working with a lot of people and I've been working with a lot of people and I've been recently elected as the president of the board of Open Education Global. I'm very honored to be there and I must say that there were very many fantastic candidates. I was really proud to be reading so many, the portrait of so many people with so many deliverables. And now I prefer, because I just joined, I prefer to let the floor to the team, to Marcella Alanne. And so please take back the floor because I just arrived and it's a bit of work to cut you while you are speaking. That's fine. So more or less, we're just going to go through the group of individual awards and talk them as a whole. So of course the Catalyst Award from Gen. Wetzler. So everybody in shout out, probably knows Gen. Wetzler from work on the Creative Commons certification and the open, the network of open educators that she runs within Creative Commons. A big shout out for our leadership award to Patrina Law from Open Learn and the Open University, who has been at this for such a long time and has such a great track record for bringing so many great initiatives. Through there, some of them have already been recognized in previous awards, but also just because they really, like their work goes out to the whole world. And then very excited, because I know she's in the room here. Hello, Maha, a longtime colleague, Maha Bali, from the American University in Cairo, who has done so much as a real living open advocate and educator of everything in terms of paying attention to students, equity, justice, care, faculty development, and I don't know, if anybody's ever been in a presentation led by Maha, she really knows how to be in a room. She's such an inspiration, definitely the work that she does and yes, I've had the opportunity to listen to her presentations. And I agree with you and she's just amazing and so deserving of this award. So congratulations, Maha. Fantastic. And kind of like breaking some new ground, we had a nomination that was actually three and one for the student awards and we really want to recognize the students in open education. So, Henry Agnew, Ethan Turnow, and Matt Barkovic have been part of the Libra text and Delmar was giving me some background before but like this history of having students be part of, it's open pedagogy from the beginning for Libra text, right? Yeah, definitely. These students were part of a team of thousands of students have contributed to our project but these three students in particular were critical in terms of moving us from the backwaters of a wiki to learning management system into something significantly greater. So they are. And they've taught me a lot about technology and not the other way around. Fantastic. And then because, you know, students we really like to recognize in the program, we want to give a special recognition too to Yasser Tamaratef who's also a student at the American University of Cairo. And really his openness is really in being an advocate as first a student and for paying attention to the challenges and things that people with certain disabilities need and he's become it, done it in such a caring way in open spaces from the nomination that we got but also he's kind of become and maybe Mahat will say more in the chat just he became a participant in the Equity Unbound MyFest initiative and really became a leader within the program and this is really what we want to see happen. So again, we really wanted to, there's a decision by the committee to recognize students out of this whole mix. All right, so let's give a round for our individuals. You'll be getting more emails from us with certificates and things like this. Individuals will also get, if you see on screen that little yellow icon, the image award winners get a 3D printed trophy that's done for us by our colleagues at the Fab Lab Caterer at Costa Rica at the Distance Education University there. We're trying to set up a tour with them tomorrow so you can see how it's done but these prizes are a unique part of the process. And so now we're going to go on and I'm going to ask my colleague Judith to be the magic button presser to reveal the open assets awards. So we've got the system working here and hopefully the open assets will now be revealing the winners that we're going to show to you now. And yes, I can see that the technology, at least on that end, has been working. They are loaded, if you will. And as Alan tries to make sure he gets the link into the chat for you to be able to see meet the winners of the open assets awards. This is pretty exciting for us too because assets are what we're all about and that these are certain projects that we want to record that have been nominated as the four categories. So very first one, I was so glad to see this one come in because Story Weaver has been a favorite project of mine for a long time and often not as well known because it's really aimed at focusing on making children's stories available openly through an amazing resource of thousands of story books in languages that most people have never really come across before, but very important mother tying languages. So let's hear it for Story Weaver. Has anybody taken a chance to look at this one yet? Yes, absolutely. So I think that one of the things that resonated heavily with me is the detail in the curation process of these stories. I think that's just amazing and something that is a wonderful example of how we can be used and adapt OER and make something wonderful from that basis. So I just love that project and have been following for a while as well. So super excited that they have this award now and we are able to recognize their wonderful work. All right. And we're going to move on to the Open Infrastructure Award. Another amazing resource for what it offers and also being completely open. Openverse, the successor to the Creative Commons. I still remember the very first Creative Commons search where you had a tight, you know, sent your search to very different websites and this is really a completely new generation of material. So I certainly hope Openverse is one of the resources that people use very often. I know I do, but really it enables you to find an openly licensed Creative Commons license, audio and images and soon other sorts of media where you're not really guessing to understand what the license is because it's Creative Commons but really effective because it provides cut and paste attribution. Yeah, Alan, it's really become my go-to for images, for audio. You said the attribution feature is so easy and you can, you know, you can search by the licenses. They just make it so user-friendly and so easy that you really have no excuse not to use openly licensed images and audio. Yeah, and thanks everybody. It's so great to see so many comments in here and we'll say it often, but really, I mean, everything, everything that everybody's doing, we want to recognize through this program. And so now for in terms of open reuse, remix, adaptation, a project from Kingsborough Community College part of the CUNY system is this course that's kind of used in a unique way. It's part of a College Now program where high school students get credit, dual credit for an college experience in this course on