 Da'r fiamers. The finalят of we are 16, so if you don't use it for a day you will get under re. So if you're not an interpreter, such as to use a place in He傘, you might have known already, it's been a very busy fact now. So Namosa is director of learning and teaching and web services mewn meddwl, ac ysgrifiaith beer yn ddigwydd a leydiannol i'r hynny yn digwydd a chyddion ond yn gwellio'i meddwl yn ysgrifiaith â ymgylchau yma. Ac oes ymgylchau ymgylchau meddwl wedi'u bosbladein, a'r siŵr ar y cyf Democrats o'r strategiaeth ymgylch. Fel oedd yn Wyrdd ymgylchau hefyd, oedd ymgylchau gwahododddol, oedd ymgylchau meddwl a'r gyfrifiadau, ond felly wedi ymbylchau hynny, realt ond yn oeddiw'r ddiogel ac mae'n oeddiw'r rhwng o'r cymryd yngolor a'u ddweud y ddigon iawn. Rwy'n fudd i wneud hynny o phobl yn gweithio ar y Llyfrgell Seifftrwy o ddwylo'r gweith yma, y gallai eu cymryd ym Omelolodau Diolch, a'u wirwch yn cael eu cefnodol i'r Rhwng-i-Fyredu. Fyddwn i'n ddon yma gan報 sayo o hynny'n gwych o gwaith cymryd. I don't think there's any exaggeration to see that she's one of the most influential women working in education technology in the community. So if I could do, please welcome Melissa Highton. Thank you very much, Lorna. We've been working on this for some time. It's a particular pleasure to host the conference at University of Edinburgh and to listen to the papers and the speakers. For me, it's been an excuse to gather friends and colleagues from all over the country and all over the world. But contents may have shifted in flight. Some of the images in the presentation are OER, and some are restricted by the University for my use in learning, teaching, research, recruitment or marketing activities. I'll leave it to you to decide which this is. So I want to tell you a bit about Edinburgh University and how we aim to make OER sustainable here. A bit about the vision and our practice and make some suggestions to you from the perspective of central IT, for that is who I am. Some suggestions that I hope will be useful to some making the case for investment in their own institution. When we began organising this conference, Lorna and I were thinking about the value proposition for embedding open culture in the context of institutional strategies for learning, teaching and research. University of Edinburgh is a traditional university. As you know you've enjoyed some of our beautiful buildings. You can see from our crest a castle, a thistle and a book. We have old buildings and a strong Scottish identity. Learning is at the heart of what we do. Most universities have books in their crests. We read books and we write books and we publish books. Edinburgh University Press is one of the largest publishers in the UK. We live in a beautiful city. We have beautiful buildings, beautiful libraries, collections of treasures, famous alumni, beautiful students, creative thinkers. Most have a number of university farms. We have lots of sheep. We have some famous sheep. It's our fault that all sheep look the same. We also have more than 30 MOOCs on three platforms and more than 60 distance learning masters level courses. We have a range of learning materials available for whatever kind of eye device you're holding. Against some definitions of open, we're doing very well. To get an institution that involved in open education, the value proposition needs to be really clear. At Edinburgh we're talking about 10,000 distance learning students. We're talking about a quarter of our student body being online. We're talking about scale, sustainability, we're talking about reuse. OER is part of the infrastructure for an institution aiming, hoping to make use of its collections and content in myriad ways. It's important to remember when you think about value propositions that the value propositions will be different for different universities, different institutions. There is diversity in the sector and that is a good thing. But it does mean that universities will invest differently and in different areas of learning and teaching and research and outreach. The trick is to get your OER vision to match the mission of the university. For me, open licensing makes clear the distinction between those resources that can be used for free and those that we are free to do with what we will. And that's internal as well as external. So from an individual's perspective a digital resource might only be used by them once, but that resource itself will have been used by many others before and after. And I like to use the term reuse to cover all instances of use. It's unlikely that any digital resource available online will only ever be used by one person in one context. The more we remove the barriers to access, the more open a thing becomes. The more open a thing is, the more it will be used. The more a thing is used, the more interesting things will happen as a result of the creative process. And from an institutional perspective, the more open the licence, the more sustainable it is because it gives us as an institution licence to make changes, convert formats, save it, develop against it, move it around or publish in new ways. Without clear permission to make adaptations, it's harder for older learning materials to be converted into new formats. So for us, open makes sense. And I'm very happy for there to be many flavours of openness along a continuum, multiple definitions of open, just as long as we are open literate enough to know which one we're talking about at any given time. We need to be really clear about what the value to the institution is. So people quite often tell me that at our institution senior management just don't get it, we don't have senior management buy-in. But for many of us our job is to help senior management to deliver the mission and business of the university. And we need to offer them things they can say yes to, not just things that we want them to say yes to, things that they can say yes to, given the constraints and context in which they work. So what do you think senior management really want? Can you link your interest in openness to that? Can you articulate a value proposition that makes them choose your project over others? Now senior management will always want to see a return on investment. And return is hard when we're talking about open educational resources. So