 So, thank you very much. My name is Zaynab Baruklu. I am a program specialist at UNESCO, Communication Information Sector, and I'm responsible for supporting the implementation of the OEI recommendation. I will give you a very quick overview, and then we have a very packed schedule today. So, as you know, this presentation is about the recommendations of what is UNESCO? I'll go very quickly. It's a specialized agency of the UN. It's based in Paris, and it has offices all over the world, and it is part of the UN system. All our work is based on the UN documents, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in that regard, of course, Article 19, which is about the right to receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers, and of course, the right to education, and UNESCO's constitutional commitment to the free exchange of ideas and knowledge. So, this presentation, as you're aware, is about the UNESCO OEI recommendation adopted two years ago. The recommendation you can find by going on our website, and it is one of about 15 recommendations. So, recommendations are normative instruments which provide recommendations on what member states can do one particular area in which they report on a regular basis. And this one is particularly interesting because it's the only one on open educational resources in the whole UN system. And if there is a definition of what an OER is, and I think that's really important to keep in mind within the scope of what we're doing today, the definition is on the screen right now. It's a teaching learning research materials that are in the public domain or under a copyright that has been released under an open license. And an open license is a license that respects intellectual property rights and grants the public certain permissions. This recommendation has a very large number of stakeholders that it addressed. It's not your typical group of educational stakeholders as much larger as of course the traditional educational stakeholders. Then we have libraries, archives, museums, publishers, of course, the public sector and private sector into governmental organizations, media broadcasting companies, etc. So, what's inside this recommendation? There are six basic action areas. As you'll see there's a little blue arrow, and the arrow points out that these different action areas function together. And as the OER global meeting has shown, it's a very comprehensive recommendation and the different parts of it work very closely together. The first one is about capacity building, basically the point that stakeholders understand the added value of OER and they have the digital skills to create access, reuse, redistribute OER and that there are platforms that are available so that OER can be easily found. The second point is on quality multilingual inclusive OER. So that means that OER is available in languages other than English, because as we know much of the internet is in English. They're accessible to persons with disability and other vulnerable groups and they can also be available offline. Public investment is in putting infrastructure for accessibility and that quality OER is compared or better than none OER and this includes the fact that it links to traditional OER qualification systems and other qualification systems. Sustainability, this is a big word but basically you want to, there are two main points that we want to underscore is that first that development maintenance and is done where the end user doesn't shoulder the cost so that means teachers and learners and incentives for stakeholders to use OER are enhanced so incentives for teachers, for institutions, etc. Policy, issues addressed in the section of procurement models to reflect supporting open licensing, guideline standards, other guiding documents at national institutional level for OER, incentives again for teachers can be addressed in this part also and alignment with other open licensing policies such as that for open data, open science, etc. Now all over this or surrounding this is international cooperation so that there's international cooperation between regions, institutions, organizations as a backbone to creating a means for which knowledge is shared globally in the framework of this recommendation and this is about inter-institutional regional sectoral cooperation. This is basically the nuts and bolts of this document. I invite you of course to go and check out the specific parts of the document but just to provide you with a larger perspective. What have we been up to? We've been very busy since this recommendation was adopted and so has the rest of the world from what's seen on the OER recommendation and from the OER global meeting which has been very dynamic. We have launched the OER dynamic coalition and this is a coalition of activities. It's a means to support the different ongoing activities at UNESCO and within the framework of this we have done a number of activities. We've had a series of webinars that look at different issues for example copyright, capacity building, policy. We've had a mapping of the available online and offline courses. We've revised the UNESCO guidelines for the Inclusions of Learners with Disabilities with the look at emergency situations and it's in the framework of the UNPRPD, the UN Partnership on Rights with Persons with Disabilities. We have a large project going on in Sahar which is through our UNESCO Decor Office on Policy, Capacity, Building and Francophone Resources and other language resources, other languages in English. We have done a developed French version of a very important course that's been developed by the OER UNESCO OER chair in New Zealand that's on licensing and this is just an idea of some of the things that have happened since then. So there is into going to today's discussion we have as you noticed not just that the whole world has been through a pandemic since this recommendation was adopted and in this light UNESCO put out a joint call for knowledge sharing through OER and in this framework we called that this was an opportunity for us to, for us as a global community to build something new and to make it so that there's a foundation for systematically integrating OER in the future of learning and in this regard we're going to be looking at three main questions today and we have a very packed schedule and we will be repeating these questions three times and basically we're talking about the fact that COVID-19 has been a trigger for renewed interest in OER and this made the COVID crisis has repositioned the recommendation and it's an important starting point for us in this discussion and in some ways the recommendation in many ways has become much more relevant higher education institutions and distance learning have taken a different and more enhanced role in learning and education than they've had before this crisis and it's important that we work together and share and share our experiences and see how we can move forward to make a positive impact but there has been some bottlenecks the crisis has been a source of withdrawal and we have had an era in which sharing has been enhanced and also there has been other issues that have come up digital materials have been shared and there has been a second wave realization that it's not just sharing digital materials but the importance is that they be openly licensed that's very important for development and for real knowledge creation and the real the potential new power of openness has become much more important and the pandemic has given us a learning moment so it's important that we don't waste this very important opportunity and in this fight we will be looking at the three questions on the screen throughout the three panels the discussions will be the first panel will look at capacity building multi-lingualism we'll have Dr. Jehan Osman, Dr. Jane Agu and Dr. Skander Ganya and Dr. Richard Jamal who will be speaking on this and the second panel we'll have Dr. Lisa Petritis, Dr. Talani and Dr. Maria Soledad Montoya and the final panel and they will look at policy sustainability accessibility and quality and the final panel will be on international cooperation and we have Gaspard Hrestes from Slovenia the national he's the secretary general of this national commission Neal Butcher from South Africa from OVR Africa and Sanjay Mishra from the Common Laws of Learning we'll also be looking at this it's very packed so I will stop very quickly and we will have time for question and answer between the three panels and with that off we go so I give the floor now to Jehan. I'm representing the point of view of higher education in Egypt and the MENA region and of course I have I cannot say that I have like complete awareness but of what I've heard and what I've interacted with as a member of that sector that the impact varied dramatically from one country to the other and from one sector within the country to the other depending on multiple things and so the reaction in Egypt and a lot of the Arab world was not about the integration of OVR or not but how to continue and maintain education despite the pandemic and the question was how do we integrate online learning and how do we reach all these students so that they can go on with their education. In Egypt there was not talk about open OVR or not but there was more about available and free resources for students and these were developed through the Egyptian Knowledge Bank very few universities integrated OVR's mostly in Lebanon so the the issue was more about about there was definitely a lot of like inequality issues and accessibility issues for refugees, for poorer sectors of societies, for residents of rural areas, for girls but these were not a matter of OVR or not or having materials or not but they were more at the basic need of internet or not and computers or not and so for many just having internet at home was considered a luxury and as such many students in higher education around the Arab world could not continue with that education during the pandemic and I let my colleagues talk further about the situation and their parts of the world. Scander, can you hear me? Yes, my name is Scander Genia, I'm the Director General of Digital Affairs at the Ministry of Education in Tunisia and it's my pleasure to share with you our experiences of this situation as they relate to the pandemic on the one hand and on the other hand how they relate to the development of open educational resources and we discussed this issue in 2019 we thought that we were only facing this issue in terms of digital resources but unfortunately with the pandemic we've learned that there are other issues that relate to the situation of Tunisia but also the rest of the world and mainly in terms of infrastructure and access to that infrastructure which varies