 yn cyfnodol i gyddiadau yn ymddangos eu cyfnodol, ac yn ymddangos eu gennych ymddangos eu cyfnodol i'r mewn Llywodraeth mewn Llywodraeth, ac yw ymddangos eich bod yn credu bod chi'n helpu i gael ei eisteddau educatio a'u gweithio amser i gyntaf i'r ddau ymddangos eu cyfnodol i'r ddau i gyfnodol i gyfnodol i gyfnodol. Yn ymgyrchu'r yw ymgyrchu yw ymgyrchu'r Uned, y ddylch yn Ynysgrifennol yng Nghymru yn Ymgyrch, a dylai'r ymwyllfa yma, Tim Reed. Yn ymgyrchu'r Ymgyrchu yw'r ymgyrchu, yw yn ymgyrch ymgyrchu yn y rhanau anhygoel. A oedd gennym i gael ymgyrchu ymgyrch, ymgyrch yn ymgyrch i ni, Roedd y gynhwysbeth o digital lytrosi yn ydych chi mor hwn o gyngor iawn o ddweud o fuddol yn hwyl ei wneud o'r cynhyrchu Cymru a nhw'n cynnig i'r mynd i gyd yn llwaiddio digital oherwydd oedd y teimlo cwyrwyd gyda'n dod i ffyrdd iawn, mae oedd gyda'n cymryd beryddiol fel yw y gallwn eu d兴inol, ond mae'n ddwych yn dweud, a ddysgu'n ei wneud o'r gyfnod ychydig a'r gyfnod gofyn o'r ddechrau oherwydd o'r hunayn, ran hyn os oedd i ni ran wneud ysgol. Dyna'r rheswer ynglynig, rydyn ni'n meddwl, a effaith yr url a'r peaniaeth arobu'.au.au, wrth gwrs, ynglynig a'r syniadau ac'r dweud ac i'r ddigonol ti'n symun. A o ddysgu, o'ch bêl o'n wneud, rwy'n cael ei dgweithio hynny'n ddefnyddio'r ddechrau, around refugees, around MOOCs, around language learning, around employability, and around accreditation. And that maybe this is normal, makes it quite uncomfortable and a bit incoherent sometimes. And so what we're doing at the moment, if not from anything else, is struggling to get some sort of sense of coherence and direction and order out of the original proposal. For anyone that's interested, and I doubt very much of anyone is, we attempted to get the acronym from the phrase, massive open online courses enhancing linguistic and transversal skills for social inclusion and employability, which kind of summarises it but doesn't make for a particularly elegant acronym. And this is supposed to either capture the project's ambitions and aspirations or maybe just to represent its incoherence. The refugees are at the bottom right hand corner and the idea is that what we do by exploring the relevance of MOOCs and refugees needs is to help them on their way into higher education and then obviously into the labour market. And I suppose I should say that amongst the partners there are partners in Germany, partners in Sweden, partners in Spain and partners in Malta and a few other places. And one of the things we discover very quickly is not only the diversity of refugees coming into those various countries and some of them are more or less the points of entry, Malta. Into the EU, whereas others, Germany and Sweden and maybe the UK, are kind of a long way down the line. They end up in some cases being the target destination as opposed to merely a transit nation. And also discovering that different countries have very different accreditation regimes around MOOCs and around accreditation of prior learning. And actually that many countries and many cultures have rather different takes on what they see as happening to immigrants and refugees included and what the nature of integration, assimilation or whatever it might be amounts to in their country and their culture. Yes, so what we've done so far in about the previous six months is attempt to review and map MOOC provision that might be appropriate to meet refugees and to meet refugee support groups and to explore the issues of accreditation and help what that might mean in terms of progression into or within the higher education system and then onward into employability. And this is all very impressionistic. I mean even surveying and reviewing MOOCs is pretty impressionistic in the sense that, well, apart from anything else, the term seems actually to be quite poorly defined in practice even though we all know what the acronym means. But certainly I think what we've discovered is that whilst there might be some MOOCs explicitly targeted at refugees, the way in which they're targeted often seems merely to be fee waivers onto existing courses and actually implicitly to be targeted at refugees who are kind of a long way down the process. They're not the people arriving on Greek beaches. They've kind of fairly well into the system in any case. And there aren't actually very many MOOCs once you start looking at what might be appropriate in terms of entrepreneurial skills or language skills. Or maybe we just haven't discovered very many, but they're mostly in English. I mean we have discovered some originating from outside the EU, specifically Jordan using Arabic, but they're always on the established platforms. One of the problems in making very much progress is the amount of instability and churn amongst the various statutory organisations and voluntary sector organisations attempting to support refugees and the amount of, if you like, confusion and churn. I mean especially in the UK where much of this work is voluntary sector work or is volunteer work. People come and people go. They do have some time. They don't have some time. They're only partially funded. And so kind of pinning down even a straightforward appointment can be quite problematic. And I suppose what I was coming to is that clearly accessing a MOOC makes