if we can't quantify return, maybe we can make the case against risk and cost. So from the point of view of an IT director, not being open is a risk and not being open costs us money. I'm going to explain a bit about that later in my talk. But first since I have you all here, I'm going to tell you a bit about the Edinburgh University vision for OER. So what I always aim for is have a vision that supports the university mission. That vision should be supported by a policy. The policy should be supported by a service. And the service should be supported by resource. So John gave us a very clear outline of the value of open to his institution. And since I've been interested in OER, I've worked in the central services of three big universities, Edinburgh, Oxford and Leeds. And what I've learned is that as well as institutional strategies for learning, teaching and research, there's also usually an institutional strategy for IT increasingly in the context of a digital university. Vivroff suggested to me that the definition of sustainable is that it's sustainable when some senior budget holder has put it as a line in their budget. And that's a recurrent budget rather than a project budget. So thinking about that, for many people, for most people, university budgets are a bit of a mystery. And they are mysterious things. But there are a few things that it's quite easy to spot who are the main budget holders in your institution from the top down. One of them is likely to be the CIO and the directors of IT. They will always give the impression that they have no money. And then it will always be a struggle going on as other parts of the university complain that too much is being spent on admin. But nonetheless, the IT budget will be there and the size of it will be considerable. At an institutional level, it's about managing assets, digitisation and IT policy. And people do often tell me that OER is not a tech issue. And that's fine if that's working for you, but you're totally missing a trick if you're not looking at the IT budget for support for what you want to do. The tech for OER is not just about building special OER repositories. I see OER policy and practice as the infrastructure which underpins the business of what we want to do at Edinburgh University. Care needs to be taken, permissions need to be given and risks need to be managed. Sustainability needs to be designed in from the start. And institutions invest in VLEs, lecture capture systems, repositories, websites, media asset management systems all the time. But the tech budget will also include people and people to support people. So if you're looking for advice services and staff development around this issue, then aligning it as part of the IT budget may be something you should try. The other thing is about the Creative Commons licensing. Those licenses are designed to be understood by people, lawyers and machines. At Edinburgh, we welcome our new robot colleagues. Let's give them something to work with and something to do. This is the Twitter that you can follow to find out about Open Educational Resources at Edinburgh. And this is the address that we have for our new website. When we're thinking about the value proposition for Open Educational Resources at Edinburgh, when you give a value proposition, you want to distinguish yourself in relation to others. And as I said when I welcomed you to the university, the university's mission is creation and dissemination and curation of knowledge. We aim to make a significant, sustainable and socially responsible contribution to Scotland, the UK and the world. Promoting health, wealth, economic and cultural wellbeing for the university, for the country, for the world. The university is founded on a civic mission created by the city for the city. As a great civic university, Edinburgh will continue to look to the widest international horizons enriching both itself and Scotland. The Scottish reformers desire for a school in every parish and access to university for a broad section of society has been updated by our current principal, who wants an online masters in every school and access to Edinburgh education on every possible MOOC platform. Occasionally people do ask me why Edinburgh University does MOOCs. This is what Sir Tim always says. But I'm sure I don't have to remind this audience that MOOCs are not the definition of open. The discussion started at University of Edinburgh a couple of years ago in 2014 about an open education policy for Edinburgh. A high-level task group was established, including key opinion shapers from around the university. It was actually led by the Students Association, the Vice President for Academic Affairs challenged the university senior managers to explore how learning materials could be made open, not only for students within the university, but across Scotland and the wider world. These were heady days. The university was riding the wave of global interest in MOOCs. An NUS report had been published to Champion OER and it was an upcoming independence referendum. Many in Scotland saw that there was a strategic opportunity to contribute to a fairer society through open educational practice. I'm very pleased to say that we have the President-elect from USA in the room at the conference today. I'm hoping that that is also a sign of sustainability amongst the student support, the student leadership. The resulting OER vision for University of Edinburgh has three strands, each building on our history and civic mission. The three themes help us to help academic colleagues to decide where materials should be released, to decide which materials should be released and where. The three themes in the open educational vision for University of Edinburgh. For the common good, Edinburgh at its best and Edinburgh's treasures. For the common good, it draws upon our civic roots. It's about releasing teaching and learning materials to enrich the university and the sector, and to enable any member of the university to publish the OER that they make as a routine part of their work. To support members of the university in finding and using high quality materials, developed within and without. So recycling our own and other people's materials, part of the university's commitment to sustainability and recycling. Edinburgh at its best, that's