greatly depending on the regions so you could say that there's not equal opportunities in different countries and in different areas of Tunisia not just in terms of accessibility but also in terms of competency development for teachers because we're facing a situation where teachers are asked to teach using digital materials but there are great variations in terms of the teachers skills and how they can adapt to this situation what's most important is to highlight that even if technology is used and available for some persons learning models are not necessarily adapted there's not a clear model when it comes to the use of these learning systems and this brings us to resources because even if there are resources even if there are resources available are they suited to the user population there's a great variability in terms of these resources they're not always capitalized on they're used in a specific channel for example for example on websites but this isn't always available in rural areas so as you can see there are a number of issues here the pandemic is an opportunity and it has allowed us to see the gaps that we have in terms of digital learning models for example and in international conferences I was able to participate in some conferences where it was said that we don't have a clear model in terms of integrating these learning models in the digital context so with this pandemic we've had an opportunity although of course there are also issues that the pandemic has brought about it's an opportunity to restructure and reposition our digital and digital development strategy in the field of learning and teaching now when it comes to digital resources despite the lack of digital resources and the lack of a clear strategy in terms of the development of digital resources in Tunisia we've been trying to share a regional strategy with UNESCO to strengthen the use of open resources so that we can move forward globally and regionally but what we've noticed in Tunisia is that these resources are not necessarily always available so we've had to try to create linkages and to create a single a portal for access to these resources so that's what we've been trying to do to bring together all of the resources that are available to have them certified by teaching inspectors but also to allow teachers to share these resources with a specific model but the problem that we have now is that we need a clear strategy for the development of these resources and we need to harmonize the development of these resources as well now secondly we always talk about resources available on the internet but internet isn't always accessible to everyone and what we've seen in Tunisia what we've done is to launch an educational TV program which is an interactive program and covers all education cycles secondary school high high school and higher education in Tunisia there are around 11.5 million inhabitants and in education in the three cycles there are around 2.3 million students at all of these levels and there are around 150 000 teachers in primary and secondary school and around 6 130 schools primary secondary and higher education so we launched this school tv initiative but we started with a pilot framework in order to make these resources available now i say this because when it comes to the third question you've asked about solutions and innovations we need to take into account the various channels that can be used to make these resources available including the tv channel but what's important to remember is that when it comes to pedagogical material it's something that requires a lot of work if we want to develop digital resources and i believe that UNESCO is the right platform to advance and move towards the development of these resources now i'm talking about teachers and educators who need to be prepared and trained for digital transformation as well as digital production and open resources i'll stop here and give the floor to my colleagues thank you there are many things which are getting um into the direction of mainstreaming OER so in particularly so if i'm speaking about Slovenia and Europe so the main issue about the accessibility to OER and how to how to make them available and usable is being discussed here around quite a lot there were several projects to be supported by the European Commission in the previous calls um uh so several have been successful of course several nots as well but certainly this is something which is a key point so the key point is that whatever you talk to anyone um in particularly teachers or content creators you will have the same the same response which would be you know it's very difficult to find it's very difficult to use and it's very difficult to implement OER and we would like to help which would be a pragmatic simple usable user friendly solution and this is why things are being developed at our end so we uh for example consortia partners that we have been involved with just finished one of the one of the project which was called x5 gone and i can share then later on um some of the stuff that we did and so if you go to the to the site you will find out several tools for this cross-lingual recommendation OER use analytics discovery so we collected we are automatically collecting OERs and we are having right now more than half a million of OER materials collected materials uh um not just collected but also um uh also uh protested in a way that you can use that in various forums in particularly that would mean uh also multilingualities so that we take care about the automatic translation of those and uh and of course the the idea and the the tools that are there to be used to uh essentially become a website becoming part of the global OER network to support this cross recommendation and uh one point of view so those are the things that certainly are being done there are many other things as well so as you can understand uh from the uh from the research and development in the area so for example the multilinguality or let's say automatic translation is getting better every day and that would include various types of modalities so not just stacks but also spoken world and and and the videos which essentially is something that is being used very hardly today so uh there is this is one part of it so the technical development the other part which is still missing is OER development in the sense that the people will really develop OERs and proclaim that them as an OER with appropriate license still a lot of works a bit have to be done there so there are many immediate initiatives here in in Europe that actually goes into that direction to promote OER to the teachers community in particular and then also to to the community of TVAT so so the lifelong learning part so there is a lot of work still to be done but things are getting better and that's because mainly because of now of this new reality that you know we never know when and how uh we will switch to we have to switch to online education and this is something that as it's in the first wave and the second wave in most cases countries will actually just just solve issues on the spot without any strategic directions and this is why now the Europe is going into that looking at more strategic directions then there is quite a lot of discussion on in particularly on using AI education and so we are involved in of course with UNESCO in particularly in the new recommendation on ethics in AI and then there is quite a lot of work on EU level so there is a specific strategic group now discussing about how AI should be looked at as a tool a set of tools that can be used in education and then there is plenty of work in the Council of Europe Council of Europe is an international organization that out of those is the only one that actually can provide something which is a legislative document that that has to be used by by all the member states and there is a quite a lot of work on OECD as well and particularly in the sense of how the technology can support the open education and as I say as I said so many national ecosystems education ecosystems are now aware of OER so I'm talking about Europe EU so it's aware about the OER aware about the the the positive and negative elements of OER and and they're trying to push their their investments into that some countries are doing that better some countries and doing not that better but certainly this is something which is a distinction between before COVID and now let's say after COVID period why it's still more relevant today certainly because of the things that already said so in particularly because we need to find out solutions to support national educational ecosystems with access open access to open educational resources now on one side this is related to to promote OER for the better understanding of OER and on the other side there is a need which goes a little bit beyond what is the current education which is about the flexible and pragmatic learning scenarios which are also including the TV as I said already before now problems which are there as I said so it's still there's still missing the usable and user friendly platform and tools the one we developed is there so and this is automatic so that would mean that we provide to anyone access to to this processing platform through various APIs and various tools that we develop and everything is completely free the multilinguality is adding every day so that would mean that more and more languages are being involved into that and this is a very good sign for the for also not just multilingual but also multicultural OER's personalization of learning is being discussed in relation to access to private and personal data so some of the ideas are there Europe is quite quite strict in that response so following GDPR now is the GDPR 2.0 being being developed so things that are getting in the direction of creating the all necessary measures for private and personal data and then there is a lot of discuss about the access and use of these data so it's not just about how to prevent but also how can we gain or how the system or how the education can gain from this information and this data so all in all it's different certainly because of the lessons learned that we had recently it's different because Europe is certainly trying to get into this multicultural environment so trying to open education following everything that we did so far on the Bologna Reform and and all the other stuff and so certainly Europe is looking at for expanding these ideas and these models to other countries as well so that will be briefly about what the state is here as I said I'm pretty much positive because I see that there is not just a you know something that would be a good idea but it's also a need now from the education environment to get into OVR and open education thank