 Thank you Jonathan and thanks for moderating the moderators have just been excellent throughout the whole conference. Hi everybody, my name is cable green I'm the director of open education at creative Commons I see some familiar faces here in the room. First, before we get started, if everybody could just introduce themselves in the chat, that would be great maybe your name where you work and where you are. And I am in Olympia Washington today at my home and I was telling Jonathan i'm I and all of the other Pacific Northwesters in the United States are happy today because it's not raining and at this time of the year it usually is raining so it's a good day. It's got somebody from Kansas. All right, Natasha's in India welcome Natasha. Where's everybody else from at North Charleston South South Carolina welcome Jessica. Excellent. Most people come in go ahead and introduce yourself oh there they come we got Canada Brazil. Colorado Springs for Jonathan it's one of my favorite places. All right well welcome everybody i'm going to go ahead and share my slides, let me say right up front I will be sharing these slides with you right at the end of the presentation. So you don't have don't don't need to take notes don't need to take screenshots i'll make i'll give you a link and these will all be available. I am going to go ahead and share my screen and ask Jonathan can you see the slides. We're good to go all right I see a thumbs up fabulous. Today we're going to talk about the UNESCO recommendation on we are and specifically what can we all do as open education advocates and people who work in open education to create the resources and the support services and the advocacy and the discussions around this recommendation with. Our national governments with our state and provincial governments and with our education institutions so that's what this session is about today. My information is at the bottom of this slide if you'd like to talk more about this topic i'd love to speak with you. My email is there i'm cable at creative commons.org, and you can also catch me on Twitter at see green C g R E N. Okay, all these slides, unless otherwise noted are under a creative commons attribution license so feel free to reuse them as you see fit. So a couple bit of context here creative commons is now 20 years old we're actually having our 20th anniversary this year. And we've been working on open education for that entire 20 years i've been at CC for just over 10 years, and we've always been in the open education space and will continue to do so. During that 20 years we've worked with many others also working in open education. Today we're going to focus a little bit on UNESCO. And so we've worked with UNESCO and OECD and other idios and national governments and lots and lots of civil society organizations or NGOs around the world for this full 20 years. UNESCO is many of you have probably heard of UNESCO know of UNESCO UNESCO is one of the wings of the United Nations, and UNESCO specifically is the part of the UN that focuses on education, science, and culture. And so when, when the United Nations gets involved in conversations around open education it's led by UNESCO. What's really cool about UNESCO is that they have these various legal instruments that countries around the world the UNESCO members are national governments from around the planet. And they come together and they talk about the big issues that affect not just their individual countries but the world. And then UNESCO has these various legal instruments to to formalize the the wants and desires and the commitments of these countries. And so they have things called conventions that are at the highest level. And so like the convention on human rights would be the highest level of of a recommend of what UNESCO is talking with national governments about and then commitments that national governments are making on the on the low end or something called declarations declarations or more. Here's a here's a topic it's really important, something that we should start to pay attention to. So in 2012 UNESCO actually passed what's called the UNESCO declaration on OER in the middle are something called recommendations, and I've got the detailed script here from UNESCO, but recommendations are legal instruments. Etc etc etc if you look at the very bottom and bold. These recommendations are intended to influence the development of national laws and practices. So recommendations are a really big deal. They are discussed and debated and written usually over a couple of years, lots of meetings happen around the lead up to passing a recommendation. And these recommendations are exactly what it says here they're intended for a national government that's a UNESCO member to say. Okay, this is a serious topic what national laws do I need to change what policies do I need to put in place. What practices in my country do I need to support. So recommendations are a big deal. In 2019, there was the 40th UNESCO General Conference and one of the items on the agenda that was voted on was a UNESCO recommendation on open educational resources. It was unanimously adopted all countries voted yes by the 193 UNESCO Member States and Jonathan, would you please share in the in the chat the link to the UNESCO recommendation so everybody's got that. Thanks. And so this is now of an official recommendation it's been adopted by countries around the world. And then the United States just a quick addendum here. The United States is one of the very few countries in the world that is not a formal UNESCO Member. So long story if you want to learn more about it, you can, you can Google why that is, I'm happy or I'm happy to describe it, but they're not an official member that said United States did actively participate in the conversations and the, the editing and the