a showcasing, the highest quality learning and teaching, with the high production values that we're putting into some of our materials, published online as OpenCourseWare. And to enable the discovery of these materials in a way that ensures that our reputation is enhanced on a global stage. And it's Edinburgh's treasures. One of the best things about working in a research institution is working alongside the amazing collections and museums. And Edinburgh actually has an extraordinarily eclectic collection of stuff. The librarians and collection management people have been collecting very widely right from the beginning. Collecting from a diverse set of cultures. So making some of those available online, a significant collection of unique learning materials. Digitized, curated and shared for the greater good and significant contribution to public engagement. And to put in place policies and infrastructure to ensure that those OER collections are sustainable and usable in the medium to longer term. To make them available in innovative ways, which is part of the reason why we've secured ourselves a Wikimedia in residence. To champion particular areas where Edinburgh has material that is distinct in the sector. So for instance Edinburgh is the birthplace of modern medicine. And last year we started this work with a Wikipedia editathon around the Edinburgh 7, the first woman to study medicine in the UK. And we continue to work to create an open body of knowledge. So the vision with its three strands builds on work, custom and practice in the university. But also offers an opportunity to take a strategic approach to publishing open educational resources at scale. The vision is supported by a service and a policy which you can find on our open.ed website. Which I'm sure Charlie is retweeting around the room as we go. Establishing a clear vision for OER at the University of Edinburgh will mitigate the reputational risk of colleagues referring to online materials as open. When in fact they are under a closed or unclear licence. And the support service will mitigate the risk that colleagues are unclear about the decisions that they need to make with regard to licensing, sharing and use of online materials. Our activities in this area in open educational resources also align with the universities, some of the other university strategies. So the university has a strategic commitment to equality and diversity. And our Wikimedia residency has a particular emphasis on open practice and engaging colleagues in discussing why some areas of open practice do have a clear gender imbalance. So part of the investment in what we're doing with Wikipedia and investment in edithothons as staff development are part of the university's commitment to Athena's form. I want to say a bit about being director of IT. The University of Edinburgh shockingly has more than 700 people working in our IT and library services. That makes us one of the largest tech employers in Scotland. Some people think that central university IT is boring. I think you're missing what's actually so exciting and interesting about it. The challenge of working at scale at enterprise level rather than local. It's actually quite easy, I think, to build a solution locally that meets the needs of a particular small group of users. It's much, much harder to build something that will work for everyone. No one ever believes me when I say that working in central IT is great fun. You'll have to trust me if people knew how much fun it was to work in central IT, you'd all be working there. I enjoy the fact that OER is framed in a kaleidoscope of competing discourse. I like the fact that we have a whole conference about it. I wanted to add one language of discourse, the language spoken by IT directors. What I liked about the early GISC projects, the OER project, was the explicit challenge to release a significant amount of content from within your institution and to process for that process to become mainstreamed and sustainable. That was in the funding. It meant that the technologists and the academics worked together with the lawyers and the librarians to release stuff at scale, either old stuff or new born digital stuff. That was the approach that was so successful at Oxford that supported Emma Smith who you've met in what she wants to do. There was no barrier to her doing that. It was seamless for her. In academic development people tell me that teaching and learning isn't always about content. I know it isn't always about content but a whole bunch of it is about content. That's why we have libraries full of published content. We have reading lists and course packs and slides and handouts and recordings and data sets. We constantly produce and publish more as we research and learn and teach. The challenge is in managing it all. As soon as you do that at scale, as soon as you make it digital, it becomes interesting in terms of tech. What the tech can help us to do, how the tech can transform the way we work. When people say to me, it's not a tech issue, it kind of is. Because the sustainable OER at scale involves platforms and repositories and collections and search engines and web crawlers and Twitter bots and a dozen other things. I like OER practice. I like the rigor of defining and working with something that is open and knowing what is not open. I think it's really interesting and challenging to help people to find and make and reuse resources and to be literate in their use of open content. I like to mainstream it in ways that lower the barrier to participation in OER production as much as possible. I like to put systems and workflows in place. I like to put workflows that privilege open practice. The more wonderful, unique stuff gets out there under an open license, the more there will be for me and for others to use. I want to make a suggestion about talking to IT directors, which you can take or leave, but you might find it useful when making a value proposition within your institution to the CIO. It's the concept of technical debt. It's not sexy, but it works with IT directors and CIOs. We've been thinking a lot about the similarities between technical debt and what one might call copyright debt. Think about the institutional risks of not being open. Institutional risks are sometimes legal, sometimes reputational, sometimes