 To make a start with the actual program for today, yesterday we had a really interesting session on opening up Poland. And today we're going to broaden the scope to Europe, opening up Europe. So our keynotes are three well-known speakers. We have Jan Gondol from Slovakia, and Kamulda from the Netherlands, and Lisa Blaszka from Germany. I'll be introducing each of them in turn. The speakers will have about approximately 20 minutes for their talks, and that'll leave us time for questions and answers at the end, and hopefully some lively debate. They'll be approaching the topic from different but closely interrelated perspectives, political issues, social issues, and the importance of collaborating and networking. So our first speaker is Jan Gondol, who worked for the Slovak government in 2014 and 2015. During this time, he was a manager of the Commasode Open Data Project at the Ministry of Interior and was responsible for Slovakia's open data commitments under the Open Government Partnership, OGP, Umbrella. He also introduced the theme of open education in the country's OGP Second National Action Plan, and drove the initiative to build foundations for OER policy and open access policy in Slovakia. He's now working with several organizations to promote open data, open education, and open source software when you're ready. Good morning. Thank you very much for your kind introduction. So the reason why I'm speaking to you today in this panel, Opening up Europe, started with opening up Poland, now we are going to open up Europe. With, in the threads session, we will open up the universe or mind of the universe. So Slovakia did some important steps in introducing open education in the Open Government Partnership. In this first presentation, we will have a big picture view and then we'll dive into some very specific ways of how openness plays out. But first of all, why even care about openness? Why is there something we should even discuss? Well, there's many ways to look at it. And one of the ways is to look at it through the issue of power. Who is it that has power? Those who have access to information, those have access to power. And this is something that we really understand well in democracies. We know that unless there is openness, unless there is free-flow information, unless there is access to information, it's really hard to have a democracy. And this is something really important in Open Government as such. We have seen some examples during the past couple of weeks of what it means when there is not openness, when there is a lot of secrecy. We heard about the Panama Papers. And this is oftentimes the way we look at access to information. It's through the prism of transparency, of fight against corruption. When we release information, when we release data on what's going on, there are certain benefits. And some years ago, there was discussion about open data. You heard in the introduction that I was responsible for some open data activities in Slovakia. And we realized that data itself is not enough, that there is a lot more than we can do in terms of openness. And that is why we started working on open education. But first, let me start by saying why open data is considered as useful. And when you communicate with policymakers, they understand certain benefits of open data through their eyes. There's many ways why open data is seen as beneficial. And the easiest one is money. When data is released, it can be used in new and innovative ways, which means that there are high-quality jobs that are created, very interesting data-driven jobs when there are companies that are started that work with data. They pay taxes, which makes policymakers, politicians happy. And this is something that they understand very easily. Also, there is the issue of fairness. When data is released, people get access. And sometimes, politicians are scared, well, when we release data, and people just start downloading it, what happens? Our servers will go down, and we will not be able to serve them. Well, you see, in this picture, there are multiple boxes. One box can be given to the government, so people can still have good access to data while sharing with everybody else. There is the issue of friction. We have some friends from the Czech Republic. And in the Czech Republic, there was a study conducted where they actually looked at how much money it costs to administer when data is served commercially, when you just give it to some organizations that apply, they pay a fee. And they looked at what happens, what the financial flows are. So in order to make 20,000 euros, you oftentimes have to spend 20,000 or more just to administer all the paperwork around it. So politicians understand that when they release data, they actually do not gain a lot when they try to just withhold it. And today, we understand that unless we release the data, unless we make it open, and we make it available on the web, we are losing out. Because the next issue is being future friendly or forward looking, the next web will be built on data. And just like we heard yesterday in the panel opening up Poland, we heard that it's really, really important to have the building blocks or LEGO blocks. So all of this was about data so far in the moment that we'll connect that to educational resources as well. We got to the point when it is generally understood that there are benefits to open data. The last thing is, it's really awesome that data is being released. And today it's just the hip thing to do. Some of you will recognize Alek Tarkovsky in this picture. It's a little dark, but you will probably still recognize him. Today, releasing data is just, if I can use the