comments around the lead up to the recommendation. And so they were very involved in this they just didn't have an official vote because they're not an official member of UNESCO at this time. I say that because there's still an opportunity for the United United States to fully participate in the implementation of the recommendation, just like every other country. The recommendation, as we said before, this is a missile a bit more about it here it's a specific UNESCO instrument that gives national governments a list of recommendations and a list of actions for them in this case because this is a recommendation on OER to support open education in their countries, and then it actually calls out and says don't just do this alone. You're working with other countries, as you implement this and that's true of all recommendations. This particular recommendation on OER has five major areas so if you look at the document that Jonathan sent you, you'll see that the recommendation is has these five major sections in it. And that is building the capacity of stakeholders to create access reuse adapt and redistribute OER. So this is all about capacity building professional learning opportunities, getting certified, having, you know, various trainings having conferences and bringing together a lot of people in your country to learn about open education, and why it's important so it's that that awareness raising and then skilling up of lots of people in country. The next area is developing supportive policy for OER. So this is everything from from funders including governments, putting open licensing policies in place, where they say you know whatever's publicly funded is has a creative comments license on it that's quite common we call those open license requirements, foundations and institutes and others oftentimes adopt those. But it's also things like we're going to have a policy to regularly provide funding for universities. We might have a policy to support faculty with release time who want to work on converting a course to OER converting a whole degree program to a to a zero textbook cost degree. It might be a supportive policy to to adjust the rules around promotion and tenure, so that when some when a faculty member or an educator goes for promotion or tenure that they're, if they're publishing and open access journals, and or if they are contributing to the comments that that's viewed as a positive thing and you get more points in your promotion tenure. So there's lots and lots of different types of policy that the recommendation calls out that we should look at. The third area is include encouraging inclusive and equitable quality OER. This really goes right at the conversation of what type of what kind of content. Are we building for whom who gets who gets to be involved in creating that content. Are we truly being inclusive and equitable as we're creating educational resources and then openly licensing licensing them. So this one's absolutely critical and you've seen at this conference, many examples of some really great work happening in this area. The fourth area is nurturing and creation of sustainability models for OER. And this really goes at the primarily at the business models at the flows of money, how policy might interact with this. The commercial sector might have to say about this and what the public institutions that are that support education, new ways of them thinking about how they can ensure that when they use public funds that the resources that they procure or produce or commission are open and I'll talk about that in just a moment. And then the last area is to promote and reinforce international cooperation so there's no need for any country or any state or province, or any education institution to do this alone. The recommendation has a very detailed set of actions, and we can all work on those actions together. So that in a nutshell or the broad areas of the recommendation within each one of these categories you'll see a lot of detail and specific subcategories and actions that governments and others can take to implement the recommendation. So I want to emphasize how important this is this is a real milestone in open education, open education as a field is really only 20 years old, maybe a little bit older depending on who you're talking to. That's not a long time when it comes to politics or laws or the focus of in this case the world's nations. And so this is a, this is a milestone this is something to be celebrated and most important in my opinion this is a unique opportunity to advance open education for all the reasons that we work in it globally. And so some other points here when we're working with national governments or provincial or state governments, it's an opportunity to have scaled impact. It's one thing for me to work with my community college or university to have, you know, promotion and tenure policies that favor the production and use and adoption of open education. It's another deal when the Ministry of Education in Belize says from now on, everything that we fund and procure for educational resources will be openly licensed it's just a different level of scale. And we can with this instrument with this recommendation, we can have new conversations with governments because the governments have signed on to this thing the government's built this thing that we couldn't have before. And so that's, that's very exciting. Those of you who know me or heard me speak in the past know that I'm very keen on thinking about public funding and how what the rules are on public funding of educational resources of research in science etc. And this is this is my firm belief that publicly funded resources should be openly licensed when the public pays for something the public should have access to what it paid for. And we shouldn't restrict those resources