 Mae cydwyddi'n gwirionedd maen nhw'n ei wneud yn fawr yn eu ddyfodol ychydig ar y cael ei gwirionedd. Mae'n gwirionedd yma'r gweithio dros bod yn cydnod hynny'n dweud, i gyda'r Unedig. Wrth gyd, mae'n rhywb yn fawr yma. Mae'n gor altered eich bod yn eu ni alch chi nhw'n ddemolio'r eerol. Mae'n cyfaint am wneud o'r panlyst yma nhw. Mae'n cyfaint i'r gyda Gw personellent Gwana. Mae'r bod yn gallu'n cyrwngmodeg yn gyfrathio'n teimlo'n dryr. We're just to give a little bit of background where everyone's getting comfortable about today's session. As we know during the pandemics, there was an increase in ebooks, as students moved to studying away from campus. Soutainlyxie, as that pressed through the pandemic, we also had a price rise both here in the UK and elsewhere in the world in terms of accessing materials. As you're probably aware, I've been, uh, td cross, um and td campaigns, particularly in areas of the world which is North America have been a really keen kind of way in which OER has been mainstreamed. And here in the UK during the pandemic we had, what we do have campaigns such as e-book SOS were challenging publishers and bringing the issue to wider attention. ymddangos. Felly, mae gennych, rydyn ni wedi'i gweithio eich cerdd o antychol yn Antyni Sïnna. Mae wedi'u gweithio'n tuweddol o'r Association ReoPort 2021, yn fryd o'r rhan o'r proffit ar ydwun 14% o'r ymddangos y ymddangos. Felly, rydyn ni'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio ar y ddweud o'r textbwys i'r Unedig. Rydyn ni'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio ar yr un o'r textbwys o ddydd ymddangos o'r Aquall yw'r cyflwynedd yma gan beth ch pawb ar ddyliadau yma, am ymweld ddod yn mi sgwrs fewn i'r bobl. Er byddai isbwynt yn bryd, cydw i am fydd ni wedi'i dda i gyntaf ar gyfer eich hubau o bobl o bobl aribau y gweinidol a goblio'r gweithfeydd. Felly, roedd y panel y mae chi'n rhan o'n see spur yn y rhan, oherwydd bod y gobl o bobl o bobl o bobl o bobl o bobl o bobl o bobl o bobl o bobl o bobl o bobl o bobl o bobl o bobl o bobl o bobl o bobl o bobl o bobl o bobl. Ac hynny'n i'w gwybod yn y bwysig yna bod y cyfnod yn ystod i'w ddweud o'r bwysig o'r unrhyw ym yn ystod i'w ddweud o'r bwysig o'r bwysig, ond rydyn ni'n gael eich profiad, dyma'n eu bwysig o'r bwysig i ddim yn ystod i'w ddweud o'r bwysig o'r bwysig, Llemon, yn ddod oes y dyfodol? Thank you for inviting me on today. My name is Arlyn Campbell and I'm an Education Technology team manager at the University of Edinburgh where I manage the University's Open Education Resources Service and I'm also a justine of alld in the UK. So in terms of open textbooks although Edwin has been sporting the creation of of open education resources of all different kinds for five or six years now. Open textbooks were not an area that we were too active in until last year when my senior colleague, Melissa Hampton, who many people would be familiar with, suggested that it might be interesting to try and repurpose some of our existing open education resources to create a new textbook. So that's what we did. We applied a very small grant, a tiny little student experience grant, and we took some content that was originally created for a MOOC, that had already been repurposed when all the grant was caught, and we repurposed it again to creating a new textbook. So that was really our first point into the creation of textbooks, but it's something that we're certainly very interested in seeing in the future. Hi there, so I'm going to work on this one. Hi there. I'm Gary. I'm the director of a library and library services at the University. So I guess for me, it's slightly different, obviously, given that it's an online delivery in that sense, but we have an awful long history, we have not an awful long history, we have a long history in relation to open learning and so forth, and we obviously provide some of those open resources as open textbooks, they're not published in that sense, but they're available in that sense. And we have an awful good practice, I'll stop saying that. We have a great, great, great practice in terms of our rights team within the university who are always looking at open educational resources to use within our courses. And that's something that we consciously do. But that's probably part and parcel of the fact that the way in which we deliver and write our courses is many courses slightly different in terms of the scaffolding and the support that surrounds our courses because of the open access option that the university provides. My name is Daryl Snowden and I am the textbook programme manager at UCL Press. I joined the press in the May of last year, so it's been almost a year. And my role is to develop and launch a new textbook programme, a free open access textbook programme, very much building on the presses. Existing portfolio of open access publications that we have published in the 200 research base. One of us is open access books, we publish a number of journals of open access as well. So this is a new foray into extending that into textbooks. My background is commercial academic publishing. So I've spent over 10 years working on the other side of the coins and my previous role is to build a US-based textbook publisher. So I'm coming that perspective into this new open access textbook space. Okay, hi everyone. I'm Jane Secker. I'm a senior lecturer at City University. I'm also chair of the Silicon Information Literacy Group. I'm co-chair of the OLD Copywriting Online Learning, a special