you thank you very much Micha thank you I think we've had a very rich discussion we've seen that in fact Micha has shown the different developments so the field of OVR has become very sophisticated it's become very the EU in the EU it's very highly developed AI is being introduced Scander pointed out that while there were bottlenecks in getting resources up and getting things going it has been solved there is a solutions that have been put in place in Tunisia Jihan pointed out of course that in fact connectivity just by itself is a very big issue and was something that needed to be addressed and was extremely challenging at the beginning we have three questions on the line I can answer the first one very quickly then I'll give the floor to Scander and to Micha to whom they're addressed the first question was the 200 2012 declaration paved the way for the recommendation yes it did we had two world congresses the first one in 2012 the 2012 the main point of the 2012 declaration was that repaying for publicly educational resources made with public funds should be made available on an open license that was a cornerstone of the recommendation and remained in the Lubean OVR declaration which was used as the structure actually was the main it was the basis of the discussion of the current recommendation and it was also maintained into the recommendation so the answer is yes Scander if you'd like to take the floor to address the question that is up in the chat on the translation yes the question was a translation of free resources available into other languages and whether it means that it can sort of reduce the need for other and new resources and the answer is sort of yes and no no of course if we have a standard reference model then having resources available can be translated in whatever language French or another one and can lead to proper use and it means less need to develop these new resources but look for instance at resources as actual lessons okay teaching lessons well you know that these need to be to comply with very specific technical and educational standards and there are a number of resources that can't be accepted by educators because of their constraints yes these resources might convey something that is required but if it's not in the right kind of format it won't be acceptable or usable by educators so sometimes within a given country or even within a same a given discipline amongst teachers who teach the same kind of thing they might not always accept the resource or agree to use it as it stands now in Tunisia and I'm sure it's the same in other countries there are there's the inspectorate of schools that sets the pedagogy that needs to be used and I'm sure that's true in other places too so to answer your question I'd say that if the resource actually corresponds to the model set for a given place then it can be simply translated but in other instances that is not necessarily the case and in Tunisia for instance there are a number of resources that are not certified by the inspectors in even though they've been devised and set up by teachers themselves thank you Erskander Alexander says in the chat that it's an issue of adaptation so it's adoption versus adaptation So that was for me right yes the last one can you can you reply can you can repeat please for Mitja is interoperability still an issue in the diverse types of resources we adopt and adapt so many OERs in closed formats no so the thing that I've explained a bit so this automatic content gathering and processing this is actually being solved automatically so there are tools and capacities and technologies that can do that so interoperability is not an issue anymore of course for some some special special aspects could be but essentially for the things that are there mostly widely used this is not the case anymore so that can be solved technically okay thank you very much I think we're right on time so I will thank this panelist for this for their very important interventions and give the floor now to the second panel which is on policy sustainability accessibility and quality and with panelista you have the floor great thank you very much well I want to talk about sustainability and what the recommendation initially set out was to really encourage a comprehensive and integrated sustainability model so this was going to be looking at procurement models by institutions and governments how we could catalyze new models for funding and how we could build capacity across the silos of government and institutions to really support continuous improvement and OER itself as a sustainability model what I think we've really seen and what's been different with COVID is that really it moves so it really moves past this idea just that economics is the main model around sustainability and that's what we focus on in the words the money and the funding that is brought in certainly it's important but I think where it's come in is different and that it's much more around creating communities of practice and the professional development issues around accessibility and translation so it's really what we're seeing is it's more about so sustainability is really about developing the capacity of people and I think that's what we've seen here at now during COVID and the pandemic whether it's for training or awareness building or collaboration it stipends for educators to actually do this work so these recovery efforts are not just about OER or carrying the flag for OER it's really saying where can they use the adoption and the adaptation of OER be built into the existing mechanisms around education now really specifically I think some interesting things we've seen here in the US is that those who were using OER already had a much easier time adapting not only because the resources were already digital but because they already had a certain kind of mindset that they were thinking about how you adopt or I mean how you adapt a resource what is it that a specific learner needs how can I align that to standards those are the kinds of questions that when you are adopting OER that you're thinking about very different than if you're just using the standard textbook that's been used for 10 years and you keep using it you're really thinking about about the student and what their learning needs are so in some ways I think with COVID the emphasis has now gone back to kind of the professionalism of the educator as being the expert who knows best about learning who knows best about what it is a student needs how to accelerate that student learning and I want to also just talk about some of the pieces that have really come in around equity and inclusion and accessibility as well you know accessibility is something that we think a lot about and has come right to the center I think around OER and when we think about accessibility we think about can a person with a disability do they have the opportunity to acquire the same information can they engage with the material in the same way can they really enjoy what it is that that service or resource has just as much as a person without a disability I think if we think about OER accessibility you know it really is about multiple options for learners it's are the materials perceivable are they usable are they understandable and and this is really what if you've heard of this term of UDL or universal design for learning it's about having flexible options to to understand the material and to express how we learn and and what we know these are really I think some of the pieces that we're seeing post COVID people are looking at much more specifically I wanted to invite also Marisol to speak a bit about the example of again I'm going to say this is where we're not just looking at procurement but the examples of being able to build with a community practice that really transcend and build on the original initiatives and Marisol are you there if you are thank you Marisol Marisol if you'd like you can speak in Spanish we have um we have interpretation thank you so much Lisa I'm going to check for for the Spanish okay and in this topic that Lisa has told us about sustainability the topic that we're talking about the one that she's talking about in terms of sustainability is a film which much has already been done but there's still a lot to do I mean of course there are many initiatives that have been taken on OER and open education and let me give a few examples for instance a recent major project conducted in Mexico involved three contributors the private sector the government and the universities and we were working on something that was well really tailored to the needs of Mexico now a number of things were done namely amongst other things one relating to the use of OER in the context of MOOCs and we had also to look at for instance training on the energy sector we had 12 modules with 1200 OER resources available there are two sets of resources if you will one is an open library and you could in a way access this information or we did things in two different ways first of all there were 12 as I said MOOCs are with specific courses works of workshops masters courses that relied on these 12 1200 OER and on the other hand there was activities that were there to enable us to identify new projects new resources to try and set up innovation networks within education that's one of the things I could I was willing to mention as concerns concrete examples relating to sustainable development now a number of questions have been asked and we wanted to share them with you relating to this specific topic first of all in what are the parts of the education system government institutional or otherwise is existing work taking place in which the creation adoption and adaptation of OER could be embedded and the second question was how can you ensure that the costs local and or regional in terms of adoption and adaptation and not necessarily borne by the teachers and or educators and learners so those are the two questions we might want to look at thank you thank you very much myself could I give the floor to tell you tell me Dr. Neil so good afternoon good morning to everybody pleasure to be here so we had a small deck of slides which I won't be able to show now and just a couple of them but I'll speak instead following what the colleagues have done and what we're discussing in terms of policy we highlighted some elements which you thought were particularly useful in the recommendation is that the recommendation today is more relevant than ever because it expands beyond the discussions on open licenses so of course it provides a definition of what an OER is and it discusses permissions but it goes way beyond that and I think it's a very important point to think about OER beyond just the idea of open licenses it also does a really good job of