quite specific, albeit tacit assumptions about digital literacy. And I think those assumptions are fairly culturally and linguistically specific. So what might be the underlying challenges that we find ourselves working with? Well, one of them, and this is around, if you like, the cultural specificity of digital literacy, is that people from outside Europe come with a particular set of expectations and experiences of education, the purpose of education, of pedagogy experiences within school, which are very unlike the dominant ones within Europe. Clearly most MOOCs are not in non-European languages or non-European scripts. And it's really quite difficult pinning down the kind of characteristics or typologies of refugees. And I think we make a few too many kind of easy assumptions. I mean, many come from Muslim countries where the established banking systems are not like those that we're used to in the West, for example, or where the nature and expectations around livelihoods are not about going into a large corporation, a large anglophone corporation in Western Europe. And where we don't know very much, especially early on in the process, you know, Greek beaches or Maltese harbors, we don't know much about the nature of their devices, access, tariffs, coverage, their digital habits, their use of social media, which ones and why. And all of this is very kind of fluid and informal when you compare that to the kind of formality, if you like, rigidity and structure around MOOCs and the pedagogy that is probably embedded in MOOCs. And as I said a minute ago, it's not necessarily clear why we're doing this. Yes, it's easy to say employability, but it's not clear what that might mean for people from very different cultures with very different expectations and experiences about livelihoods about earning a living. And about the nature of integration or assimilation. We've had quite a few heated arguments about how our respective different countries treat people coming into them and what they expect. And so I live on the, well, I work in the fringes of Birmingham and the Black Country where there are substantial South Asian communities where in some respects it's quite easy to be disconnected from the Anglo-Saxon corporate mainstream, if you like, and where people from outside Europe could quite easily slot into informal economies, whereas that's completely different from experiences in Sweden where clearly someone from an Asian or Middle Eastern background is quite conspicuous for a variety of different reasons where they don't have immediate points of reference and immediate points of contact when they arrive. And I guess Germany is presumably slightly different, again, because of a long history of Turkish guest arbiter. And where social attitudes may differ as well, you know, where there may be a backlash. So there seem to be quite considerable uncertainty and quite considerable challenges in this work, which are only beginning to kind of surface. And it's quite easy for us, I think, to deal with the problem as it's been set, rather than recognizing the more significant or meaningful problems behind it all. Yes, we could tackle how do you fit incoming refugees into MOOCs, but I suspect that's not necessarily meeting their needs or recognizing their aspirations. Yes, so my concern was that, yes, MOOCs imply some kind of set of skills and attitudes and access and affordances around digital literacy, but it seems that those have been framed largely from EU and UK perspectives and aren't necessarily relevant for people coming from Middle Eastern backgrounds. And yes, we can formulate kind of abstract definitions about digital literacy in terms of how do we enable our students to flourish in increasingly digital worlds. And then if you unpack it a bit, it turns out as a kind of ongoing tension between digital literacy interpreted to mean employability and IT skills, and something kind of vaguely, something much more vague and much more vague around, I suppose, Western European kind of liberalism and self-expression. And largely maybe individualistic. And that's what worries me if you look at how, for example, Hofsteder might characterize other cultures and other civilizations and what the difference is in terms of, I don't know, hierarchy consensus, authority, trust and so on, what that might mean when you try and see its implications for digital literacy. So I think, yeah, this is as far as I get in this particular context in thinking, yes, this work could be useful, but we need to probe quite seriously what is behind it and attempt to avoid, if you like, a superficiality around the whole issue. So that's kind of my thoughts in progress. Thank you. Anyone? Questions? Hi, I'm Francis Yobara from Kobe University in Japan. I'm really interested in refugees. I wonder, what do the refugees want? Do they want to do MOOCs and what are they hoping to learn? For me that seems to be the essence of the whole project, finding out from the refugees what they want? Has much research been done on that? In a sense, that's certainly my problem, even if it's not the project's problem. I come up this partly because I've worked for the UN organisation in the Middle East that is responsible for the Palestinian refugee community, so a school system of half a million