just to one country, if the public in one country paid for something. Yes, they should all have access and there's no reason not to let the rest of the world have access as well. One of the new ideas. So you know this is an older idea we've been working on this for a long time this should not be new to anybody. This is an idea that that I started to put forth maybe four or five years ago, and whereas open policy is very top down so it's you know the funder could be a foundation or a government saying if you take this money. What you produce in your grant or your contract will be openly licensed that's that's an open policy usually, whereas open procurement is really bottom up. So open procurement might be a school district buying educational resources or it might be a university's math department that maybe Jonathan works in and that math department saying. Okay for entry level pre calculus textbooks and educational resources let's have a conversation as a faculty and decide what we are going to use so what are we going to assign our students. And so the idea of open procurement is at the point that you still control the money. So if you're a, if you're a school district in primary or secondary schools. If you're a school district has money and you're going to procure or buy educational resources for your students. What open procurement says is, don't do the traditional thing, which is, I'm going to give a bunch of money to the to the market probably to a for profit publisher. I'm not going to sell me educational resources at a high price and the model used to be that I got paper, and then I kept that paper for 1012 years and amortize the cost over that long period of time. And then I bought new resources, well that was problematic because resources got old and stale and students couldn't keep the resources, and the books ripped and you couldn't update them and it was a bit of a mess. The new model that publishers are putting out is a digital lease so now you don't even own what you buy, you lease digital access to the resource for for the duration of your lease and then when you stop paying, you lose access which is also bad right this is what we should be doing with digital resources over procurement says if you are procuring if you're buying resources, that's fine, build by commission you know pay money for what you need. If you can build an in house, even better, but it's okay to have somebody else build it for you or buy what they have. But number two, ensure that when you procure or buy something that you own what you buy. Right so I don't like I don't lease cars I go buy a car and then I own it and because I own my car I can sell it or I can loan it to somebody or I can let my kid drive it when they get their licenses I have all these things I can do with it so if you're going to buy or commission copyrighted resources, make sure you, the public education institution owns the copyright to what you buy, and then hopefully you'll have an internal open policy that says you're going to share and CC license, what you own. I'm trying to put this in a catchy phrase, you know, build or buy what you need, own what you buy and share what you own, and that's the idea of open procurement. I bring this up because we wove this into the recommendation and suggested that that that countries and education institutions and districts of schools and primary and secondary schools, take a good hard look at how they spend their money and ask themselves is there more a more effective efficient way of procuring and owning and sharing educational resources that is not beholden to the market forces which are taking us down a path that are not very healthy. Okay, so that's a lot about the recommendation. Now, what's what's happening like who's working on this is anybody taking advantage of this milestone and starting to put together some help for governments. And the answer is, yes, and we're just getting started. There's a long way to go. So there are at least three collaboratives that creative Commons works with and not just us many other organizations are part of these as well. The first one is the UNESCO oer dynamic coalition so Jonathan if you could share that link that would be great. This is a group that's led by UNESCO and specifically led by the UNESCO staff which, which facilitated the whole creation and passing of the recommendation. So this is a really important group. What they've done so far is they've hosted webinars with experts from all around the world on the different areas of the recommendation. And there's a lot of sharing of ideas going on and challenges and how we can collectively overcome those challenges. And so that's one group. The second group, we call the network of open NGOs. This is lots of different non governmental organizations or civil society organizations that work in the open education space, who have gotten together and said look, all of us are willing to do something to support governments and in education institutions around the recommendation. Why don't we work together. Why don't we coordinate our efforts why don't we pool our resources so that we can, we can have a more united set of services and and communicate, you know hopefully with with one voice to governments that we're working with. So this is a great group they meet once a month. It's facilitated by by OE global they do a great job pulling us all together and keeping us on track and and we are Africa group or we are Africa and Neil Butcher and associates as part of that and they're leading us now in an in an effort to build case studies. So we're talking about short one to two page or case studies that are easily digestible by government officials to demonstrate the success of OER. So all of us have, you know, ideas and philosophies about why open education is good and we've got anecdotes we've