interest group. So I think I'll be partly a bit about all the copyright and licensing, in the textbook discussions. I am a big advocate of open education. I teach on a master's in academic practice at City and teach a module on digital literacy and open practice. Say a bit more, as the panel goes on, there's probably quite a number of things I'd like to pick up on. Thank you so much, thanks, Jane, for a very long and that's fantastic. Just before we get started into the discussion, I just want to ask a quick question to the audience. It's around the cost of educational materials. Has this become more or less important to your university over the last two years? Is the cost of educational resources kind of increased and important? So if it has, you can just raise your hand. A few hands raised, that's great. About the same maybe? Or maybe not so much? Or not at all? Not at all. No worries, that's great. Thank you. That's great, so thank you. That's useful to know. Great, so to get back to our panel now, I just wondered, for all of the universities that are kind of represented, how many of the universities have made educational materials accessible during the pandemic and are kind of online with it? And do you have your role in that? So, Jane, would you like to go? Yeah, okay. So, did OEOR play a role? Yes, it did. I mean, actually, the first time we ran some workshops that were available for all academic staff on finding and using those educational resources, those workshops were based on material from the University of Edinburgh and adapted from a session I used to do in my module to various small numbers. So, yes, we were sort of trying to raise awareness about open educational resources, probably did more sessions as well about things like finding images and materials that you could reuse online because of the digital pivot. And we also licensed our educational technology guidance under Creative Commons as a kind of setting example for the first time during the pandemic too. Yes, I think so, but probably could have played a bigger role as well because I wouldn't say my institution, we haven't got an open educational policy, it's quite sort of a ground level sort of autonomous approach that's happening there. There's a lot of enthusiasm, but it's not coming from the bottom. Thanks so much, yeah. Will any of you have risen a real policy in a different kind of situation everywhere? Yeah, we already had a lot of open resources, but we weren't putting it anywhere anyway, so we did find that at the start of the pandemic we were able to make sure that people had access to them. So, for example, we have a collection of student-creatable medication resources on TET resources, which are designed for school teachers to use and are aligned to the Scottish curriculum for excellence. And when schools were going to walk down and so on immediate uptake of people accessing these resources, we also had probably one of the most high-profile projects that happened right at the beginning of the pandemic. Last April was the team behind the Master's in Critical Care. All these resources directly addressed with our address needs of healthcare workers were moving back into critical care as a result of COVID. So they need all these resources free and available with support computer and actually. So that was a really sort of high-profile and it stood to just get resources out to people who needed them. We also had equal things like we had technicians all over the university who were printing base finds and things like that. And we put the models up on the sketchbook so they could be downloaded and used by other people. And perhaps the other important example was we all were at Redhead and we are a policy under a lecture recording policy, which is available on the open licence. We also, at the start of the pandemic, created a new virtual classroom policy to address the recording of virtual classroom sessions and we also made that review as well on the open licence because we knew that there was a lot of other institutions grappling with the online pivot and getting all the teaching online first before our virtual classroom service, which are really small service, but didn't have a specific policy of it at all, but some of them all were teaching and learning and were pivoting to be online. We needed that policy to address some of the copyright and these protections. Thank you. It was a bit more of a deeper pivot for the UCL specifically to talk about textbook. Prior to 2020, UCL over services were still predominantly buying print editions of textbooks that were required and essential for more of our modules. Some departments and disciplines were doing things slightly differently, but predominantly we were still really still purchasing the print copies and they would be for students who couldn't purchase their print copies. So when the pandemic hit, we did have to pivot that and change our model and find new alternatives. That proved challenging. It meant that we had to grapple with a lot of different e-textbook aggregators to get the content that we needed to deliver our courses and meant that we needed to request more funding for that. So the budget for purchasing of e-textbooks was relatively small and had to pivot to almost £3 million to be able to facilitate all of that essential content that we hadn't been used to buying in print with a lot of our students not being able to assess it. So the reaction to that at UCL was very much that it was still quite a shock