kids and their teachers working on their e-learning strategy. So I'm quite conscious of, albeit second hand because I don't speak Arabic, quite conscious of their school experiences in many cases. I mean, if we're talking about Palestinians stretching from Egypt to the Turkish border, I'm very conscious of that. And therefore, conscious of the kind of distance between that and, as I say, the formality and values of European higher education and what's encapsulated in MOOCs. But I think our challenge is that it's really quite difficult getting to any of this first hand and I'd almost rather we kind of did nothing than did the wrong thing. But that's not really a very satisfactory answer to your question. I mean, yes, we are attempting to run focus groups to make contact with support groups, but it's a very small project with very limited coverage and you end up talking to the people who want to talk to you or talking to the people who want to talk on behalf of the people who want to talk to you. And that, you know, in terms of the kind of credibility and trustworthiness and scope of what you're hearing is pretty wobbly. So I'm sorry. I'm Gabby Wittas. I'm based in Leicester and I'm working with an organisation called Chiron in Germany. And I think the issues are, it's much clearer in Germany because of the large volume of refugees and asylum seekers that have come in. Amongst the many thousands of them, they've got 2,000 who've signed up and are progressing through MOOCs and are very clear that they want to enter the German higher education system. They've got a branch in France and they've got activities in two other countries. I think Jordan and I'm not sure it might be Turkey. So I think there certainly is a place for MOOCs. You know, amongst the population of migrants there are people who've had their studies interrupted in their home country or who never got around studying in their home country or who've lost their transcripts and actually want to do higher education and use that as a way of integrating into the new country. So I think there is a place for doing this but it's a case of being clear that higher education is not going to meet all the needs that refugees have and identifying people who want that specific thing that higher education can offer and then finding alternative ways in. Yes, sorry, I agree and I think actually when you say there are these kind of people and there are these kind of people and there are these kind of people, we actually do need some kind of trustworthy taxonomy or what do people call them? You know, to give us some handle on if you like use cases that we can respond to but that's proving quite difficult or it's proving kind of impressionistic and certainly very, very, very variable across the partner countries. Any more questions? Still have. Hello, I'm Marguerite from Canada. Well, I'm just pondering the issue of accreditation because in Canada I'm just looking at our landscape and we have all kinds of people who are highly educated who spend years as taxi drivers or in roles of unskilled workers. And that issue of accreditation is it just blocks their progress. How will you approach that? I mean it's such a huge, how are you investigating it? How are you approaching it? How will you convince accreditation organisations? Well certainly, sorry, I mean certainly in my case from some UK universities it isn't actually the procedures aren't in place because we have I guess European wide processes for the accreditation of prior learning and the accreditation of prior experiential learning. But the challenge at the moment seems to be constructing a business case that universities will listen to saying it's actually worth their while, which is partly to do with money and partly to do with the volume of people we might be talking about. And so, at the moment what we're trying to do is establish that there are a sufficient number of people for whom it will be worth what we call activating these processes because otherwise in business terms they look like far too disparate and dissimilar. And all of these are kind of one off procedures and if there's a way of kind of generalising a bit and identifying the volume of them then we can talk to the kind of business side of the universities and say this is why it will be worth your while. Okay, thank you John, I think that's it. That's the time we've got for John. So let's all thank him. A bit conscious we're a bit behind time and we will really really keep this to no longer than the 20 minutes we wanted to be a little bit more discussive as well. So it's quarter to 12 and we hope to sort of nail it by shortly after 12 o'clock because I've got to get a train. So thank you so much. I will introduce my collaborators if they intend collaborating on the stage. We've just started a project looking at open textbooks and I'm sure you've all been to the open stacks stand and sort of caught up with some of the work that's going on in North America. We've been really lucky to get some Hewlett Foundation funding in collaboration with the OER hub and we've got Rob and obviously Martin on the stage. It's also in collaboration with Wonky where David now is and I'm based at the University of the West of England. So we kicked off in about April to try and explore