expanding our notion of of policy making beyond just large-scale national implementation so of course we do need top-down implementations and large frameworks that can help us move forward in terms of policy but it has put I think a more reasonable emphasis on the the actions of you know bottom-up designs and bottom-up top-down concomitant designs where we have a lot of institutions and small organizations and and even at the larger government levels at smaller sections of the government where we're making changes that can impact in a large scale instead of I think what we did in the beginning which was to focus on very big large national policies and we found that to be fairly hard to do so that entailed I think one of the one of things that's that's present on the recommendation is this idea that we need to engage people from all sectors in designing policy it is not something that we do to other people it's something that we do together with other people and I think across the world when we do your surveys of policies and we have maps of policies we can we can see that a lot of the initiatives either at the discussion or the implementation level have happened at states smaller institutions and then as slowly as they build they get larger organizations and the national you know temperature around OER to to grow and finally I think what recommendation does today which is is even more relevant is that we're thinking about it systemically I think this is an incipient point but a very important one is that we're starting to think about OER policy together with other policies so instead of just trying to come up with a single policy that's just around OER I think where the recommendation does and is very urgent today is to think about how we align OER policy with other types of policies so engaging with ICT policy open access policy which many countries do have at a large scale or states have at a large scale engaging OER within those frameworks makes it a lot easier to have policy come around so in order to give an example of this as something that would be you know contextualized what we're discussing here one of the examples that we have is we recently just last month worked with the state of Sao Paulo and it's a huge state with more than 5000 schools and three and a half million students which is kind of the size of Uruguay just in terms of students and we worked with the state of Sao Paulo to develop policy which was approved last month and OER specific OER policy that mandates that all materials created by the state of Sao Paulo's secretary of education have to be an open educational resource but in order to do that we did a lot of workshops with folks from you know from teachers and managers administrators we played what we have and it's called the open policy game which has been used in many parts of the world it's a it's a policy game that gets people engaged over a period of you know four to six hours to think about the technical aspects the pedagogical aspects and the legal aspects and we map out the challenges and then we go about designing policy based on the local needs and the assessment of the of the local population it's a long-term process that starts with tools like this to get people engaged from the beginning and the policy itself becomes of course very important but it also helps us think because we're thinking systemically to get us to get these actors as you know as really engaged in the process as they move forward so when when we change people's minds about about OER and we get them engaged the chance that the policy will survive is much much higher than just getting a document approved and I think we've seen a lot of these examples over the years of getting large policy projects including us here in Brazil that ultimately don't get things moving forward because we don't have actors engaged in this process so getting getting people to buy in I think as Lisa was saying for sustainability is incredibly important but also for the sustainability of policies as well and so to finalize we had a couple of questions we wanted to put out which I think would be useful for other folks so questions based on in a sense of this reflection that we did in our group which is what are in what ways can we think of these large national policies as policies that we can leverage to create smaller OER oriented policies so when we look at the when we start to think about OER policies what can we look at at the national landscape that could support us rather than trying to think about creating necessarily an OER policy from scratch so is there an ICT policy that could be leveraged is it an open access policy or a willingness to work with open access or open source software what is there already in place that we can leverage to create and support the idea of OER policy of course the OER recommendation itself is such a policy in a sense you know we can look at the OER recommendation at at different sectors of government and say this is something that we could use as a supporting document and finally just to finalize another example is for institutions particularly in higher education institutions to what degree can you look at peers to see what other peers are doing to leverage OER policy in your institution and I'll give one example that relates related to the COVID pandemic which is in Brazil a lot of institutions didn't have a copyright policy and most of them still don't not an official copyright policy and when we moved online and we had to put our videos online and all materials online teachers panic administrators panic students panic and we started a movement here in Brazil where we had this template from one institution that was approved by by the set of that institution and we basically remixed that policy to three and four other institutions that adopted that same copyright policy during the pandemic and so instead of starting from scratch in the spirit of what we are what we did is we got a policy that was approved somewhere else we tweaked it to get it adopted and and planted in other institutions so that others could speedily and quickly in the spirit again of what we are to get this done and get their policies in place during the pandemic and solve this very immediate problem so I'll stop with that and I'll send it back to you saying that to my colleagues if they want to comment thanks again thank you very much thank you that's really very good would you mind them tell would you mind putting those questions into the chat I think they're very yeah we just put both sets of questions I want to just bridge a bridge between the policy question and the sustainability question what tell had just said is what are the larger policies in your country that you could leverage to begin with your institutional policies and similar around sustainability you know thinking about what other parts of the education system in existing work where existing work is taking place that this creation and adoption of OER could be embedded as a sustainability model so I think we're sort of asking the same question one from the sustainability point of view and one from the policy point of view is this question of where do you embed into existing efforts that are taking place whether it's around ICT or open source the remaking of libraries these are I think where we're seeing this sort of the advent of the impact of COVID and the pandemic realizing that we can't just simply carry the banner for OER that it has to be fully integrated into the existing education system policies and practices yes indeed I think we're coming back to the concept of mainstreaming it it can't just stand out alone because it's too it's too complicated now it's too big and there's a lot of with the pandemic we've had a lot of different initiatives that are in the same areas that really could be reinforced if they're together with that I'd like to give the floor to Jane Jane Agbo from Nigeria are you there Jane we're here let me see Jane Jane are you there you think you're here yes the floor is yours Jane to give us are you able to get on Jane okay um while we see if Jane is able to get on could we go to the questions perhaps and just see if we can open the floor very briefly we have quite a bit of time and the questions are actually in the discussion on this one but I'll just read them out the first question was that what larger policies in your country can leverage to begin can you leverage to begin your institutional policies what institutions that are similar to yours that you can reach out for examples of strategies has this been an experience that other people in the discussion have had the second question if you'll allow me well I'd like to share an experience with you in Latin American countries there are only four or five countries that have a national policy in terms of open access which require that all projects with public funding produce articles patents and products that are open educational resources or in open access so these policies that exist in these Latin American countries allow educational institutions particularly higher education institutions to mobilize open access actions and this has brought about an increase in open repositories which gather scientific knowledge of institutions and make it accessible so these national policies have enabled other policies to generate open access infrastructure which enables that mobilization and as was mentioned there's still a lot to be done in this field because these policies aren't always supported whether at national or institutional level with a follow-up on what's happening in terms of the implementation of these resources and to date there are no incentive systems to incentivize and encourage this open access work and research so there's still a lot to be done in this field in order to create linkages with the elements that have previously been mentioned in terms of policy and sustainability thank you very much thank you very much Lisa would you would you like to add anything on this point um were you going to actually have Jane come in I wasn't sure I was trying to get Jane to come in but there seems to be a hiccups so if you'd like to take the time to provide some background to the ideas that were put forward that first of policies which can leverage other policies and also the the other points that was made by templates and remixing policy yeah I think that well there's there's two pieces of that I think looking at the ways in which sustainability is being bolstered by not only additional funding that that is coming in through the reallocation of resources so not on the for the purchase and the purchasing and the cost of materials but again really emphasizing where the people need to be supported and that's mostly with training that's with the creation of libraries