to pivot in that way and it made us think a bit more carefully about whether that is a system we were just intended to. It was very much the impetus for us to be thinking about open education and specifically open text books. UCL has a wonderful history of open access mostly in research with the education element being a little bit slower to develop and a little bit more on the priority list and that's really changed since 2020 and my role and programme itself is a new way of funding. So we did have some elements of OER that already existed. We have an OER repository that was developed mostly as a proof of concept. It's not fully developed but it's up there. We have a landing page with a list of resources for academics who want to find OER and create OER. But that was something that we created but not necessarily a huge amount of resources with him to prioritise it. So I think that's quite interesting here in the different sources. So you can imagine, don't you? We don't use a lot of text books actually generating our courses because the courses that we're producing are in a sense text books within themselves that are fully integrated with all our library resources related within the courses. And therefore the impact was less on us and I think it provided us with an opportunity or an able list to provide support into the sector in the way in which it's been done in terms of supporting the sector being able to make the pivot online. So within the library services for example we ran a session about how to deliver perhaps wide digital literacy skills within over a thousand four different continents. We have a thousand libraries tuning into that session where we're sort of supporting the sector. And I guess we can't over-learn it itself we can't, you know, it went from something like about nine million users or separate accounts to a peak in about fourteen million in the second year of the pandemic and past its hundredth millionth learner in that time. And obviously we're providing an awful lot there particularly within the different nations around skills development and digital development. But some of the things that sort of played out through that was obviously elements associated with digital property. It's all very well having all the materials there available online and available but it then sort of raised other kind of concerns. So it's been quite a different sort of journey for the early year in terms of its role and how it's supported the sector through the use of different sources of technologies and getting online. And I think it probably touched a little bit on this actually as we kind of worked through and heard a bit more about what's been happening in each institution. But I wonder what kind of changes you've been seeing in terms of education to the students during the pandemic. Do you think they've become more expensive on a value just mentioned that they're going to be less of an issue? And I just wonder what your response was to that and what you touched on aspects in that, but whether there was anything else? I think one of the things I just wanted to pick up was so in March 2020 I was conscious that everyone had shifted online and there might well be lots of questions about how's that going to work from a copyright perspective. And I'd written a book with Chris Morrison that's called Copyright Online Copyright and E-learning and we thought well let's see if we can actually just get that made act openly available as an open textbook and approached our publisher who is facet who is a library association publisher but they said unfortunately no you can't just split that book and open then let's make three chapters available and this is kind of where old stepped in and Mar and Martin said well you know we can support you to run a webinar because we thought well let's talk to the sector and tell them the stuff that's in the book if you can't actually just make a book available we'll bring the community together so since then we've run 50 webinars where we have had so many and it mainly library has come in and we can see a real crisis point where the British Library was shut many libraries could not get the books that they needed to students they couldn't buy them in digital format they couldn't get hold of them in print format if they wanted to scan them there was a lot of publishers who to start with made a lot of resources available for free on a temporary basis and the Copyright Licensing Agency extended their licence to let you scan two chapters but all of that finished by July 2020 it was like pandemic's over you've got to get hold of the so I would say the sector was really struggling we're trying to get access to content and starting to realise that a lot of the content that it thinks it owns it doesn't and I think that's what started real conversations about firstly being much more confident about saying we can use copyright exceptions to make material available for teaching but also a bigger conversation without authors who are academics to say actually they're not a better way to do this you know you want to write a book and you want it to be available for your students to read then maybe we'll start thinking about things working in a slightly different way which is where I think you know we're why we're having more of the discussions about opening to experts now so you're sorry follow-up first I completely agree but it has a bit power on how we see it so very much that Portaire's our code-based promise to funding services