what are some of the context of open textbook use that is becoming so successful and powerful for students in North America. How does that map to the UK? And we're just going to give you a quick skim and introduction to the project. I think what's really, really fascinating from my perspective I've been an educator for 15 years is we know so little about how students use textbooks. There really is almost hardly no literature out there so we're kind of thinking this is going to balloon into hopefully a bigger and more interesting project at some point. So just a big, big nudge to our overseas partners as well. So the Hewlett Foundation funds a lot of this type of work in the US. The OpenStacks people who have sponsored the conference and who are in the building. Daniel's at the back there, oh cool. And we also work on the open textbook network just to broaden the opportunities of bringing books into universities and colleges in the UK. So great to have Daniel here. So what's an open textbook? I think we've all been sort of going across to the US conferences for a number of years now and I actually find it quite staggering. I mean our approach to this was coming from the UK Open Education Programme and Communities where we are to us, that might be a video, it might be a PDF, sort of small granular building block approach to learning. But over in the US for a number of years now they've been producing entire textbooks and calling them OER. And I've always found that quite staggering really, the effort it goes to create a textbook and then to share it under an open licence. And to share it in a range of formats that's really useful to students. So some of them still do want print versions, my students are annotating their books and they still want a version in their hand. But also then there's a whole range of more accessible digital versions. So there are several years ahead with what they're doing I think in the US and it's great to try and bring some of those ideas over here. And the beauty of the Creative Commons licence, depending on the term of licence that goes with the entire book, is there is some really nice stuff being done now with these books in the US where people are recontextualising them for their students, which gives us great scope over here to make our education more inclusive by making the content more meaningful with students. We've got students co-creating some of the case studies within the chapters in the US and building it up as part of their assignments to contribute and to create their own textbooks. So I think there's some really lovely stuff going on in the US that hopefully we'll start to see down the line over here as well. I think when the big drivers in the US and there's been a lot of government support and a lot of local state support in the US and Canada, and the big drivers have been around student debt there. I should call my partner in crime over in a minute to explain the UK context a bit. And Sarah Goldrick-Rab here has produced a book and done an amazing piece of work really understanding the plight of students in the US and I really don't think we're far behind. There are soup kitchens on some of these campuses. Students can't afford to buy the resources they need. And I just don't think, if we're honest with ourselves, I've looked hard enough at this in the UK and I think there's a lot more interesting data now coming to light. So that's been I think the primary driver in the US. Let's give students more accessible and better quality, lower cost learning resources because boys just don't deserve that. So I'll hand over to Dave who's going to explain some of the UK context and I'm going to grab a seat. You do that? I'll use this one I think so. That can be a bit kind of louder and boomier. I like that. So I mean as we used to go to these presentations, American OER projects, we were concerned with open textbooks and I mean to be honest from the UK perspective, it was quite difficult to get excited about them, the stuff about kind of open pedagogies, educational practice. It's just easier to get excited about that I think. But the textbook stuff is really important for the transformational effect it can actually have on the lives of students and the more we've looked into this the more that we've realised. So I mean you've probably spotted over the summer, there's been a little bit of kind of higher education news. Of course most of you would have been on your three months holidays at that point apparently. But there's been a lot of concern about the affordability of a higher education in the UK. Students are carrying an absolutely massive amount of debt when they graduate. It's up to around £57,000 according to the IFS. Now that's not debt in the strictest sense because repayment is linked to their earnings and at least 35% of all of this debt, if you look at it overall across the whole country is not going to be paid back by students, it'll be paid back by the governments. But the headlines are focused on the fee levels. What has happened, that's perhaps had less kind of mainstream pretension, is the removal of student grants and their replacement with loans. The brown model of fees, it raised the fees but that was backed up by maintenance loans and actually recognising that the immediate