humanities. But of course they don't have access to the kind of resources that college students do. And so this open book, which is remixed from many other sources, is a beautiful example of what this category is about. Alan, I have to speak to this one really quickly because my background is in the arts and humanities. And I have never seen the humanities seem so exciting and vital. I mean, there's a chapter on the Mexican neural movement. There's a chapter that combines a look at Ma Rainey, Stonewall, AIDS, activism. All of these are significant catalysts for social change. And it also focuses on rock and roll and the roots in African American culture for rock and roll. So I can't say enough about how exciting I find this resource. There's so much to use here and so much to build on as well. Yeah, and they even get to punk rock, which is actually... For us it's new, but for a new generation, that's already history, but it's wonderful use of media in this resource. And then now for the significant impact OER, which is always a difficult one to choose, is this wonderful project from Trent University in collaboration with the Canadian Observatory and Homelessness. And really it's quite remarkable to see that what they've done is to do this collaboratively and build in a lot of stories from people who have experienced homelessness and work with it now, but it's so rich with their case examples and their stories. And so it's a significant project that Trent University has done. It even includes a podcast and a video series that can be used outside of it. Alan also has a focus on Indigenous homelessness and it's... I think how they argue it is perpetuates colonizing practices, very eye-opening, poignant, sometimes shocking, groundbreaking work. Fantastic. And of course this is... Again, the assets, the things that we create are definitely a significant part of open education and the work that we've been recognizing for years. There were so many good projects this year. It was a really, I'm sure for our committee, a difficult process to come up with just one. So all of them, and we refer you to the short list of previous... of the short list of nominations to see all the great work that's been done in creating open assets. How are we doing out there? I think we're ready for the next category, which is the open practices. And so this, I believe, is already published and we're checking. Yes. And so these are already listed on the URL that was sent in the chat. They're live. All of these are in our Hall of Fame and are live on the awards website. So we want to bring on first for the collaboration project something that we had a chance to talk to recently here on OEG Live, the National Teaching Repository which is such a fascinating approach for, yes, repositories have come and gone for a long time, but their whole idea is to build it in a way that the people who share are able to get academic recognition by getting a DOI for all these things. All the materials are creative license and it really helps both sides of the equation in terms of supporting faculty who are creating this material and getting some professional stature, but also by being a community. And it's like, and it's ironic because when we learned is that it's a national, you know, it started in the UK but it's actually gone quite a bit farther. So let's here to Don Irving Bell and the rest of the team that were part of that it's so great to be able to recognize this for open collaboration. All right. What is next coming on? Oh, God, I just love this, this one that Bud's branches embark which is an open textbook out of the British Columbia Institute of Technology which is just a great story behind it, but definitely to live out the idea of open pedagogy and the fact that it was created out of this understanding that identifying plants up in the area of British Columbia at the time most classes happen is in the winter when you don't have all the nice leaves and flowers to identify plants and so the idea was to help create this fantastic living resource of plant identification which was done in so many ways as open pedagogy in terms of students being out there to capture the images but also design as students who participated in creating all the materials it's really a beautiful resource. As a climate activist Alan I consider this to be such an exciting resource because we just if young people can just understand and identify the world around them they're going to feel more invested in keeping it alive, sustainable and renewable. So I just find this to be a very exciting resource and for open policy another amazing project from the state of Washington from their organization of technical and community colleges doing what many organizations tried to an institution level is come up with a system to identify courses that use OER and labeling them so when they know this in advance the most significant thing is that this was really created and developed with a huge amount of student support and so definitely worthy of the policy award. I got to jump in here Alan because I'm a former policy analyst for a state higher education agency in the United States and let me tell you policy is not considered exciting or sexy but they make policy so accessible in this resource and I think it's probably not only helpful and useful for Washington and for the state of Washington community colleges and other institutions in Washington but across the country and even beyond I would argue so user friendly, so well done. Thank you Judith and so definitely one that we were really honored to award this year. Open research we were excited that this project that came again from some folks at the CUNY system I'm pretty sure it was Stacey Katz and Jennifer Van Allen who were the editors of this special journal on multicultural education that really focused on the practice of open pedagogy especially with attention to social justice and equity and so it's this research journal publication that came out in this Emerald Insight Journal I believe the original they work with funded by the Hewlett Foundation for all the research to be open of course and they've recently migrated it to the manifold platform which itself won an open education award a few years ago which really enhanced the abilities to use this as a resource. I think it's such an important element the multicultural education aspect of this research and it resonates so much with the work that we do on a weekly global that I just was fascinated to see what they have been working on wonderful resource. Excellent so now we get on to the third category and these this is your turn Marcella to press the button. Yes let me get yes my turn to do them this is the special category award so here we are announcing them now yeah and just confirming from the yes I can see I'm getting a positive signal on the dashboard here and that the winners in the special awards category are now available for everyone to see and we will bring them on stage but I want to add that this whole idea of having special awards was to make the process dynamic to different trends and issues that come up and so I don't know maybe there'll be one next year on artificial intelligence I don't know but the ones that again were categories this