emotional, that's freaking awesome. So we talked about 5F financial value. There was the issue of fairness. There was the issue of removing friction. And it's just really freaking awesome. So there are many more arguments to think about open data and their value the way they are brought to the society. These were just five examples of how we can open for data. But now you're probably thinking, what in the world is this person talking about? This is a conference about education. It's not an open data conference. It's an open education conference. What we have done in our national action plan, we basically work with the policymakers who already recognized the many benefits of open data, some of which I just introduced. And we tried to make a link just saying, OK, transparency is really, really important for the functioning society. It's really, really important that we fight corruption, the things we talked about in the beginning. All of those things are absolutely crucial. But why do we stop there? Why should we stop there? There's a lot more that the government is doing. There are a lot more services that the government is providing. And those should be open as well. I mean, there's so much value in there as well. So basically the argument that we built, and there are many ways to build the argument for policymakers, we basically said, you already recognize the value of open data. Now you already know how much it can do to the society. You already know that this is beneficial. And there's so much more that the government does. Let's open up those areas as well. So there are some obvious places where we can move on. There's data, but there's also content that we also pay for with public money. Data is created with public money. Public money is spent on a lot of other things as well. And one of them is content, whether it's educational content or all kinds of other content. And there's software. The government pays a lot for all kinds of government systems, all kinds of other software systems. So basically what we have done, we said, let's not stop there. Some people are really scared when you talk about when the government pays for software that should be released openly under an open source license. Even people who are fighting this and who are saying, if you are releasing source openly, you are building communism, which is perceived as a negative thing in this part of the world. You're just doing the wrong thing by releasing open source. Well, there's an argument that we can make that. It actually makes a lot of sense to release this source. And we can build on what we have already done with data. And the same thing with education and educational resources. The government provides education in many countries. It's one of the key government services. And many times, the government pays directly for the creation of educational resources, but they are not available for people to reuse. If you just say, all right, I would love to get access to materials that are being taught at public university, public through my taxes, I would love to just see what's happening there. I'd like to access the content many times you can. I'm a parent. I have a 4 and 1 half-year-old daughter. And when she goes to school, and I will want to obtain a copy of what she's learning, because I would like to see what's going on. I'd like to make a copy in my phone. I cannot legally do that. And it's kind of weird, because this is resource that was directly financed through public money. So just like this poster says, sometimes it's easier to just buy a gun than just to buy education. Oftentimes, what happens, there is revolt from the established players, from those who provide services in the old model. And they say, if you release content openly, if you release software openly, there was going to be a huge problem in the society. Just like we see in this comic, when joking about sharing of the bread, the person selling bread is saying, well, the damn piracy will kill the bread industry. So oftentimes, what the publishing industry says, well, if you just allow sharing, this will kill the publishing industry, or software people say, this will kill the software industry. So oftentimes, you get this kind of reaction from the established players. But there is argument to be made. Whenever there is a public good, we could say the public should enjoy the benefits. When there's public funding, the results should be treated as a public good. When we build sidewalks, or when we invest money for goods that are supposed to be enjoyed publicly, it's so much better to just let people use them. And we should extend this from data, which we have already done, to software and education as well. There is an analogy between how data works and what we can do with educational resources. If you've ever been to an open data talk, you probably saw this a number of times. In open data, there is a five-star system, which some of you may have heard about. It's just like with hotels. When you go to a five-star hotel, you probably expect that it's going to be better than a two-star hotel. And it's similar with data. So the first step is to have data that's open and licensed. The first step is just to put it on the web in any form. Just make it available. The second step is to have data available in a machine-readable format. So while it's nice to have at least a photograph of something, it's the first step. It's one star. Even if it's just a photo of something, even if it's just something that you cannot edit at all, just make it available. That's the first step. Second step is making machine-readable. So if you save it, let's say, in a Microsoft Excel file, it's a little better than