has spoken a lot about this even with Johanna and then the lead for the hashtag lead because the west campaign that there was very little regulation of how publishers, commercial publishers were pricing the e-text version of the PDF version of the print book that we were more nearby and that that could change at any time so really difficult to assess whether budgets could accommodate certain test books that teaching faculty needed to deliver their courses and really made us really think that reliance on commercial publishing and what we decided at UCL is to use the infrastructure that we already had within UCL press as a publishing output to also include the idea that we might want to publish our own open access textbooks so all of our books at the moment have access to all of those routes to market infrastructure to create books and that we would think about how we could use that to create some of our own that brings up a lot of different challenges writing textbooks are very different to writing research-based books and with them teaching faculty already really overloaded with teaching commitments so how do we encourage our academics to also be in open access textbook authors and what we realise quickly is that a lot of our academics are already producing different kinds of resources to help them either pivot the online teaching or engage with their students in different ways so they already have starting grades of what we would consider a homegrown textbook that they could use for their course so kind of using what our academics are really creating and helping them develop that into a fully open access textbook so really the pandemic could bring a huge catalyst for change for us and how we talk about that I mean I certainly identified with what's already been said and certainly within the we are service we did probably more digital skills workshops about copyright literacy specifically for hybrid online teaching of learning sort of filled back up at the same time in the library different bit of information services the university library have actually just set up an open press that's called Eichon Rail Diamond and this builds on the previous open journal service that the library has supported which is a very successful open journal service and it's intended for students to co-create their own open journals and they're producing fabulous stuff so they've now expanded that service to include e-books and it's a very very new service and the first e-book we have is the Fundamentals of Music Theory textbook that the little project created but I think the point that Diana made about a lot of academics are already creating content that looks quite similar to open textbooks so we already have a couple of open textbook type things on our service website which were created completely independently by academics using the top pages and that's where they put their effectively course hand books which they turned into get up pages books and the Fundamentals of Music Theory textbook the content that went into that like I said some of it was originally created for our MOOC but the text content was effectively our course handbook so I think there is a lot of mileage in re-purposing existing content that our academics have been creating I guess I'm sort of mad at the extension to that obviously notwithstanding that you're a slightly different model but I've been really interested to explore the conversation around how is that changing how is that changing it's already existing in terms of handbooks but how is the use of OER starting to change the pedagogical structures the way in which we're teaching or perhaps communities and other institutions are teaching because obviously at the early years it's very structured we have a learning design structure and framework in essence the handbooks that you're talking about they are the things that we're actually producing because they're co-created at the university so it's not just the academic involved the library is involved the learning design is involved the media the media assistants are involved in terms of the design of the interactive elements associated with that so that's a really interesting piece to think about the only other thing I'd sort of add is that there seems to be much more collaboration in terms of so within the library sector we have different communities whether they're the national communities Skirll Scotland or Wales there's much more I think collaboration going to happen across the groups in sharing and understanding and open press within Skirll but we are part of the video you we're starting to think about how we collaborate in war within the sector which I think is a consequence actually Thank you I think I'll put a little bit about in terms of the pandemic and UCL and about that sort of the movement of the textbook project at Edinburgh as well I wonder what kind of role do you see for opening responses to the kind of issues that we've been talking about so far and at that particular time is it an opening response being more impactful One of the most important things about opening responses to crisis is it's a basis the ability I think and I think that's one of the things that's why we saw in addition to the the recommendation on who we are they had the the name of it they had a a secondary document that basically supported the use of open education resources to address disruption of education that resulted from the pandemic but the quickest and the cheapest and easiest way and most