 Hello, my name is Balaji, I work for the Common Wealth of Learning. I'm happy to be able to present to you some of my ideas on the advancement of open educational resource publishing in the developing world and how partners associated with the Linked-Up Project can contribute to its further advancement. The Common Wealth of Learning, where I work, is an intergovernmental agency which was founded by the Prime Ministers of the Common Wealth in 1987 and our broad objective is to advance access to affordable and quality education at all levels and we work with every common wealth country and we are supported by at any given time by 45 governments of the Common Wealth and we report to the Prime Ministers and the Education Ministers of the Common Wealth. I'm very happy to be associated with the Linked-Up Project, which we cherish and I want to thank America Guy for giving me this opportunity. Now what is my very brief view of where we are on this subject, that when you look at it from way above, you find that developing countries today are major producers of open educational resources and most of this work occurs in large institutions rather than in small ones and the most important development that we find is that there is a significant need for value addition to this effort, value addition can be in many ways but from my point of view it should take place in terms of building new educational employability ontologies and to do everything possible to assure quality. In order to give you a picture, I want to make use of one of our projects that we are connected with. This is our own directory for open educational resources and we started to work on open educational resources directory after we concluded the World Open Education Resources Congress along with UNESCO almost exactly two years back. This in a sense you could also say a kind of stock taking of all those developments after the two years. We are making, we are constructing this, we are maintaining this directory a very simple directory for open educational resources of the commonwealth and we are looking primarily at resources in English although commonwealth has many, many languages because of this particular focus we are living out one very large producer in fact a super large producer in English namely the United States of America. We are also living out producers in other languages such as China, France, Brazil, etc. But don't mistake us, this filter is mainly to give you a flavor of where developing countries stand. Now doing a very close analysis of do it through a lot of analytics that my colleagues Michelle Gruda and Panis Parish and several others have been able to bring forward. What we find is that there is a lot of protection taking place from the developing world in terms of higher education and calls very important areas namely open schooling which allows people who have dropped out of school at the school going age to return to school when they are at work as semi-skilled or non-skilled workers. It's a very, very important area and we find that a lot of open education resources are getting published there. Teacher education is very, very important because in the continent of Africa alone there is a need for over 1.4 million teachers in the next few years even to reach the essential levels of literacy and most of these teachers, available teachers do not have the requisite training. So teacher education is very important. We find that a lot of open education resources are getting produced there. The other important area that has emerged rapidly even in the developed world is the skills development area. The skills development sector for various reasons is linked with employability, income generation, etc. even in developed countries and you would note that developing countries are already producing quite an amount of material in this particular area and a lot more can be done with your partnership. Now again going to further on this picture you find that who are the top producing countries in this slide. You find that United Kingdom among Commonwealth countries of course leads the whole show because of their historical investment and very strong interest of the academia in this particular topic and are rapidly emerging actors are India, Nigeria, South Africa and Pakistan. These are emerging as large producers in a relatively short span of time and you also find that even countries such as Ghana are coming forward with publication of open educational resources. Remember that we are still talking only about OER in English and who are the top publishers. You find that the National Open University of Nigeria is a major publisher as is the national program on technology enhanced learning in India. Of course the Open University of UK which inspired the founding of the Commonwealth of Learning is a major, major publisher. There are several others which have emerged almost entirely in the span of about three years time. And what do they work on? I mean if you look at the subject tags you find that most of the OER publishing relates to STEM topics. Mathematics is a big topic. Science and technology broadly is a big topic. Physics is a big one. You find that engineering sciences, especially mechanical engineering, computer sciences are very big topics. This is quite in a sense in stance and sharp relief. If you looked at the fact that when distance education was emerging as a major paradigm, the topics covered primarily were language teaching, mathematics, humanities, social sciences, et cetera. And engineering and sciences came much, much later. Whereas in the area of open educational resources publishing where the same or similar actors are involved, you find that the subjects are very different. That probably reflects the priorities of the milieu we are living in today. And we follow a very broad based descriptor system called A2 tags. And A2 tags are included in our online directory service. And you find that when going by the frequency of occurrence of these tags, you find that most resources produced by English use in commonwealth are in the area of higher education and undergraduate area, especially focusing on the undergraduate area. Although as we said, teacher education, et cetera, are important, they are still classed mostly with post-secondary undergraduate area. This also shows the emerging emphasis on post-secondary college education when it comes to educational publishing in these countries. Now looking at all this, where do we stand? One is that there was a view. And at the time when UNESCO coined the term open education resources in 2002, the broad belief was that the developed countries would be major producers of open educational resources. And the rest of the world, including developed countries, would be consuming them. Now this view was kind of challenged in 2007 during the Cape Town Declaration meeting on OER. And since then, it has rapidly emerged that developing countries are producing OER in large quantities, as it just happened to see. And it's more appropriate to say that developing countries are both good producers and therefore are likely to be good consumers as well. And while looking at it, let's look at some of the typical OERs that some of these institutions are able to publish. For example, here we are looking at a product, an OER from the Open Education, from the National Open University of Nigeria, which relates broadly to teacher education. And you find that it's essentially course material presented as somewhat like a textbook in PDF form. This is one of the most popular forms with many of these institutions. And here is another example from