 So we have on the agenda today, the Open Education Week, 2015 year in review, highlights from the community members, planning for the 10 year anniversary of the Cape Town Declaration, Open Education Awards for Excellence, and lastly questions, comments and discussion items. And first on the agenda, Open Education Week. Last year, during the summer, we surveyed the Open Education Community about the best time to hold Open Education Week. And the majority of people wanted to keep it in the second week of March, so that would be March 7th through 11th this year. Now, I don't know if you've seen it yet, but call for participation is open. Please go to submit your event under a call for participation. There is an easy form to fill out on the project you will showcase or an event you plan to host during the week. And we'll send you this badge that you see over here to put on your website to add to your event publicity. And I want to make sure that you're aware of the great graphic materials that we have here and you can download and use for your Open Education Week event and for general promotion. We have PowerPoint templates, logos, posters and web banners all available for download. Even if you're not hosting an event, you can still participate by putting these banners and posters on your website or blog and help with promoting the week. This is what I want to talk about right now. See the arrow pointing at Picture Yourself Open. Thanks to you who were on this call last time, we put up this social event called Picture Yourself Open. I don't know if you guys remember, but this was one of these suggestions that came out of this meeting last time and we got right to it. So here you can download some postcards, color them and upload your masterpiece like this or submit a photo featuring your ideas of Open or Open Education, anything about Open. So you just tell us where the picture is, preferably on a social media platform, and we'll put it on the website. Now we're thinking of running this as a contest to get more participation and I like your feedback on that idea. We've opened this page up for a couple weeks now and we don't have as many picture submissions as we would like. And if you have any good ideas on how to increase participation, please go ahead and tell us now. Okay, it seems like you might need a little more time to think about that. Well, aside from this Picture Yourself Open, we also have less than two months to this week and we've been getting some entries for events and resources, but we would like to get a start on serious push on the week now. If you can think of any way that we can promote participation in Open Education Week in general, or if you have any ideas for collaboration, please let us know. You can email us. You can do submissions asking us to help somebody to collaborate with, to run the program with anything. Thank you, Eagle, for all the links and email. Okay, so something to think about. We'll come back to this at the end of the call today. Well, for now, jump to the second item on the agenda, which is 2015 Year in Review. You can find this infographic on our website right now. I know that some of you got a sneak peek at this last week, but today I want to show you the whole thing available on our website at this URL. And there's also a PDF version for you to download. Now, this is a high level overview and we'll take you through the journey of OEC activities in 2015. So we start here with a tree of sharing and we'll start with Open Education Week 2015. So there were 130 events hosted during the week in 20 different languages from 38 different countries. People who came to our website during the week was from 115 countries and we had close to 4.3 million Twitter impressions. So we were very happy to see that it was reaching out to as many people as possible. Of course, we would like to top that success this year and we need your help and ideas on that. Shortly after Open Education Week was the Global Conference. It was in Banff, Canada, during which we had seven plenary speakers at the altitude of 1,463 meters with 83 presentations from 37 countries. That's a lot of showcases and case studies and we had over 2,000 tweets. I'm sorry, I don't think the PDF version is up there right now. I'll put up the link later after the meeting for the PDF. So again, the conference had great reviews, response from people saying that they were able to network with as with many people. We learned a lot about Open Education all from students, faculty, administrators, policymakers alike. Again, this year we have the same conference in Krakow, Poland. I hope to see all of you there. And then the next section in the infographic is the member and community services. So these activities, I'm sure that many of you are familiar with these activities because we discussed these during the meetings over the course of 2015. So I'm not going to spend a lot of time going over them now. If you're not familiar with them, please see the infographic on the website and follow the links for more information. You can click on all the links for the project website. And underneath that section in the infographic is projects and activities. And these are some of the activities that you may not be too familiar with. We were involved in some great things last year, along with many of you. Like, let's say this project campus virtual did less America's. It is an initiative from the Organization of American States to make quality education accessible to the people of the Americas. So a group of selected institutions, organizations and corporations have granted their expertise to make this virtual hub possible. Our role was to collaborate and to take charge of its open education section, providing curated OERs, providing general information about open education, and support in the administration, design and structure of the website. Luckily, we have Marcella who's been very active with this project. So this was one of the more main activities last year happening in languages other than English. And then we also got involved with consulting or e-learning. So this project, e-learning pioneers, we organized this program to share best practices in e-learning and open education for female faculty members in Saudi Arabia. The program was sponsored by the Minister of Education and the National Center for e-learning and distance learning in Saudi Arabia. We partnered with some excellent organizations to make the program both broad and deep. So we had 40 pioneers from Saudi Arabia and here's a list of Saudi institutions participating. The program ran from February to December for 11 months and there were 178 hours of online