got data from oftentimes our own countries or our own institutions. And that's great. And governments, you talk to them about that stuff and they say show me the data. And so we're putting together research backed case studies of various OER successes from all around the world. What we found with this group was, we had a lot of ideas, but what we really needed to do was to stop, pick something focus and do that one thing. And then we're going to move on to the to the next thing. That's coming along nicely. The third group is a group that that I facilitate it's called the creative commons open education platform. Think of this as a working group for open education topics that are global in nature. So this is a big group we've got over 1100 people from 94 countries and it's growing all the time. You're all welcome to join this it is free to join. Jonathan, could you drop those three links in for me please. The first link, Jonathan will share is a link to the open education platforms web page on the CC website. There's information about how to join if you have any problem joining just send me an email and I will add you to the list. We meet every few months we also have a slack channel and various forms of communication. The next link Jonathan will share is our 2021 work plan in the platform. And the reason that I want to share that is that one of the areas of work that the platform members decided that they wanted to work on was helping governments implement the UNESCO recommendation on we are so you'll see some more detail in there. And then the third link that Jonathan will share is a grid that we're going to use in just a minute. We're going to have some interactivity and work together. There are other possible actions to to operationalize or help governments implement the recommendation on we are and so this this grid is multi column thing that Jonathan's sharing the column on the far left is the recommendation. So that's actually the copy and paste text right out of the recommendation. The next column over is what can governments do I think that's what it is I don't have an in front of me. So what could governments do so what are the specific actions that we think governments can take that fulfill those parts of the recommendation, and then the other column is what can institutions do and here we're talking about education institutions, universities, colleges, schools, and other formal education institutions. So let's go back to that document in just a moment. So as I said please feel free to sign up and join the CC open ed platform we'd love to have you it is open it's free. All are welcome to join. Okay, so now we're going to come back to that last doc that three column document that Jonathan shared. And what I want to do is I'm going to stop talking, we're going to open it up for questions first, and then we're going to engage in this activity together for the remaining time. And that is what I'd like to do is have us all think about how can we work in our countries with our governments, either at a national level or a state or provincial level, and or your education institutions that you work with. And help them implement parts of the UNESCO recommendation on OER. When you look at the recommendation, it is huge there's a lot of stuff to do in there. We can't do it all at once with any government or any institution and they may never implement the entire thing. And that's okay. The question that we're asking at this early stage of implementation is, what can we start with what's a natural fit for your institution or for your government. What is their opportunity. What skills do you have what connections do you have that you might be able to help your government or your education institution make some progress on implementing parts of the recommendation. And or what might you produce so as you can see in these groups what we're starting to do is to produce resources that advocates will need as they're engaged in the support services. And these studies that we're building with the network of open NGOs, those are going to be licensed CC by and we're going to share and publish them openly, and anybody in the world can take those translate them modify them and use them in their advocacy efforts. And we're going to be, we're going to keep building in these groups more and more of those openly licensed assets that advocates can use. So that's another area where you as individuals or you as groups of open education leaders can contribute as well. And so, so I'm going to stop sharing for just a moment actually let me just share my contact information here again cable at creative commas.org or at see green on Twitter. I'm going to stop sharing and then we're going to come back to this document in just a minute. There we go. And so at this point. Jonathan were there any questions along the way that we should circle back to in the chat that people have already asked. I think there's only one Jody Bailey asks, says I subscribe to the CC open email list. Does that mean I'm already a member of the CC open education platform. Yes, that is the email list. Okay. At this point there's really three ways that people can can chime in one is feel free to unmute yourself and turn on your video and and ask your question or just suggest how you might brainstorm or how you might contribute and and or how you might help your government or your education institution. If you've got an idea, please share it. If you have a question about how to do it let's talk about it. Hopefully if you you can also chat in the chat window and I'll keep an eye on that. And we can also use this Google document everybody has comment permissions for it. And feel free to look through it and add comments about where you think you might be able to contribute. So I'll stop talking the floor is open. And then you feel