living costs are the most important concern to students that are going to university. So a big chunk of those maintenance costs are accommodation. Again accommodation costs are creeping up in the UK, that's a different argument about the privatisation of university halls that kind of thing which is upside the scope of this project. But another big cost that students have is textbooks. The textbook cost is something that individual academics can actually do something about. The choice of textbooks that an individual academic actually makes, you can choose textbooks that cost £200 of some cases and expect students to go out and purchase these textbooks. So a little graph here. The work required based on the minimum wage for an 18 to 20 year old which is lower than the regular so-called living wage to afford university books and costs. I mean if you need to buy five core textbooks in your first year, that's 17 days work. That is 17 days of effectively nine to five at which is time that you could be spending studying, you could be spending socialising, you could be spending enjoying the wider benefits of university life which you're not doing. I mean obviously it's insignificant compared to rent, that's the big cost. There's also food and travel costs which also mount up, but it's the big cost and if we can remove that cost or lower that cost for students, I think that's a good deal. So this is a map of the way that tuition fees have risen since 1996. I mean I think we forget how massive this is. What a huge, huge change in funding this has been, but this is only half the story. The removal of maintenance grants, as I say, is the thing that is really affecting the students that you're teaching right now. And as much as we might want to look at this graph and say, it's terrible, I shouldn't, Joe Johnson do something about it. I'm going to write to the competition and markets authority, et cetera, et cetera. It is not the single biggest pressing issue that's facing students, the single biggest issue that's facing the students that are here at the moment is the costs that they have to live, to work, to love, to do everything else that human beings deserve to be doing. So, as I say, that is actually just the principal amount. The interest rate for students selling the most is currently set at 6.1%, as inflation rises, as various macroeconomic effects come into play around, say, June 2019. That interest rate is going to go up as well. So, I'm going to hand back to Viv here to talk about a piece of research that she has done. That makes quite a clear financial case that we can do something here, we can make a difference, and even just chatting to students. I kind of knave us out at any couple of hundred quid. I said, what do you mean? It's a month's rent. That's food making a small difference. We'll have a big impact on all of them. So, I just did a little pilot study and we're going to build on some of this. Just to understand, are you buying books? Are you interested in books? Overwhelming they are. Some of the open comments, I've felt quite emotional reading some of them, because students, I think they do have a really close relationship with their books. It's the first taste of university. Here's my textbook. I remember being really excited by my textbooks. Students do want books and access to this content. With the open licences, we can be providing them with all of their core books. You've seen the open stack stands. There's over 30 core texts now. We should be using them. But I think we just need to understand a bit more fully, not just the student attitudes to the books, but actually how that embeds within our teaching and what some of the staff attitudes are and how we can really lever these books into the curriculum. I'm conscious of time. We really wanted to have a bit more of a discussion. To understand if people are using books in their institutions already, you guys out there in the audience. If you wanted to share your experiences with us on the project team, Rob, for example, helps run the blog and is gathering and evaluating some of the projects. We'd really just like to open up the questions now if we can. Just to get some of your experiences, maybe you're using open textbooks already, or maybe you think they're a good idea for your students. So, can we do that? Great. OK. So, it's either the answer those questions or ask a question. Anyone? Hi there. Veronica Volts, University of Leeds. We have officially adopted open stacks, but I've been a big fan of them for a couple of years. What I like to do with them, is that I actually take them apart and I make little micro-learning packages out of them. I use them as supplemental material for biological sciences, and it's been really, really well-received, and I really like doing it. I just think there's a lot of potential with these. You can do basically anything you want with them. They're there to use and reuse and remix, and I think they're just really great. That's awesome, isn't it? We could do with grabbing your name in details afterwards. Oh, fabulous. That's really exciting. That's the potential these books hold, that's great. Is anyone else using them, or recommending them to their students? Or considering it, maybe. Are you considering it? Yes, I'm from Nunscandalbury