workshops and webinars with two weeks for practical and placement locations in the U.S. And 154 is the number of U.S. faculty and administrators that our pioneers met with. 220 hours of training, meetings and discussions while they were in the U.S. So here you can see this slide gives you an overview of how the program was organized and the goals of each section. So on top, you see the objectives of each stage. And to the right in blue, you see how it was done, the workshops and the medium for which we were able to achieve the goals. And now we're in the process of writing up the final reports and assessment for this program. Okay, another great project was McLuhan Speak Special Collection. If you're familiar with Marshall McLuhan's work, you'll know that this is really cool. If you're not familiar with it, you should take a look. It features videos of his speeches and appearances, explaining his ideas in his own words like the medium is a message and the global village. All the videos have transcripts and this is a really remarkable primary source website. And we really appreciate the McLuhan family for making the decision to openly license all the content and share. And here we wanted to give you a snapshot of the advocacy and awareness raising work we've been doing. So all the pins that you see here are the places where the OEC staff and board members were at to give presentations, workshops, etc. And as you can see on this map, we covered all continents except for Antarctica. Okay, so it's in fine print, but still this map lists all the conferences and events where we presented, gave workshops or organized seminars. You can find these slides on our website under resources. Right, Robert, you're right. Russia and China, in the past year, we haven't done a lot of awareness raising in that area. And India too, right. I think test India is one of the main groups doing work in India and nobody else was really doing a lot of work other than maybe edX people in India very recently. So since Robert pointed that out, maybe we should plan ahead and see how we can work more in Russia and China. Yes, yes, MIT has a big project in India. Many projects in India. Okay, now we've got Willem in the package. Okay, thank you, Willem and Robert. Okay, so this is a really good map to have to see where we were and where we want to be this year. Okay, all right. April is not too far away, we can talk then. Okay, so the last slide is a thank you slide. That's the last part of our infographics there. And of course, you know, we have to thank all of you who made these activities possible. Our sustaining members, member institutions, collaborators, partners, committee members and all the other individuals who helped us make it through the year with these great workshop activities. And now we move on to highlights from community members. And for today's meeting, we've got Thomas from Opportunity in Education. Yes, good morning, everyone. Can everyone hear me okay? Thomas. Good. Yes, my name is Thomas Pilz. I'm from Germany and we initiated a project, a global education project called Opportunity in Education. The aim of the project is a bit ambitious but we're quite positive. We want to create equal opportunity in education based on e-learning and digital solutions to pass it on around the world. And one aspect I'm going to introduce later is freeing data from open source LMS or any kind of LMS actually. In order in the spirit of open educational resources to swap complete courses from one LMS where they were generated into or make them available for any other LMS that likes to use a complete course rather than a piece of open educational resource like a PDF or PowerPoint or things like this. And this was inspired actually over the last or past two years in talks with plenty of teachers, students and at through pilot project with universities simply as a request. This is something wonderful to have and we evaluated the idea, could envision that this makes sense and this is how it works. What happens usually in an LMS and there's regardless what type of LMS stays within the LMS. It starts with the user data, with learning analytics, things like this, but also with the content actually used for teaching or learning. And what we want to achieve with our solution is to have people from anywhere with any kind of LMS dive into ready made courses that are available. For instance, a course made in Moodle which is excellent for teaching mathematics. That to swap around from Moodle to Moodle is relatively simple, but to swap that around to people which are using OLED or Canvas or any other type of LMS usually make necessary retyping, reorganizing. Practically it takes a lot of time and with especially teachers in school levels in Germany and Austria we spoke to. They have problems first with the time, second sometimes with the technology. So what we do is try to do something to simplify this. And we're using for instance the experience API as one model to make that possible just for those that are interested in what is the technology behind this. For those that are no coders and programmers that might be boring so therefore I keep that brief. The experience API is a technology piece of technology which is often coined as the successor of SCOM. It's not quite like that, but it fits into this and it does a lot more and allows a lot more for e-learning and learning analytics as SCOM does. And the main advantage of the experience API is actually that it is a perfect tool for transporting and storing data, not only learning data, any kind of data. Learning data important for learning analytics and personalized learning environments so that people can run basically their own in their own control, their learning CV. But to transport data and store data goes also with learning content and therefore also then this complete courses. And that allows then to create a more complex situation. We have one project running actually at this time. So it's not just Siri and some dream, Pine in the sky kind of thing, it's actually happening. This is a project where eight schools from 70 new countries try to make museum content more interesting for school pupils to bring museum art and everything that goes with it into schools, but also to transport typical classical school subject into a museum like physics, biology and things like this. So if you think about Leonardo da Vinci, for instance, he was perfect artist, but he was also a genius in many other fields and that is where the deductible concept starts with these schools. So now these people use a custom made moodle platform from us, which is basically pimped with communication tools in the back end so