and repositories it's looking at where there might be accessibility or diversity in equity initiatives where OER can be brought into those areas so those are how I think both at the governmental level as well as institutions those are some of the places where existing work really can be can be leveraged and somebody wrote also about the crossing the silos of open and I think while I don't think that has ever been actively discouraged I think really looking at the what is open access what is open data open research open resources we are finally at that point where we really can look at these kinds of efforts and cooperation not just across institutions but across countries is really going to bring us the biggest benefit and I know that there'll be a conversation around this in terms of international cooperating cooperation but when we talk about not only sustainability but about policies I think this is where we're going to see significant changes thank you I think you're bringing up another point that is through the through the last through this pandemic period online has become mainstream mainstream and that has brought together the openness issues and we even have we even have right now another recommendation that's on open science and open science has become another issue with the pandemic so I think we're seeing a sort of snowball effect here and it's a good thing but it's also a complicated issue anyway I am very happy now that we've got Jane online and in front of us and on screen and with the microphone so I give the floor to Jane Jane Francis from National Open University in Nigeria please go ahead. In your opening remark you noted that the pandemic has given us a learning moment so we don't we need to leverage on that and don't waste this opportunity and I'm actually supposed to talk on capacity building right the first panel so I want to start by saying that everybody the institutions and the government all have the consensus that the consensus of many institutions of institutions and the government is that everyone has the right to education and the this pandemic with this pandemic there's an urgent need for government to be made aware of the prayer of UNESCO recommendation which is also very dear to my heart coming from the developing world and correct the open licensing of educational materials produced with government funds we need to increase advocacy targeted advocacy in this area specifically for the ministers of education and so on because we need to help unlock this will help us to unlock knowledge for the benefit of all okay and also the new normal has increased the utilization of ICT in teaching and learning and both digital immigrants and natives are left with no choice but adjust to this new normal and it requires significant time spent online searching for teaching materials this presents a good opportunity to learn how to assess to create share integrate OER in teaching and learning and a good example is a what UNESCO is bringing or brought on board the ICT competency framework harnessing OER for teaching and learning is a very good initiative why the recommendations are relevant it gives us the opportunity to encourage embedding OER policy into our national frameworks we don't need to go on coming up with something elaborate all we need to do is to understand appreciate the beauty of open educational resources and embed embed that in our national policies we have bottlenecks people are still unaware of open educational resources especially from my own end of the world and also we have what we call the approach avoidance conflict association we are associated with embracing open educational resources which could be triggered by poor inside in this area so more capacity view than is needed here and also misperceptions why sometimes you'll find OER champions they find themselves working a lonely part because of these misperceptions about open educational resources and also fear about sharing knowledge and also opening up their contents fear of scrutiny and so on so we all need to be open minded we have technology challenges we have a low political will and equip mention in capacity building is still low solutions innovations from my own end regional and global collaboration is needed for example UNESCO collaborated with my institution in 2014 to champion the establishment of an OER unit in my institution we also need the capacity building as some of the innovations and solutions to build awareness to understand developing and integrating OERs in teaching and learning also to and also take note of converting them and also developing OERs in local languages and the leverage on open licensed tools and their natural OER resources and also very important is to promote digital literacy skill another solution we need to look at is to nurture our champions like I said earlier we are actually very lonely when we are championing this initiative so we need a little bit of understanding and nurturing and encouragement in order to to keep doing the work for example in my UN institutions I had to every Wednesday we have advocacy day so in my institutions we usually we designed an OER T-shirt which we put on to work every Wednesday and people come around to understand to to share and to try to learn from us and try to understand what open educational resources is all about and lastly another innovation which is what I'm mentioning is online courses on integrating OER in teaching and learning there is a common way of learning MOOC ongoing now my institution has also leverage on that to use the OER content to design our MOOC that will is actually starting on the 4th of October and as we speak we have about 20000 participants ready to start the MOOC already so these are some of the innovations solutions and the way forward thank you for your time thank you thank you very much Jane thank you very much I think it touched me that you said it's it's sometimes a very lonely job and it's hard to get people to understand what you're doing and why you're doing it and what how it's done basically I think that's an important point but now I think the framework has changed somewhat I noticed let me see the questions there are two questions Jane you have a Marisol there's a request for you to share the link for the 1200 OERs that you mentioned and Jane apart from institutions are they ground up initiatives say students it sounds like there's a lot of ingenious work done by Nigerian youth this one's for you Jane did I get that yes that's yours do you want me to read it again yes okay apart from institutions are there ground up initiatives say students it sounds like there's a lot of ingenious work done by Nigerian youth yes although we are still at the we are still taking the baby step but there are a lot of OER works and initiatives coming up like I said my institution has quite a bit of open educational resources and we also try to focus on the massive open online courses and through the collaborations and the institutional alliance we've been able to collaborate with UNESCO with the Commonwealth of Learning specifically for with the Retrieval Institute one of the institutes of the Commonwealth of Learning to disseminate training in this area so we are we have a lot of champions coming up now and a lot of sizable amount of research in this area which is very much needed thank you very much does anybody would any of the panelists like to add anything now then I would like to ask I think I'd like to go back one step we have a little bit of time three or three or four minutes according to the schedule and I'd like to ask Jihan if she would like to add anything more about some of the ways that in Egypt these some of the bottlenecks and innovations that have been presented have been overcome Jihan would you like to take this floor sure I mean in Egypt a lot of the problems in terms of higher education is really related to when it comes to OER and when it comes to online learning is that I mean there are two different issues but there is lack of awareness there's a great enthusiasm for MOOCs and open educational open courses but OER is a different story there is lack of awareness there there's definitely the there are a lot of problems with capacity issues that that and centralization so I mean teachers do not have the freedom to just choose any materials online and adapt them and use them in their classrooms especially in public schools and public universities these things are kind of for quality control or whatever you want to say that you can you have to very similar to Tunisia that it has to go through a process of that of quality control that certain materials are kind of pass pass the test of someone from the government and so this this really minimizes it's a totally different issue that has that beyond awareness that many teachers lack many professors definitely lack there is the issue of centralization and of course there is capacity building issues there is huge skepticism to any materials that that exist online and OERs are mostly digital there's a lot of skepticism there of course the pandemic has really helped in changing that so so for the longest of time nobody could move forward with any form of online learning and the pandemic has changed that dramatically into acceptance and excitement so I think we are definitely going to see a change in policy so higher education in Egypt there is now a requirement for every university in Egypt to include forms of online learning what these forms are is left up to the university but this is a huge shift and a promising shift another area that will be a huge bottleneck that I don't think we still have an answer for is the business model and the reward system so so usually within the public universities professors depend on selling their own textbooks and that is a huge source of income for professors changing that whole system into open educational resources or even online learning that is a huge barrier that needs to be dealt with for it to happen and for OERs really to take root in higher education especially in the public system the conversation in the private system so far has been well our students pay and they can't pay and there is no need for OERs so so there are a number of issues that are very different from what I hear my colleagues talk about and yes so we're in a different place I think but I think the pandemic has had the most positive yes it it exposed a lot of things that we have to deal with in terms of capacity building for professors in higher education content online content and the absence of policies and infrastructure issues that have caused a lot of inequality within different sectors of society but it has also really changed political will openness to other forms of education so I think in that sense the pandemic is a fantastic