just a little photograph of your data. And then make it available in a non-properatory format. It's a third step so that you do not have to purchase a certain program to be able to read that. Then there are certain standards to make this data available in such a way that you can interconnect them across the web. So we start with data in any format whatsoever. Then we keep improving until we have better open data. And then data that can be used as a building block of the web. And we can use a similar framework for thinking about educational resources. We can start with making things at least available. That's the first step. And then we can keep improving the educational resources to something better, just like with the data. So we could say that we could have a framework. This is a beta version, something that is starting before a conversation. We could have data available on the web with a free license. So as long as this is fulfilled, we have one start open educational resources. If those educational resources are in an open and editable format so that they can be reused, we could say that this could be two-star educational resources. Then when we make those resources accessible and we add metadata to them, so we can figure out what's inside and we can share them in digital libraries. We could say these are three-star resources. And then the next step would be to make them available in a web-native format so they could be displayed on any device. If you type any address into your phone or tablet or laptop, the reason why you'll be able to see a web page or website, it's because it will be in HTML. So it's a standard. You can open it on anything. And then we can move to the final step, which is making content discoverable in those atomic pieces. If I want to teach a particular subject in math, statistics, physics, you name it, a particular one, I should be able to find three, five-minute videos on this particular topic. So just like with data, there are lessons to learn, one through five stars. There are also lessons to learn through, we can reuse that in educational resources. We all know that open education is a lot more than just open educational resources. Those are a core part of education, but there's a lot more. And when we talk about open government, talking with politicians, working in open policies, open government as a theme is much, much bigger than just open government partnership, which is an organization that put together countries which are working on openness. Now, I'm very happy that General introduced the Action Lab, and we will go a lot deeper into this, so I will only spend a minute on introducing what open government partnership is. First show of hands, how many of you have heard about the open government partnership before? Okay, so about a half. And it's an international organization that basically put together countries to work on openness, and they try to get commitments from these governments to work on issues like civic participation, fight against corruption, and harnessing new technologies to promote openness. And these are also the values of the open government partnership. So logically, if you want to promote openness, if you want to fight against corruption, you start with data, but there's so much more. And just recently, the open government partnership started increasing its scope, and looked at the services that the governments provide. So one of these key services is education. When you look at the Slovak Open Government Partnership National Action Plan, we got open education as a theme, and we were one of the first countries to do so. The United States is another one, and there are also other countries that are joining, and I see in the audience some of you who are working on this exact thing, either open education and open science. So we introduced open educational resources and open access in the action plan, and we are just creating a new action plan for the next couple of years, where we will increase the scope further. Again, if you come to the Action Lab, we'll be very happy to tell you more about that. If this is something that you will be interested in, maybe you think, this open government partnership is not a bad thing. The partnership is about the partnership between the government and the civil society. So it's not like the government is doing something. You may have noticed that I mentioned that I worked for the government in the past, 2014, 2015. I'm still involved. I no longer work with the government, but I'm still involved because it's partnership. Now I'm on the civil society side, and still continue to work on that. So those of you who are not in the government, which is most of you, and who are on the civil society part, you can still get involved with the government and work together. So how do you get involved? This week, there are several ways to do that. So as we already heard, there's the Action Lab, so if you'd like to come, please do. If there is more interest, we are happy to do an unconference session on Friday. And gentlemen, nobody mentioned that there's Hall, there's Nickel, there's myself. We're very happy to chat with you during this week. But even after you leave the conference, there are many other ways to get involved. I work with Organization Spark, and we organize monthly conference calls on open education. And you are invited to join. And in a moment, I will show you a website where you can learn about what we're doing and what are the ways to get involved. Every country has a point of contact for open government issues. So if you'd like, you can reach out to them. They are there to help you and to communicate with you. So you can definitely