that collaboration in groups, chat, live chats, video conferences, things like this could happen. But it's one platform just for these eight participating schools. And to push content now to other participants which might want to adapt this concept is relatively simple as long as we always talk about moodle. But the world is not just moodle in Germany. It is almost just moodle, but outside Germany there are plenty of varieties and we want to cater for these as well. So now looking at the same situation what we create is a central content hub where any connected LMS with content that should be submitted to others or is made freely available to others, others can draw from. So it's not anymore necessary to use the same deductible concept of the interactive museum guide with the moodle installation. You can do that actually with an open OLED or proprietary software. You can use Canvas. You can use practically anything you like and pull complete content, but also push courses back to the community, which is actually the idea. And that would look then something like this technically. There are on the left side the connections that submit content and on the right side are the connected LMSs that pull content and that can be done. Okay, now I'm back. Can you hear me again? So what did you miss or where did it stop with audio? The beginning of this slide. Okay. Okay, there. Can you hear me? Okay. Yeah, I'm sorry for that. Don't know what's happening here. I start this over. So this slide shows basically the connections of the content hub to participating LMS. And what we create and create it already is a solution where a moodle can swap with an open OLED and the other way around complete coursework. Everything that you can swap from an open OLED to a life ray or customized life ray LMS complete coursework. The technology behind it is simply to be emulated for any type of LMS because depending on how they look and how they work and how they advertise, why they're better than the other solution. In the end of the day behind the screen is a bit of code and that is like everyone cooks with the same kind of water. So these connections without going into these technical details are relatively simple. What we're looking for in the moment is participation in evaluation projects and pilot projects where this thing is basically tested to the end even breaking it. Because what we want to achieve is between today and the end of the year to create a complete stable release that will be open source available to anyone where there is a central content hub which we would manage and administer. But basically anyone could use the code and use the same system and install content hubs all over the globe. If I'm not wrong, that completes actually what I was going to show and unfortunately sorry for the sound problems. If you do have any questions, please, providing you can hear me now. Do we have already connected commercial platforms such as Blackboard and Canvas? No, Blackboard we haven't. Canvas we were trying. Unfortunately there was a bit of a glitch with communication with these guys and we postponed that now for meeting them or anyone in charge who can take some decisions when we are in Krakow. Canvas as a commercial platform was actually something we aimed for but as I said unfortunately communication was not too good. So we tried to do this face to face. We have other proprietary software connected. But basically we aim at for most in the moment open source and freely available simply because in few European countries a lot of Austria for instance even corporations use Moodle or systems like this and we want to see how this works with them. And then basically from the experience we do with Moodle and other open source softwares move on to other systems. Yes, we know that Blackboard is market leader in a few markets. But nevertheless in the moment what we have to do is get the vehicle on the... Hello? Can you hear me okay? So probably you missed again what I said about the Blackboard part or did you get that? Okay, you missed it. What I said is there are plenty of systems and probably there are better ways in going about evaluating this development than we choose. But we choose in the moment to go with open source and what is widely available anywhere in the world. And I just before saw that India is under served and other parts. I don't know how popular Blackboard or paid solutions are in these parts of the world. So what we wanted to achieve and maybe we learn something better from you now is actually to provide a solution that practically in the moment anyone could use. So Moodle is simply to pull a live for you as well, open OLED. These kind of things with Blackboard is probably something different. To connect commercial platforms in the end of the day is simple because as I said and anyone knows that who deals with software behind a fancy front end is code and that is no magic and trickery. So it's a few lines of code that then would connect Blackboard or other systems. Can you hear me now? Yes we can. Okay good. Yeah I'm sorry I don't know what's happening here but... We all didn't know that we're only going to have a lot of questions for you today. Yeah no, no problem. So here's the solution now. Can you hear me now? Yes perfect, we're aware of that. For the commercial evaluation what we want to achieve is Moodle for instance even if I'm personally not so keen on Moodle but it's widely used and it is used for instance in Austria in many many businesses. It's very simple to create situations where also businesses can evaluate how that works for them, what is the benefit and actually in the end of the day businesses are the ones which should sponsor and support this kind of developments to keep it free and open and really freely accessible to anyone else. Okay another question is what is the benefit for institute and lectures. We got the idea simply inspired by teachers which and I'm just talking now about Germany and I'm talking about Austria for instance where everything is available. There's a server structure, there's Moodle set up, there's someone who's administrating these things and they have courses and classes on how to get content in it and how to make it interesting and appealing for kids. Which is with Moodle who work with this not that really easy because it's not really fun and intuitive, it doesn't really appeal to kids because it did not arrive really with functionalities in the 21st century but that is a situation. So the media competence of plenty of teachers and also students is not that great. And they spend a lot of time and waste from their point of view a lot of time creating courses, creating