opportunity for our part of the world thank you very much Gian thank you I think it's really interesting that you're bringing up some you know there was always talk that you know publishers are making money of books but in fact it's not just publishers it's copyright holders already there's a there's a it's much more it's much more complex than than it's than it you would think and I think it's interesting to see that everything has just come to the surface as if you know there was a volcano and everything that came to the top and we're looking at it and then it's everything is now much more mainstream and up and being discussed and understood because of necessity and the recommendation that we did not plan to have a recommendation just two months before a pandemic first time in a hundred years but as I told you recommendations are very rare and we had only 15 in this area since 1985 so you know it was bound to happen somehow statistically some sort of thing but we didn't plan on this one so thank you thank you thank you now we've had a really what we've done up until now we've been going quite fast in this and we've looked at the first four areas of the recommendation we've looked at capacity building we've looked at quality assurance multilingualism inclusiveness we've looked at policy we've looked at sustainability now we're going to look at them all together we are going to be going to to discuss about the the different points that have to do with inter-international cooperation around the recommendation so around these points of course the UNESCO launched the OER dynamic coalition specifically for this discussion but I will give the floor I think I'm not sure how you've organized yourselves Neil are you the first speaker okay so I'll give the floor to Neil Butcher from OER Africa who will address this this point Neil the floor is yours thank you so much Zenith and it's been a fascinating conversation so far so great to hear all the points of view and to see the comments on the chat please do keep those coming through as we're talking because we'll keep monitoring those and respond to comments and queries as they come in as Zenith indicated that everything kind of gets pulled together with the conversation about international cooperation and I think some of the earlier comments that people have made really highlight again the importance of international cooperation the COVID-19 pandemic has really I think illustrated very very clearly just how important international cooperation has become so we obviously know that for managing pandemics international cooperation is absolutely essential well I think we haven't necessarily been enormously successful all the time in that but I think we've also seen that there's a growing range of problems that the world is facing that without international cooperation not simply not going to be solved and all of them are critical to the education system both in terms of what we think we need to be teaching students at all the different levels of education in order to prepare them for the world into which they're moving and for tackling the problems that we're facing but I think also also very importantly they highlight the necessity for open knowledge networks which is really what open licensing and OERs is all about so you know a good example of that is managing the economic effects of the fourth industrial revolution which we've seen accelerated by the COVID pandemic and this really calls for responses that are about the level of the nation state so that this cooperation is becoming increasingly important and open knowledge networks that facilitate legal sharing of resources and intellectual property are just critical to tackling those kinds of challenges we've seen the plus side of that in terms of the speed with which we produced vaccines and the sharing of research made that possible in many respects we've seen the downside of closed networks where that intellectual property gets caught up in proprietary systems and makes it harder particularly for people in the developing world to gain access to the technologies that are needed for success and education systems really are critical to this as Zeebs mentioned in the introductory remarks and then again now the OER recommendation has a dedicated section that focuses on promoting and reinforcing international cooperation obviously it's an agreement or an instrument between nation states so these are recommendations they can't be enforced but it does try to promote and stimulate cross-border collaboration and alliances facilitate regional and international funding mechanisms etc etc so there's a number of ways in which the recommendation is trying to create a framework for open knowledge networks in the area of education and I think this is just so important at the moment pleasingly we have seen around the OER recommendation and I think this group of people that is part of the panels presenting to you today is illustrative of that is that UNESCO launched this dynamic coalition and we have a broad membership representing all regions that's actually supporting implementation of the OER recommendation and this is a really excellent example of good collaboration there's also informal networks that sit around the dynamic coalition of organizations that come together to see how they can help with the process and I think the more we do that kind of thing the better also as a direct consequence of the OER recommendation UNESCO's DACA office in partnership with ZNEP has been facilitating an OER initiative in the Sahel region to grow OER activities in Francophone African countries and this is a direct product of the OER recommendation this kind of collaboration I think represents the true potential of OER because resources in French are OERs are less available in French than they are in for example English so collaboration between countries to stimulate the growth and development of OERs and then to share them across national borders particularly in contexts like the Sahel region where governments have very limited resources and where there are acute developmental challenges that require cost effective educational solutions is a great example of good international collaboration and then lastly another example flowing from some of UNESCO's work is around the ICT competence framework for teachers where we've seen a cascading initiative of individual countries producing materials designed to educate teachers around the use of ICT in the classroom so it focuses very much on that issue of digital skills that we heard about a short while ago and then we've seen that because those resources have been created under open licenses it's been possible for other countries to pick up take those resources adapt them to national contexts and policy environments and also in fact in many instances to translate them into other languages and this has now led to interregional meetings where the different countries that are working on these projects individually are coming together OER Commons which Lisa heads up as part of her work actually has a dedicated hub for the ICT competence framework for teachers where resources are shared and this again is a great example of how governments can collaborate with each other in informal networks that make it more cost effective to deliver solutions that are responding to the kinds of challenges that we are facing that are common across the world unfortunately though these kinds of examples tend to be quite few and far between and the focus is very much still on either national or institutional efforts and so with that in mind we posed a few questions I'm going to turn over to my panel colleagues to hear their thoughts first and then we'd really love to open up to the group to hear your thoughts because I think these questions pull together all the threads of the previous panels and those questions are in front of you but before I do that let me first hand over to my colleague Gasper and then he'll hand over to Sanjay just to get a few thoughts from them in response to these questions that are posed on the screen now. Great thank you Neil and welcome also and hello a big hello also from my side I hope that you can hear me well based also and we discussed with Neil beforehand based on these questions and I am specifically now targeting this big question why international cooperation and collaboration is needed or growing also in importance for the field of open educational resources or educational open education in such and I see here if I'm looking in the framework of the sustainable development goals in order to I don't know strengthen the means and the implementation of a global partnership for sustainable development also in the field of education especially in SDG4 I can I don't know see and identify probably four main points why international collaboration in the field of open education and open educational resources is of such importance. First of all we all know demographics in the world have changed from after the Second World War when in the 50s and 60s we could count probably more than a half so 60 percent of the world's children living in the more developed part of the world nowadays it's only 30 or something percent and most of the children so more than two-thirds of the children working in I mean living and growing up in in the developing world and here I can see that that in resource constrained countries our school systems oftenly and oftenly stretched beyond their capacities and in this in this means I can say that open educational resources can can play and do play an important role and of course then more or less international collaboration with this developing world the second point is that financing is usually not aligned with the needs with the needs I say that guru countries they have less time or a more difficult time to to raise revenue and here I see also the importance and the need for international collaboration the third point I have identified or I have identified is that we can see that there is a massive shortage of teachers especially in the developing world and here there's another need for international collaboration which I see and the last and not least point is that I don't the field of education and and of open education based on especially if we we see the pandemic if we see climate changes etc it's I think more or less normal that we have to see and and when we when we recognize that schools were awfully and mostly shut down a shutdown in the time of the pandemic and that different ways of education needed to be to be invented like distance learning etc so here I see the four main points why international collaboration in the field of how we are is is of such importance for this point being I would hand over to you Sanjaya thank you Sanjaya you may be on mute