do that. Now the final issue, why is this something that we should even discuss? Why is it, why is this worth your time? I think many of us in this room believe that there are some ways in the system that are broken. Our system is broken in certain ways, and it's about time that we fix it. Education is a very important public service, and there are ways to improve it. We can be the ones who actually can go ahead and be a part of that. So I think it's important that we help fix the system. It's really important that open government partnership as such provides a platform where we can get together, where we can put together a coalition and work with the governments to advance open education policies. And those of you who are policymakers in this room, and there are a few of you, this is your chance to shine, your chance to be a part of this. So please join the effort and do a part if you're able. This is the website that we just launched. If you go to opengoveducation.org, you will be able to find some more information. What we're trying to build is a group where we can discuss things, where we can work together to promote open education in the OGP Action Plan. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Jan. So our next speaker is Anka Mulder, Anka's vice president at TU Delft, responsible for education operations since April 2013. Furthermore, she's a member of the edX university advisory board, a global network of universities, including Harvard, MIT, and Berkeley, that produce MOOCs and promote innovation in education worldwide. She's a member of the supervisory board of the Hotel School, The Hague, and of the Comité d'Orientations Statégique of the University of Sorbonne. From 2011 to 2013, Anka held the position of president of the board of the International Open Coursework Consortium, the former name of the Open Education Consortium. From 2011 to 2013, she combined this post with that of Secretary-General of the university. So when you're ready. Well, thank you very much. That was a very long introduction. Thank you very much for your introduction, and I'm very happy to be here. Actually, when I was invited to give a keynote speech here, I had various reasons for coming here, but one of the most important reasons was to, is the fact that I have so many friends and I see so many familiar faces here. So great to be here. When I prepared for this keynote speech, I asked my colleagues, Martang and Willem, what is new in the Open Education Consortium? So what is new? What should I be talking about? And they said, well, of course, there are new members. So welcome to all the new members here. There are more learners, which is good news, of course. But in fact, when I listened to what is happening in the Open Education Consortium, there were quite a number of issues that were familiar to the times when I was acting on the board. For example, the consortium still needs more money. Unfortunately, nobody was there either. Of course, I have heard a lot of interesting developments. One of the subjects you were talking about, Open Government, I think, is a really interesting development happening in the open world. The other thing I think are the great steps that we are taking in setting. Now in open textbooks, I talked a little bit about that with my old friend, Hal Plotkin, developing policies in California about this, for example. So there are a number of really interesting developments, I think, in the open world, open education world. But I have not been on the board for quite a number of years now. I'm now the vice president of a brick and mortar campus university. And I think I can talk a lot more about, that is my experience today. Of course, I'm also active in open education and in MOOCs, but my world is the campus at the moment. So I was thinking perhaps I can talk a little bit about the parallels of the analogies that are between campus education and online, and what I think should be the next, or could be the next step in online education. Now, if I look at the discussions that we are having at TU Delft, Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands right now, we are currently talking about what our new vision on education should be for the next five or 10 years. So how do we, as a technical university, contribute to solving global challenges in energy and sustainability, et cetera, et cetera. So what does that mean for the profile of the future engineer? Should we think about different profiles, or how about our portfolio? Should we develop more multi-disciplinary programs, for example? Also, of course, about how we integrate open and online education in our regular campus programs, so about the way we teach, how we should develop our pedagogy. That is our discussion on the vision of education, but I will show you a picture of what the day of Anka normally looks like. This is a day in the life of Anka. So what you see here, for example here on the left is, I discuss traffic problems on our campus. We have 22,000 students all on their bikes cycling to their courses at 8.30 in the morning, and that causes huge traffic problems. In the middle, you see a rowing boat. So what I discuss a lot is how we facilitate or give money to all types of student organizations. On the far right, top right, you see my discussions with companies and business in the region. I talk about, here on the left, developing courses, post-initial courses on nuclear security. In the middle, you see a picture on facilities, so work spaces for students. That's a hot topic for all our students on campus, and it's a subject I discuss very often with our student council. And here on the right, you see me and one of the older men