India where they use online video in a big way. Here is one course in YouTube. They've placed close to about 6,000 hours of video on YouTube, which have received a combined view of over 100 million. And there are many other formats possible, but these two seem to be very, very popular with developing country OER publishers. What are the three key areas that are emerging from this large-scale publishing? Find that one concern or one interest is on reuse and adaptation because a lot of this OER is produced with public money, with tax money. And therefore it should lead to an impact that socially and economically meaningful. In order to do so, the call and the Inesco have been advocating that reuse and adaptation should be encouraged on a very large scale. That's one value addition we should be able to do. The other is improving the discoverability of OER because OER is still not easily discovered in popular search engines and through available techniques, even advanced ones are not good enough. And therefore, linked data must be used in a more extensive way to improve discoverability of OER and link the project is already making a big contribution here. The other very important concern is quality of OER. In fact, quality of OER is so, and OER and quality can be said to be almost synonymous from the eyes of a developing country teacher because they look for OER largely because they cannot find quality stuff in their own milieu. Now, how do you assure quality of OER? One trend, one thought trend we advocate is that socializing is the best route to understand and assess the quality of OER. And we need to look at all these three in a way that linked up project partners can contribute to. We'll go into these details now. Looking at reuse and adaptation, we know from our experience and the number of studies that we have published via call and through with our partners, Atabaskar University and Vavasan Open University, that this process proceeds well when users really know the values. They are looking for educational value of a resource, especially things like a level of attainment, maturity capability, prior learning, pre-rex, et cetera. These are not readily available with the OER and therefore we need to find ways through which this data can be made easily available and accessible. The other very important and are rapidly emerging requirement is to assess the employability skills development values of OER. In fact, this point was stressed at the time of launch of linked up project by Professor Dragan Kasevich from Atabaskar University. Subsequently, Professor David Porter at BC Campus Canada has also been talking about it. We need to go into this in very great detail and with a sense of urgency. Socializing OER is of course a very, very important one. It's already taking place on a very large scale in online spaces such as YouTube or Facebook. In fact, going back to this particular OER, what you find is that there is a lot of commentary already taking place here and many students would derive a great deal of value if there is a way to pass them, generate meaningful inferences from them and make them available in some, in a way that a teacher or a learner can take advantage of that. This is one challenge I thought we all could collectively address. Skills development, as I said, is a very, very important one and the employability considerations are also becoming very, very important and there is a need for some kind of a new ontology in this. You know, in terms of educational value, the very large LRMI project operating primarily from United States is coming out with a number of ideas, although a lot more could be done has come out with a number of new ideas, but in terms of employability, we need to really go into an ontology type of approach and this is very, very urgently required and this is one area where, you know, by giving this description to a reasonable volume of OER, we will find that we are generating a huge following among developing countries for all our projects. Here, for example, you know, skills development is such a priority as you can see here, like hundreds of millions of dollars are being borrowed by poor countries in order to build skills and they believe ICT as you can see here. Everyone says that ICT is going to play a very, very critical role in all these things. Information technology is going to play a very critical role and here is our opportunity to build a system by which skills development and related data and data sets can be made available to learners and teachers and here is another example. Using the OER already published by NPTEL, they are offering a course which is meant for skills enhancement of students as well as practicing young professionals in the area of IT and very large-scale certification, et cetera, have been planned with industry associations. From the organizer of this course, I understood that there are 55,000 registrants in this course currently of which 10,000 have paid up in order to undergo the testing. So that's a major advancement in deployment of OER for a socially useful purpose and we need to do more of that. The last but not the least is that all developing country students do not have the level of internet access that a developed country student or learner can take for granted. In fact, 80% of them will have extremely limited access. In that condition, you know, there is a need for off-lining OER. In fact, we have been talking about this in LinkedUp data project that off-lining need not mean loss of data. In fact, even in offline situations, the LinkedUp data can be extremely useful. And to test some of these ideas in call, we have built a prototype. We call it APTES, which allows a complete off-lining of variety of educational resources, open educational resources for this, for example, using this small device here. And we have deployed it in circumstances like what you see here in 15 countries in 20 locations. And our results are coming in and here is a very, you know, I won't go into this detail except to show that this very small device costs about $100 and can host a server. It runs on Ubuntu Linux and it's able to host Moodle such that 20 to 25 people can access it easily. It also allows access to Khan Academy videos and part of Wikipedia, et cetera. And it's working successfully in the field. So off-lining is possible in a very, very meaningful way and the LinkedData could also be made available in that circumstance. We need to explore this as well. Now going back to my slides, I'm coming to my conclusion. So what should we be looking forward to from the point of view of the common wealth of learning? One is that this group can help us understand discoverability better and help us identify improvements in discoverability so that people from developing world are in an even better position to make use of OER or as they design and publish them, they make them more discoverable. The other is creation of new ontologies for skills development and employability, which as I repeatedly said is an absolute must and this is a matter of urgency as well. The last but not the least is improving, further improving data on educational value. The other one aspect I would stress once again on is use of social media, the commentary available in social media and socializing processes in order to improve assessment of the educational value quality of OER. We look forward to hearing from you about your deliberations and personally sorry that I'm not able to be present for various reasons. I once again want to thank the organizer of the Open Knowledge Foundation and Marika Gai for this opportunity.