thank you guys but thank you Neil thanks Jenna for this opportunity hello everyone from whoever wherever you are I'm going to talk about international cooperation from the experience of Commonwealth of Learning and trying to address the questions that we have planned for discussion with the participants so everyone is welcome to share their views and additional thoughts Commonwealth of Learning has been very active in international collaboration and I'll just highlight a few examples in the last couple of years we have developed several courses through a cooperation amongst various institutions in the Commonwealth and one particular example that I would like to highlight is development of two courses or two programs on diploma in mobile app development and certificate in web application development where six open universities in Asia and Africa join together institution in Pakistan, India, Nigeria, Tanzania, Malaysia and Sri Lanka to develop these courses we have a platform which is over 100 courses which are available for adaptation by anyone so people can visit that site to see what are the courses available most of the courses are result of international collaboration in the Commonwealth so I'm trying to give some good examples of how international collaboration has worked and as the pandemic start Commonwealth of Learning started an international partnership for open distance learning which was basically around the use of OER today we have over 60 partners in that and there are over 200 courses that are shared by the partner institution so the pandemic has done one thing that a lot of institutions have come forward to share educational resources not necessarily everything are in OER but at least people are getting access to those teaching and learning resources which were probably not available before but availability of those resources for people to get advantage during these hard times are very important and very useful we also started an international initiative with an hashtag OER for COVID with OER foundation ICDE UNESCO World Bank and others OE Global which is also part of this initiative and this was this was very significantly important because it highlighted certain inherent needs in the need for OER in the early days of the pandemic around the world not just in the Commonwealth so we had 79 people from 79 countries participating in this international consultation and as a result of that we also offered several courses on OER copyright and licensing along with ICDE and OER foundation so important needs were highlighted and the important thing was there are two critical elements capacity of people to switch to online learning and use OER was limited and that needed support and most important curated open educational resources were not available finding OER has always been a challenge so curation become an important part and a lot of curation activities were also taken care of particularly in the in the Pacific region where we currently run a big project in partnership with the ministry of foreign affairs and trade in New Zealand University of South Pacific the the skills international and OER foundation again where we are offering capacity building through a number of MOOCs on online learning and OER and digital skills for OER and particularly the focus has been around curation of open educational resources locally produced or locally adapted for local curriculum so these are some of the good examples along with that our focus has always been on policy policy development we have this OER policy guidelines publication developed with UNESCO this this publication is being heavily used in many countries for developing policies at national level and institutional levels recently call has also started a new platform called micro course platform called call commons dot org and this platform has one of the course that is on understanding open educational resources which was originally developed with Neil Butcher and this course has now reached over 13,000 participants of which more than 52 percent have successfully completed and have received a certificate on the the course the platform has currently five courses which are available for anyone to access these are all open educational resources available on the CCBYSA license so the important thing about all those things are availability of support from the institution and from the partner institution both in in case and in kind and I want to allude to one point that Gasper had identified about the availability of adequate finances and that's the most important part boils down to both institutional and individual level whether people are interested to give their rights to a private publisher or they want to release on an OER it's important to make people understand that the advantage of making open is far greater than the finances they receive or how do we compensate those individual efforts to bring them on board to make things OER not just by mandating policies but by providing incentive in terms of financial resources and in terms of creating enabling policies that will help people to use OER for their professional development or professional promotion in field like research publications are counted but OER work are not counted in educational institutions to a large extent. Institutions also need to see that how do they can bring more funding to creation of knowledge content rather than form the face-to-face teaching learning to turn into a resource-based learning environment so with that I will stop here and look for questions and comments that we can all address. Thank you so I'm just going to put the questions we had up on the screen and invite any inputs from different people basically what we were wondering was about any examples that people have of ways in which international cooperation in the field of OERs is growing in importance and how you feel it can help to support the transformation of education systems around the world I think you've heard from all the panelists some examples of how that can happen but I'm sure there's lots of others then also we'd be really interested to hear any questions or inputs about barriers and bottlenecks preventing greater international cooperation and do you feel that that's a problem that's getting worse or that's improving are the barriers more or less particularly in this kind of new international order in which we're living are there other examples of good practice in international cooperation that provide lessons from which we can learn and then lastly what what else can we do to stimulate greater international cooperation I think that would be we as as the dynamic coalition we as the participants in this panel and obviously we as UNESCO as well there's been one query just to get the ball rolling and maybe Gaspir if you could say a little bit more about the role of governments with respect to the recommendation and the national commissions to just give people a sense as to what might be possible there thanks Neil I would have raised my hand especially because of this question because probably not not if I could talk now other examples but I would like to highlight and all of you or most of you know that how much I do like and do support are the the very idea of of having established such a dynamic coalition for the implementation of the of the recommendation it was I mean to be also a little proud an idea from coming from Slovenia and as you know I am representing or I'm coming from the Slovenian National Commission for UNESCO so here this is a a great example how a national commission which is in most of the countries or in all countries which are established by by the respective governments so they are part of the government itself but they are a somehow a bridge between the governments UNESCO headquarters and of course the field so the field in this in this case means the OER community or experts in this case and and as Mithja reflected before when he was talking Zainab I don't know if you know that about but but there are first discussions that in case of the recommendation UNESCO's recommendation on the ethics of AI also in this case the the SHS sector is is thinking based on our our proposal is thinking in about something similar probably they will not name its dynamic coalition but some somehow else but they they they also are looking forward to having such such a you know follow-up after the adoption of a recommendation which will in this case happen in November this year so here I would once again as as Neil asked I mean here's the role of the national commissions and which I am highlighting from from the very beginning from the OER congress and Yubiana itself etc it's a way how and and we have seen in the OER example that national commissions can play a strong role how to somehow I don't know motivate motivate also governments but not only governments also people from the field to work to work for for the implementation of such a recommendation and this is I think a a big sign of success in in the case of the OER recommendation thank you so much Casper Sanjay there's a question for you asking whether adding open education work to something like the declaration on research assessment might help incentivize teachers to contribute more actively if so the the issue might be less about money and more about professional development I'm not sure if you're familiar with familiar with Dora Sanjay or if you have any thoughts on that question was targeted at you no Neil thank you very much that's one of my main area of work where I have been promoting open access ever since my university days but it would be good to have something like that but Dora itself is not really adopted in many commonwealth or many developing countries as such even though Dora talks about measurement of research should not be based on the so-called indexes that are proprietary in nature but the the practice of assessing research based on a particular impact factor is predominant so it's it's not that effective though there are a lot of signatories to Dora at such but what is important is that professional development and recognizing people for their OER work need to be part of policies that we work on at the institutional level and you need to work with people to to sensitize that it's important to share and there is greater benefit first of sharing of educational content than just giving it the rights to the publishers there could be some advantages but there are greater advantages for sharing the educational resources as open so that's the way as as an international community we need to to focus to streamline or mainstream OER in institution and to focus on sustainability from individual efforts and institutional efforts combined together it's not just institutions who need to fund but individuals need to be convinced