from the University of Hertfordshire. We are literally embarking at the moment on a project internally to look at whether we can build one of these ourselves as a kind of mini-research project. I think one of the key things that we've been encountering when we've been talking to the academics as well is this what's in it for them in terms of their research profiles as well, because so much of the traditional publishing output has been linked to their research profiles. So they've brought up quite strong relationships with publishers as well. They've been able to maintain those contacts and those relationships over a long period of time. So I guess looking at it from the academics perspective here, notwithstanding all of the very legitimate reasons you've laid out here with the student debt, but what's in it for the academics and how do they manage those tensions? Daniel might be a good person to answer that. Daniel, from the open stacks point of view about how you can get academics to write for you. So first I have to say it's been fantastic to be here in the UK and to learn from you all and I'm not an expert in the UK market. But what I can tell you based on the US experience that we've had thus far with open stacks, a lot of publishers aren't producing new titles, especially not in these spaces. There have been very few new first editions produced of any textbooks. So textbooks and say research papers are fairly, fairly different or monographs are fairly different. But I think what has really been exciting to see is when faculty work with open stacks to produce new open textbooks, it's not like a traditional publisher relationship where they are essentially giving the copyright to the publisher, open stacks. Well, open stacks is the holder of the copyright because of the Creative Commons license, the faculty members who produce the content have the right to use it however they like without having to ask permission from the publisher of open stacks, which is really fantastic because if you think about it, they're getting paid money to produce this content, but then they get to use that content however they deem appropriate in their teaching, learning and research. And so I think a lot of faculty really like that opportunity. In addition to that, one of the exciting things that we've seen with open stacks in the US is just the opportunity to grow reputation. Open stacks has grown from about zero adoptions to now closing in on probably about 14,000 adoptions, representing about 1.6 million current term students using the content. So if you look at that in terms of the impact of your work as an academic, I don't know if there's really another project in the past five years that's really had that type of output and improving notoriety of faculty that are writing this work. So none appeal to their egos, that's the way to do it. So I wonder if I might just quickly say something about some of the work we're doing at this phase of the project. We are trying to basically see whether or not what works in the USA also works in the UK. So part of that involves trying to understand what might the barriers be in the UK. So we're really interested in hearing from anyone who's got thoughts on why it might or might not work in their institution. And we're thinking about just collecting a lot of these statements together. So we've got a collection of these that we can say, well, here's an overview of how it all looks for the UK. So if you do have thoughts around that or you've got ideas about the potential or what you see as the institutional challenges, then we'd really like to hear from you just a very quick point in response to what's in it for academics. I think in institutions that have teaching focus career paths, it's a fantastic way of demonstrating outputs and impact. We're all challenged by that. People who are trying to get promotion through a teaching route. So I think for colleagues who are interested in that sort of career progression, there's more impact in something that's being adopted by several thousands of students than there is in an obscure piece of academic research that five people are going to read in the entire lifetime of the paper. So I think that's that. Hi, I'm Candice from Durham University. This is a more pedestrian question. As a former copy editor of Academic Texts, who does the work of the proofreading, copy editing, graph production, image production? Daniel, do you want to take that? You should be up here. We should be sitting down there. So OpenStacks model is very similar to the traditional publishers model. We hire hundreds of faculty to work with us both in producing the content as well as reviewing it. And then we have a team of editors as well as editors, copy editors, and also arts teams that produce all the art. So it's very standard. The only OER model, other OER models may not have the same sort of reviews in place. It might rely more on post-publication review. But that is OpenStacks model. OpenStacks have got a stand in the exhibition hall and they've got a couple of their books there. So if you haven't seen them, it's worth going along to have a look at. Very nice. Thank you very much, guys. Thank you. So I think that concludes our session for this morning. Let's thank all our presenters today.