year and there was a huge pool of nominations in the diversity equity and inclusion award category that all them you know wish were up here on the screen but they're all really important and so this open textbook that was published out of southern Queensland University really spoke to a lot about elevating again the idea of being able to showcase practice and the very useful things and resources and strategies that will help teachers anywhere sort of achieve much more DEI or IDEI in their teaching and their open educational resource work so an incredible resource yeah I agree Alan I think that there is a common understanding of the importance of inclusion diversity equity and accessibility in all our learning environments but usually the question comes on how can I incorporate these elements in my context and this is a beautiful resource addressing some of those questions or queries in general so I agree with you and congratulations to Niki for editing this beautiful resource yes fantastic and again open resilience is a category that we unfortunately has to come into play again so the responsive OER for Ukrainians goes out to our colleagues at Open Learn as they did before being responsive to the needs of the COVID pandemic did the same thing for the needs for everyone displaced and put into stress by the invasion of the Ukraine so they typically as the leadership of the Ukrainian law already recognized were able to harness their energy and all their resources within Open Learn first to identify through the analytics of their user base to understand where people are needing resources from the Ukraine and also for Ukrainian citizens who are outside of their country now but really to identify the kind of content that was most important in their into a very important resource but then they took it to the next level and translated it and developed new resources in Ukrainian language Alan this to me is such a beautiful example of why we do what we do yeah I couldn't agree more Judith I think that it's a wonderful example of cooperation and support through OER and the fact that they have been able to reach more than 5000 people with these resources and how they found a way to adapt it to make them available to these communities just amazing and the work is ongoing they're continually refining this and what they're really again what they're paying attention to is where the people are who need this and what their needs are and that's what OER should be about and now we kind of came up with a new category with the idea of a wild card because sometimes you say like my project doesn't necessarily fit in any of these categories or this one is just so stand out and again there were many great submissions into this category and really proud to see a we like sharing photo competition which is we've seen has been part that's been coincided with an education week the last couple years and so you know what Bayadolos, Arcos and colleagues at TU Delft do is they put out a call for students, faculty and family members of TU Delft to share photos that demonstrate visually what open means to them and the whole premise is to make it so those photos are creative commons license and put into a public place where they're available so people are able to experience openness through something as simple as you know it's not as simple but to make a beautiful photograph and so it's just such a beautiful model that is replicable in many places to that would work for almost anybody Alan I just love love loved this one it was kind of as you as I experienced it was kind of a I'm living vicariously through you and getting to see bits and pieces of your lives many of which through this side I thought boy my life is not nearly as exciting as some other people but it was also a glimpse into culture of that area of those who contributed to this resource and like you said so you it could be so easily duplicated in other contexts and I think have such impact right well thanks for bearing with us for the big review of the awards again we want to celebrate the winners everybody else who was part of this the shortlist and so I really encourage you to take time to spend time the theme this year has sort of been this explore to sort of examine and get inspired by ideas and projects that not only the winners but have been nominated and were on the shortlist and it's just such an amazing pool of people and projects and really I think what I hope we can do is sort of make this even a broader program next year just to have ongoing recognition in the work that we do absolutely as we were saying initially it's so difficult to choose because there's so many projects and initiatives that have been presented it's a very difficult work I would also like to thank the committee that helped us during this process doing this amazing work we've had the committee of 20 people that helped us through the process and I want to say thank you because we know it was not an easy task congratulations to everyone it's such an exciting time of the year for us to be able to recognize and celebrate the work that is happening all around the world so big congratulations to everyone and a big thank you to Alan for leading the process thank you very much Alan and Marcel I just wanted to add the word I really love the reading the project and seeing everything what happened and maybe some of you know that I have funded with many other francophones the network open education global francophone and we get inspired from your awards too and I hope this will put some visibility of what we are doing in the francophone countries or by francophone people and also in translation because I mean the awards themselves when we prepare this we said this there are a wealth this is where we see our common wealth and how we put together from all around the world and many resources and they are more visible often in the anglophone world because people know better how to basically this is this award and this open recognition process that is really great and I hope we will be able to launch this very soon in the francophone online conference that we would like to organize for open education week just to tell you we have everything in process our monthly webinars and this is what you did is very inspiring also for other part of the world and other people so thank you very much you are contributing to something greater than we small people thank you very much to all and a big thank you again as Marcel said to our review committee who did an incredible amount of work and the OE Global Board who again provides a key amount of oversight and selection process there are a lot of people who are part of this machine mostly thanks to the 173 people who stepped forward and nominated and so that was really exciting to see the range of ideas people and project that were nominated by the community definitely and we hope to see many of you in Canada in Edmonton next month very much and so and again thank you so many people for tuning into this we just wanted to make a little bit of excitement and to share in this moment together thank you for coming into YouTube and being part of the celebration with us congratulations to all and we will go out now with some music again that's it thank you you