effective way to do this is by providing more access to open education resources and I do think that's really important but we do have a new site of the fact that the best way to make education open and sustainable and accessible is through making our education resources more open I want to make a different point there to leave again to which which was actually about when we were talking about who we collaborated with I want to make a point about students as well so I did a piece of research doing the pandemic about students academic readings preferences building on some work that comes out of UCLA one of the library the Diamonds Racky's done a lot of work on students reading online and reading in print and we did a study which were just in the process of analysing the data between US and UK students is quite a strong from all the work that she's done previously students know what they don't like about ebooks and are not reading online and I feel that open textbooks is an opportunity to create something better than there might be around at the moment there's a lot of students complaining about if they've got to use the textbook and it's not in print because they want to take detailed notes they want to navigate around it and I think there's a lot of potential that many of the commercial ebook supplies promised us that we've never really had that we could do that hopefully with open textbooks make something better but really understand what it is and when our students might actually want print as well because it's not a very popular argument we've got rid of a lot of books on shelves and the pandemic suggested that online was the panacea and this was the great thing but many students want to read a book in print when they're studying it and they're taking notes so that's great the books need to be in print and I know I'm currently involved in a language course at King's in the evening on Monday and I want both the textbook and my lab jobs so I want both and I think a lot of the students feel like it's what they want to do so we're having to think about how we can facilitate that with an open textbook what does that mean we can include what level of interactivity does that allow us we want both options and then the thing that I've been thinking about as well in terms of the role of open textbooks and we have a lot of these discussions at UCL is whether the traditional textbook model works for everyone and what we're finding is that it doesn't necessarily and that there are some disciplines where a more alternative way of creating educational content is much better be that video content audio content, different kinds of non-textual content and how how do we think of that as a textbook as an open textbook what would that be like on the program so we're having to think very carefully about we want the program to respond and to be used for a lot of different disciplines and areas and so we'll have to think about each textbook differently which is again very different from a commercial publisher and taking that I'm coming from that commercial publishing background into now a completely open access environment and what we're thinking about in terms of the criteria what we need these textbooks to do is so different and where we'll see the impact we're not looking for it to sell or in those commercial terms thinking about how much we might make on it or how much it costs to produce what we're thinking about is what impact it will make on teaching and learning locally what impact it will make globally which of course is what we need to focus on to create textbooks for is that because the commercial divisions are very expensive and we think we can do better or where there is a gap in the commercial market so it's not it's not a very popular course around the world there's not enough of a market for a commercial publisher to a publisher textbook on it but if we produce something that could make much more impact in that particular field in teaching and learning so lots of different things we need to think about and then opening up what new access to textbook can be versus a commercial textbook Very briefly just to add to those things I've looked into things for me that I expect to kind of understand how accessible or how diverse the materials and textbooks that we're producing I wonder whether there's an opportunity to open up and make sure that everything is becoming more accessible or more diverse in terms of its reach in terms of the activity I think the other thing I wanted to add was the connection really between because I think the opportunity is there now between we've talked a little bit today in some of the sessions but open research, open scholarship and the connection there between open curriculum in relation to that and how those are connected we've talked a little bit about think data and other such things as well but there's real opportunity there I think to really kind of drive that connection and for that to be visible and connected and be able to kind of move both ways through that journey from briefing back now from the end of the scholarship activity into the research and vice versa so I think there's a great opportunity to come out of this situation right now Thanks so much Gareth I know we're talking to communities as well to connect different groups of academics, librarians people that may be concerned to kind of bring people together to take action around these issues so I'm conscious of the time it's been a fantastic talking with