that OER brings value to them as individual as such thank you very much yes I was waiting to hear from Lisa we can no longer hear the speaker we were waiting to hear about experiences in the Spanish speaking world unfortunately the speaker's sound is cutting out now as part of the chair that coordinates the global open education movement in Latin America every two years we invite the community to come for two weeks to work on the issue of proposals and projects on open educational resources we have organized three versions in 2015 2017 and 2019 and this year we'll have the fourth meeting and around 120 to 130 academics researchers decision makers and students took part in these meetings and we work together on international projects I'd like to specifically mention the meeting of 2019 when the OER recommendations had just been approved the speaker's sound is cutting out the interpreter apologizes several actions have been taken led by these communities and these activities have been rolled out within their communities and it's really been marvellous to see what's come out of this open educational resources open practices all from this international experience another example we undertook with the laboratories in universities for example we worked with Guatemala with six university labs and over 600 teachers worked together in the field of open educational resources and their promotion and this allowed us to disseminate the issue which is an area of opportunity for knowledge generation the third experience that I'd like to share we was an experience with UNESCO we've been working on inclusive open education and we'll be working on the recommendations in the first webinar that we're holding I'll share the link in the chat so that you can take part in this meeting and as part of this international project we created an instrument to see how we were doing in terms of the implementation of OER and this will require expert validation and also validation of potential users so this is something that we'll be making available to everyone and lastly I'd like to invite you to add to a graph that we've been creating with colleagues at UNESCO the speaker sound is cutting out we've been working with the remote learning institutions in Latin America on the OER recommendations it's a free journal that's available in Portuguese Spanish and English and I'll publish the link in the chat thank you very much thank you very much we're coming to the end of the Q&A session but we've got one question which I'll pose to Gasper and Sanjay as a way of wrapping up which is just asking about how we might look at north issues whether OER provides a good space to rethink or rediscuss international cooperation in terms of north-south I saw this question from Colin also had an accompanying chat observation saying that maybe the global north can learn from the south with respect to some of these cooperative initiatives before I give a quick last opportunity to my panellists colleagues to say a few words about that Lisa I see your hand so if you'd like to just make one or two quick observations that would be great yeah thank you quick observation is that what we're really seeing from a lot of these examples here are the the bottom up and the top down importance in in in how we're gonna I think move international collaboration forward meaning as somebody had said in the chat we know the action is often at the ground level right it's a it's about the educators and the external stakeholders the students the parents the teachers the workforce development and the career pathways folks there's so that's the bottom up but we need the top down the support and the cover and the credibility and legitimacy that governments give as well we know this and a lot of the early efforts in OER in fact have been from the at the ground level from the bottom up so I think as we want to deliberately move forward and how we expand international collaboration how we really blend these two and make sure that they meet in the middle is something that we haven't done as deliberately I think as as we really need to so that's just an observation from listening to the panel comments and the various examples and as well as our own experience here in the US thank you so much Lisa so a quick last thought let's start with you Sanjaya just on the issue of north-south collaboration and the role of OER in that then into you Gasper and then we'll hand back to Zinnia thanks Neil I think this is a very important point and we need to realize that the the divide in north-south in terms of OER is very little in fact students in in the north as well as south both face the challenges of not having access to good quality teaching and learning materials but what is important is the how do we connect people in north and south to work together on educational materials that can be useful for students across in the various countries one of the biggest challenge of OER is this because education are localized contextualized thing and it needs people to work on their own context but at the same time they need to work together internationally so bringing people together is the only thing and international collaboration platforms like what is being done as I think Gasper will talk about that is an OER for better education education and some of the work at common earth and learning brings together people to develop content which can be contextualized one of the comment was also about the pacific countries where we are bringing international materials to be contextualized for the local institutions local things so what is happening is that contents are being created for each of the nine countries where common earth learning is working so it's it's the challenge at same but in both north and south we need to bring people together thank you Sanjayas Gasper you have one minute so your voice is a little low so sorry can you hear me that's better okay just half a minute Neil thank you I already sent a link to all in the in the chat Sanjayas reminded me and it's a great program which is called open education for a better world a great example for international collaboration and cooperation also north south it's a online mentoring program tuition free internationally which is run by the UNESCO chair and open educational resources in Slovenia and it's running already for the last it has been running for the last four years it collected the cooperation of 40 countries from from all over the world from six continents it contained already 215 projects and had 400 participants and that's for you please check out this this link because the program is successful and and it's worth to to share it thank you Neil thank you so much and that concludes the the panel discussion on international cooperation so back to you in it thank you very thank you very much Neil thank you for handling that thank you to all the panelists for for the comprehensive picture that you provided we have done something absolutely never seen before we're completely on time which is amazing so I would like to first of all thank all the panelists and I would like to thank also the participants and I would like to say something which perhaps I should have said at the very beginning but I didn't say for a particular reason all the panelists are members of the advisory board of the OER dynamic coalition and the reason I didn't bring it up at the beginning is because I think what's important is not that they are members of the advisory board but that they are incredible professionals each of them and in a very in a very large framework from different parts of the world from different types of institutions from different constituencies and that is the point of the OER dynamic coalition that it's actually bringing together all the different stakeholders giving voice to every part of the world that we could possibly give voice to and then sharing these experiences it's not a neat little thing because the world is not very neat all the time but what's important that it is that the communication and the sharing continues and the discussion continues and that we're able to work together when we when this when this recommendation was launched we had no idea what was in store for the world for the recommendation I mean we just hope for the best but we launched the OER dynamic coalition the day that UNESCO lockdown actually it was every some people were already on their way to a face-to-face meeting and we were told that it's never going to happen because we were actually all being sent home but we managed anyway to launch this discussion we were able to discuss we were able to put together a roadmap that goes into looking at these four areas that we spoke about and then international cooperation in in these four areas and the different projects we just started it we have to keep moving forwards the big project for the next year is going to be about putting up a portal that will be able to share the different initiatives and be able to make this sharing much more interactive and much more faster and easier we have the regular webinars to share experiences we have focused work on each of the areas and what's that's all very good and fine but what's most important are all the different people working in the different parts of the world in their institutions and moving everything forward only five ten years ago OER was sort of something people talked about we had advocacy now we're talking about implementation the world has really moved forward the pandemic has been very unfortunate and there's been had a very catastrophic effects on a number of things that have nothing to do with just education but everything else in the world but we did move forward it did we did we were able to seize a lot of a lot of opportunities and while everyone was looking at online learning OER was able to take a place in a significant place and I do hope that sincerely that we're able to do what that slide that I showed you just at the beginning was that OER could be part of a sustainable future direction in learning worldwide so with that I would like to thank everybody who has been all our panelists and all our participants for your time I know everyone's very busy and there's a lot of you have a lot of demands on your time and this has been a two-hour session and we greatly appreciate that you stayed with us and that you took part in you were part of these discussions and I'd like to thank also OER Global and of course Paul Stacy who just jumped up on the screen in this chat for making this possible for us to provide this overview of the work of the OER dynamic coalition and the voice to the advisory group members to share with the group everything and I wish you all a very safe and pleasant evening and rest of your of this wonderful conference thank you so much