free if anybody wants to ask a question or talk about how you might contribute just unmute yourself and turn your video on if you'd like. Hi, my name is Elena McNabb and I work at the College of DuPage as an adjunct faculty manager. I'm sitting at this list, and I'm seeing a couple things just because I specifically work with adjunct faculty here in our institution and since that our institution is a community college it's a lot of our resources end up being public anyways. So I'm just thinking about how, like our library can incorporate. And I guess, advertise it to the community but then also just some things that I can do within my own department would be to organize a workshop which we do, but make it focused on oh we are, but then also I like the idea of installing oh we are we're doing adjunct faculty boards, which is a great incentive for faculty. And eventually, you know we can start with adjunct faculty and move it to full time and incorporate those two groups but yeah I thought that was a really great opportunity to develop that within my own department. Those are all really great ideas and thanks Elena for for sharing. I think the first section of the recommendation right it's all about building capacity building awareness. There's a ton of good ideas in there for, you know, for an institution that's maybe just getting started, or you're in the early stages of building. And everything that you, you know talked about is, you know I think fits squarely in that first area. Yes to everything you said, and you know you might see some other things in this first section that might be useful as you're looking to build the capacity and the skills at your institution. Another quick plug that I'll make is that Creative Commons also has something called the CC certificate, which is a 10 week online course, we also do it as a one week boot camp. And it's an opportunity for people to really learn at a deep level about copyright the public domain CC licenses, open education, a bit of advocacy, more and more about open pedagogy we're weaving into the curriculum. And so if that's something that's of interest, Jonathan maybe you could drop the link in for the certificate page that'd be great. We also just, there's a there is a fee to that the it's a $500 course fee for the 10 week course these are facilitated Jonathan's actually one of our long term long time facilitators. These are really great courses people love taking them they. But thanks Jonathan for putting the link in. We also just struck a deal with the regional compacts in the United States to provide a 15% discount off that price, which is new. So if your institution is a member of SRE be your witchy your neppy or any of the regional compacts which it probably is, then it's not $500 it's whatever $485 it's with that discount. But that's another I bring it up Elena because that's another way to build capacity at your institution is you might want to get two or three people CC certified at your institution. And then you've got some some real experts in open licensing who can serve as resources to other faculty and instructional designers etc. Yeah, no that's great and I can already think of a couple people that I can plug in there to see if they'd be willing to do that so yeah thank you. Okay. Oh, I see a question here. Has there been any pushback against the recommendation at any stage, maybe from commercial publishers or do you anticipate future pushback. Yeah, there was a lot of pushback at every stage and they're. And then what's happening right now is different than pushback but I'll describe it. So yes, when the recommendation was being worked on. And by the way, UNESCO is on track to pass a recommendation on open science this November at the next general conference which is awesome, and we hope in the future that UNESCO will have a open culture, which is kind of its third area that it focuses on. And so we'll be nudging suggesting helping UNESCO had that direction as well because open glam or galleries libraries archives and museums is another space that creative Commons works and we've got a program around that as well. So to answer Jonathan's question did we have pushback. Yeah, there was there was pushback from. There's pushback from publishers who don't like, you know, rarely like discussion about open education, full stop. Because you know the creation adoption of open educational resources usually means less market share for for them to sell expensive, all rights reserved copyrighted materials. And so they don't like that and they raise their voice. We also had, you know, there was, I would say, quite a bit of lack of awareness and understanding by several countries around the world, as the recommendation was being debated. And so you I'm sure you've all encountered this as well as you've had conversations about copyright and open licensing and and we are with with people that you've worked with. You know, sometimes people think mistakenly that when you put an open license on something that you're actually losing your copyright or you're giving up your copyright. That's not the case right you're the beauty of CC licensing as you keep your copyright, and you're adding a license for the public that provides some, some rights and some permissions, but the author still retains her or his copyright. And so there was that confusion. And so there had to be some education of those representatives along the way. And so of course debate about the specific language countries, when it comes to that these UNESCO instruments countries of course like to have full authority to make decisions in their countries about their countries. And they're always very careful about ceding any authority to outside entities including international governmental organizations like UNESCO. You know there was a big debate about whether or not