everyone I've got one final question that we're going to end on so what is your vision for open education in the UK HEI so my motivation just to and how can we get there as well so I just wanted to be a question no pressure just to hear your thoughts thanks I think that is good I think you're reticulous I think you're reticulous because you added in being I don't think I've got that in my mind I think for me the vision is about those open open frameworks open curriculum and being able to kind of go and use and pick and obviously that's discipline specific there will be different frameworks and different disciplines and just making sure that that's available I do think there's opportunities with AI I have to say with semi-automating open frameworks in terms of programmes and structures but then for us to be able to but he's actually personalised I have to say it's been targeted to the individual student to be able to understand that personalised that in an open way but there's something about that connection and connecting open curriculum with research and scholarship in a way which I've said but making that available and personalised in some sense so much more community driven it's more around the scaffold it's more around the frameworks and teaching that you have around it that's the kind of work and I have no idea how you get there that's not a question when thinking about the vision that we're open textbooks in the UK I find myself thinking about what's happening in North America where there were a little bit more advanced in an integration of open textbooks in particular there is some federal funding that's been set aside specifically for this because the onus is far more on the student to purchase the textbooks rather than the library and because of that we've seen a lot of really interesting creative responses to that there were more traditional looking open access textbooks for example OpenStacks is doing some work on that and then there were other kind of more creative responses and I think I would like to see again more of that here in the UK and in Europe these creative responses to challenges with traditional and current education resources and a full aid what that would look like in different contexts as it was open one size doesn't fit all one model doesn't fit for every institution and so I think we need a variety of options to reach for and as they become more mature we'll see kind of how they progress and what the challenges of those are what the opportunities might be so yeah just kind of more creativity in space I suppose I don't know if I'm going to answer but I think we need to get people at all levels in universities and in other education sectors to think about the economics of all what it is actually that universities are there for how money comes into universities how it goes out where it's spent and to start questioning whether that is how the way things are working at the moment is it doesn't have to stay like that that there is universities are hugely important in the economy we know that a lot of them are having to operate much more like a business but that doesn't mean everything we do has to be to maximise profit and about it's a community and it is about sharing and in many ways yes some universities are competing but many are not competing certainly within disciplines scholars work together in this collegiate way and that's what we want to see I suppose I think how we need to get there is to really a lot of the work I've often done is with early career research and I think if we can get people when they're at the point of finishing their PhD of understanding the benefits of open more broadly whether it's open access open education to ask big questions about what is it that they're trying to do at that point in their career then we'll bring about change you know on a kind of because I think it's really hard to many people at the vice chancellor level that you're not going to change a lot at that level now it feels you know we need to start with the younger researchers coming through and show them that there's another way of doing this and I think Covid gives us a reason to say this is you know why we should be working together and just to pick up on Jim's points I think perhaps the way that we really do embed openness across the sectors by thinking about how openness does actually support the business models kind of education on it in a very climatic way but beyond that as well I think in bigger terms about sustainability and particularly about the stable development goals of how you know we are all part of this world and we're all trying to work together in this sort of project of education and also bringing in the sort of the ethical and social justice issues and I think the alls ethical framework for learning technologies are really important step forward there so I think we do need to you know think very pragmatically at the local level but I think we need to really set your sights much further to the allies and so we are thinking really about knowledge equity and ethics and sustainability Thank you so much for your time I'll take one on the panel I think it's been an interesting discussion I think it's been kind of exciting looking forward as well in terms of the things that you mentioned about beauty and that kind of multi-classical way of approach to the things that are needed to do that so I want to say a really big thank you to the panel for all your support and sharing your thoughts Thank you so much