material which is good which follows the objective of teaching. And the idea was if there is like open educational resources, complete courses that I could use then it would save me a lot of time. I only need to maybe customize things or use it with a layer plugin framework the course as is. And this is where the benefit sits there and how that works and if that is in the end of the day something which will be adopted around the globe or in a different way. It's the beginning, it's in the moment a prototype pilot kind of thing. Probably it is called something else in a year and it probably works completely different in two years but we have to start somewhere and that is where it is. So for content authors for instance it is much easier and wider for them to get their content out there to plenty of systems rather than to one. And they are immediately in a system and not just some coursework which is sitting around isolated if for instance in schools or universities are required to use a particular system. That sounds like a good idea Rylan. Or we can probably set up another course. In Krakow or if there is plenty of questions then anyone is welcome to send me an email. With the website opportunity in education there is plenty of information on there that will be filled more and more with life as we go now. And there is also contact options and possibilities to get in touch with me or with anyone else on the team. Just about to put in the link. Thomas put it in there. Okay Thomas is not only going to be in Krakow but his company is sponsoring the OE Global Conference. So just thank you Evo for the link. We'll have a plenty of opportunity to talk to him during the conference but it I was just talking to him this morning saying that it would be nice to have some calls with other members prior to the conference because he's got a lot of really interesting tools for OER such as an LMS Cater to OER and a whole bunch of other APIs and tools. It's really really cool. So we can talk about that later. Okay well thank you very much Thomas for the talk. Thank you for having me even with audio difficulties. Sorry for that. That's Germany for you. That's really great. Thank you. Okay so we're going to move on to the next item on the agenda. So let's put this technology side away for a little while and we're going to be putting on the hats of a party planner. As we're going to be talking about planning for the 10 year anniversary of the Cape Town Declaration. So we've been working with Shuttleworth Foundation and Open Society Institute to coordinate the global celebration of a 10 year anniversary and one of the things that we'll be doing is we'll be having our global conference in Cape Town in March 2017. So we're going to have the whole open education community celebrating in Cape Town at the time. But we want to do something more special. Of course having the global community there itself is really special but can we think of any kind of activity that will push open education forward and increase awareness of open education around the world? Any thoughts? Yes, thank you Igor. The Mozilla Foundation also. For example, while this celebration is going on in Cape Town, what can happen in Japan to increase awareness of open education and have more institutions from Japan signed with this Cape Town Declaration on OER? Actually the dates are really close. I don't know exactly how they're going to tie in with the dates to look at all the achievements that happened in for a decade. They've got their own celebration, again showing the impact, putting the cases together, documenting all the activities, cases from major regions. Do you have any ideas, suggestions, any wild thoughts on how to showcase these cases? We're going to have a lot of reading to do if it's all in writing, right? Connect activities from different regions. Robert, do you want to elaborate? So all three. Sure, we can do infographic. That's going to be a huge scroll, but yep, that is doable. Okay, and showing the next steps. Any ideas on how to forecast or how to appoint certain things as the next thing to do in the movement? Maybe we can have some kind of vote or award for what's going to be the trending thing in the next coming decade. Easy to read, to understand, and to disseminate. Yes, of course. That would be very important. Okay, how would you like to push open as a default for education? Oh, yes, definitely. So this is a really quick brainstorming to just let you know what's coming. Of course, let's do that. So today I'm going to send you guys the chat history so that you can think about it a little more and do email us again to feedback at early consortium. We can keep the discussion going on for a little while. And then when we officially have another call on the planning meeting, we can all pitch in with ideas. Okay, sounds good. We'll create a Google Doc with chat history, some ideas, and then you guys can all add to it a pre preliminary version of the planning talk. So we'll stop at that. I'll send you guys a Google Doc with the chat history, some of the ideas that were brought up here so that we can expand on it. Thank you for all the ideas and suggestions. Okay, so we've got just a couple more things to talk about. Open Education Award for Excellence. You all know that the deadline for nominating somebody or a project for the award is January 29. You can see this on the conference website because, of course, the award dinner is at the conference. These are the categories for the awards, individual leadership, individual educator, outstanding site, outstanding course, open MOOCs, creative innovation, and open research. And here's the link for you to go on our website. Thank you, Igor, for all the links. And this is the information you'll be seeing on the website in a very simple nomination form. It would be great if you can nominate somebody and show your appreciation to the person or to the project, the wonderful work that they're doing in the community. Okay, one last thing. The global conference early birth rate is valid till the 10th of February. So hurry up and register before the early registration ends. Okay, so we have a couple minutes left. So if you have any questions or comments or any discussion items that you would like to bring up at the moment, this is the time. Great. Okay, so any, if you have, if you have forgotten to talk about something at the call today, do let us know you know where to reach us. And I will send you the Google Docs so that you can keep thinking about planning for the Cape Town Declaration. Thank you, Thomas, for the talk. Thank you, everyone for joining us today. Thank you all. We'll talk to you again soon.