countries would be required to do these things or if countries would be even required to report every few years about the progress they were making against the recommendation. And so you'll see language in it which is maybe a little bit softer than some of us would have liked where it's encouraging countries to do these things and it's recommending that countries report publicly on their progress. Honestly, that's the way of international agreements right you there's a lot of compromise to get these things across the line and to get them passed. And those those compromises have to be made. And that's, that's not abnormal at all all international big international agreements encounter that kind of discussion and debate. And I, and I believe that to be a healthy thing that's that's the way diplomacy works. What's happening now is different. So this thing is now passed. And, of course, it passed in late 2019. And we all know that shortly thereafter we were all blessed with a global pandemic. And so, as you might imagine, national governments around the world are a bit distracted at the moment. And as you imagine, and then as a whole. And then if you look at their ministries of education or their national departments of education. They are also very focused on a specific set of challenges, right so as schools closed. There was this massive move to online learning. And in many countries, including the United States and Canada where most of the conference participants are from, you know, there were a lot of teachers and a lot of both in primary and secondary education but also in tertiary and university education that were not well prepared for that. There were a lot of universities and schools that did not have the technology in place and there was you know, if you watch zoom stock right that we're using right now zoom stock went way up because there was a massive purchasing of that and other technologies to go online. And so that that grabbed the attention, as you might imagine of ministries of education around the world. And also, a lot of concern right now and a lot of effort, looking at kids that and I'll say kids I've got two kids who are in primary and secondary school, who, when their schools closed, they went home. Many in many many countries around the world they do not have good internet access or in many cases even stable electricity they certainly don't have one to one laptop programs in many countries. And so closing school didn't mean moving online closing school men closing school like I don't go to school anymore. And so that was a known factor we knew that was going to happen the problem is is that as schools are reopening. A lot of those students don't come back. They've been put into labor situations where they're now working and helping to support their families because coven took a hit, or the parents took a hit and their employment and their ability to earn a living and so there's just lots of challenges and problems right now in the education space globally that are drawing the attention. And so, as you might imagine things like the UNESCO recommendation on OER which is, it's not mandatory. This is a, you know, an optional thing that governments have signed on to that they've lost focus a little bit on that. And rightfully so, right we got to make sure that students can safely get back into school. That being said, there's also, so that's the, that's the down major downside for education around the pandemic we know we hope that that will get better as vaccines continue to spread as in the United States anyway they're about to approve vaccines for five to 12 year olds I believe that's coming in the coming days. But that's, we all know that globally we've got a real problem with vaccines is incredibly inequitable, what's happening in terms of vaccine distribution. I think of all the vaccines given in the world, most of the countries in Africa have, you know, have received something like 2% as compared of their population have been vaccinated as compared to many countries in the global north which are, you know, 60 70 80% of those are actually inequity problems there that affect students in education that are going to have to be worked out. The silver lining which is interesting if you saw there was a presentation at this conference about about, what's his name, Bayview analytics that does surveys every year about OER. So that's the question just looking at the United States. What happened in terms of the adoption and use of open education resources when courses went massively online. And the answer was not a lot like we didn't get a big bump in OER, but to be determined. And so they're kind of keeping an eye on it. And so, thanks Jonathan gave me the one minute warning. So that'll be interesting to watch. But that is an opportunity for we advocates that work in open education that as, as schools engage more and more in digital because they have to go online or they're having more hybrid. That that is an opportunity to talk about OER raise awareness and help them adopt open educational resources instead of all rights reserved expensive commercial resources which they probably have to lease and not own. I'll stop there and I'll take my last 20 seconds and say two things. One is, if you'd like to talk more feel free to reach out to me anytime. I'm happy to connect you with these groups I'm happy to work with you if you've got ideas. Second, if you want to add ideas directly to this document you've got comment level access feel free to throw your ideas on here and our questions and I'll review those and reach out to you. And then last if anybody does want to stay after this Jonathan's going to close the recording, but if anybody wants to stay and talk for a minute I'm happy to do so. Back to you Jonathan. Yes, thank you so much we I'm going to stop recording now.