financial. Mostly IT directors meetings we talk about the need to mitigate risks early on and avoid risks in the future. Generally the risks of not engaging with open practice are reputational. Other institutions are doing it. We might miss out on this good thing. We might need to seem to be bold in digital education and leading edge in our open research. There's a risk to our reputation if our colleagues don't seem to be up to date on licensing and refer to online materials and data as open when they're not, but most of those risks can be easily hidden under a smear of open washing and a vagueness about the definition of open in different contexts. Those are not risks that will ever persuade VP financial resources to invest. You want to convince an IT director or CIO to invest in systems which have built-in open licensing workflows to protect what you might, the argument you might be able to make is to protect the institution against the risk of expensive copyright debt in the future. So copyright debt, technical debt. Technical debt is a metaphor that's often used in IT to explain why it costs so much to replace IT systems. I use it a lot when I have to explain why rather than spending my budget on new and exciting learning and teaching functionality I'm having to spend it to replace something that we thought we already had. Technical debt is the cost of not doing something properly in the first place. From the moment you build a system poorly without due attention to software, code, rigor and processes, you begin to accrue debt and then interest on that debt. From the moment you don't fix, patch and maintain the code, the same thing happens. At some point you're going to have to go back and fix it and the longer you leave it, the more expensive it will be. It's basically the software equivalent of a stitch in time, saves nine. So from the moment a colleague tells you that they don't have time or don't care about copyright licensing and metadata on their teaching materials and they load them up into a VLE or the online course environment or the departmental website or the online course pack or the lecture PowerPoint slides or whatever, you start to accrue copyright debt. From the moment you don't plan open content licensing workflows into your new systems, you make a problem for yourself down the road. From the moment you don't ask or push an asset management supplier or a MOOC platform to show you how their tools support your open agenda, the more work you're going to have to reverse engineer later. Someone will have to go back to those materials. At some point in the future and check them, figure out who made them and when and ask and check whether they have third party content. The longer time passes or staff change between the original materials being uploaded, the harder it will be to get back to the original source. The cost will hit at the moment that you migrate from one VLE to another or from one website to another or from one media asset management system to another. At that point, lecturers and departmental administrators will be asked to go back and check and confirm that they have copyright permission for the materials they're migrating. And they will say, I have no idea. In fact, they don't even remember or know where that stuff came from. They will suggest that someone in central services, usually a librarian, should do the checking for them. And that's where the cost hits. No one in the library wants to check all your own content. The kind of money you would have to pay those people to do that task will be the expensive debt that you've paid on the content that you didn't check when it was created. So most of it will be binned. The colleagues will be outraged that they've had to make it all again. The challenge in all this, of course, is the individual academics making materials don't care about the longer term cost to central services of this debt. This argument with technical debt doesn't interest or persuade them to make changes to their practice. So we have to build in rigor for open practice into the workflows of our enterprise-wide systems and services as soon as we possibly can, making it easy for colleagues to make positive choices. If you can make your case to your IT director now, the thinking about openness will save considerable cost in the future. Take care now or risk a whole boatload copyright debt. For any institution reviewing its BLE, expanding its online learning, moving from one platform to another, capturing its lectures, digitising its collections, you may be able to get a policy or a service, maybe not a vision, but I think that the argument around copyright debt will at least get you round the table. It's just my suggestion. If you have opportunity to give it a try, let me know how it goes. I've had the sign that I need to finish now, and I want to return you just to thinking about Edinburgh. As you leave the conference and you wind your way home through the city, take a look at the buildings of Edinburgh, the physical estate of the city. Most of the housing stock is tenement flats, centered around a common stair. Our staff and students experience that physical estate, as well as our digital estate. Some of the flats in the buildings are very large, very grand, very elegant, but nonetheless, if you live in a flat in a stair, you have equal share in responsibility in maintaining the common space. So that experience of communal living and having a shared common stair, a shared commitment to hygiene, knowing where and when to put out your rubbish and take turns to wash and clean the common. Taking the time makes the place better for all, and each year, all across the city, households of students move into the flats and the permanent residents begin again educating them on the mores of communal living, what day to put your rubbish out and not to leave the black bag in the stair. And universities have transient populations, so every year the students and staff change. A new group arrive in each of the Edinburgh tenements, and if it weren't for the local community taking care of each other, the whole place would fall into disrepair. So my take home message to you would be, look after each other, take your turn to do what needs to be done to help to keep our shared areas for the common good. Thank you very much.