of the city of Delft cutting a cake to celebrate the fact that we have free wifi in the center of Delft. Totally different subjects. And still, that should not be so surprising, because I would like to do a little exercise with you because it's early in the morning and you've had an interesting evening, I think. And now you can just shut your eyes for just a second. Please shut your eyes. You're not shutting your eyes. Okay, shut your eyes and think about the time when you went to college or you went to university, perhaps five years ago, 20, 30 years or more. And they always say that your student days were the best years of your life. That's right, wasn't it? Now think about what defines best. Now you can open your eyes again. And I would like to ask you a question. If you think about the best time of your life as a student, was that about the lectures? Raise your hand, please. Yes, that was about the lectures. No? Was it about the books you read? Yeah, Fred, thank you. One, one, one. Okay, it must have been about something else. Who would like to say what it was about? What's the first thing that pops up? What jumps to your mind? Yeah, being with your friends. Being with your friends. I heard people. Beer with your friends. Oh, beer with your friends. Oh, that's also a great answer. Beer with your friends. People, somebody else? You have to shout loud? Me? Freedom. So the thing is, it was about different things than what we normally define as education. And I have also, I have a picture about me at university. So when I went to university, I went to lectures, of course. I did my homework. I had a social life. I met up for beers, perhaps with friends. I went to bars. I had coffees. I went to my sports clubs. I worked as well. I worked in a hospital. I worked in a bar, a hotel, where I learned a lot as well. And yes, I also washed dishes. And of course, I had a boyfriend. Yeah. Anyway, this is what we normally define as learning. This is extracurricular. So money, but also networking. And this is happiness. Now, we should not be so surprised about this because what I believe, of course, my point is that a university education or learning is not only about the curriculum. It's about many more different things. I think it's not only about the academy. It's also about the community. I can tell you that I learned a lot from washing dishes in a restaurant. Perhaps some social skills. Also the fact that that was not going to be my future and that I was going to work hard at university. I learned a lot from my friends. I learned from working in the hospital. I learned discipline. I learned lots of different things in my activities outside the university, as well as the activities within the university. Now, of course we know that learning is a social thing. It's a community thing. This is a picture you will find online everywhere. And I think lots of people will know it. What are, this is the muscle of pyramid. So what are our real needs? And you can see we have basic needs, safety needs, social needs, et cetera, et cetera. And somebody put Wi-Fi at the bottom of that. I think, in fact, if you look at what is Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi is an enabler of social. It's Facebook, it's WhatsApp, et cetera, et cetera. So I think, actually, social needs should be right there with Wi-Fi. Now, the funny thing, though, is that if you look at campus discussions, and actually also when we talk about online education, we focus a lot on the academy, not on the community. And I think, actually, that is a pity. One thing I have noticed, especially on my campus, is this. That's the library. I think the library is one of the typical examples or the typical pictures of what we have as a classical academy. It's where you go to when you go for books, when you want to learn. But it is, in fact, the library that has changed a lot, that has undergone a profound change in the last 10 years. Can I check who among you works for a library? One, two, three, four, five, yeah. I think if I look at my colleagues at the library, if digitalization has had any effect on the university, it has been there. So, what can we learn from that experience? Here, you're still on the left. You see, this is a picture of the beautiful library of TU Delft. You still see a wall with lots of books. But in fact, hardly anybody comes to the library anymore to get a book. You bring your laptop. Perhaps you already have bought some books, but the library there, the library and the wall of the books, the books are there mostly for decoration because people come to the library for different reasons. They come there to organize discipline to study. They come there with their friends to study. They come for coffee. They come for networking. In fact, even if they don't come there anymore to borrow books, our library has never been as busy as it is today. In examination times, when students, the weeks that students are preparing for their exams, it's packed. People queue up at a quarter to eight to find a space in the library which opens at eight and shuts at two o'clock at night. And at two o'clock at night, the people who are the guards of the library, they still have to pick up students from different corners of the library to make sure that they actually leave and go home. So, no books. Well, there are some books. That's not the function anymore. The function now is networking. It has become a community thing. Now, how about online education? If I look at what we do at TU Delft online, it's about MOOCs, it's about courseware, open educational resources. Willem yesterday gave a speech on the fantastic developments that we have at TU Delft with regard to MOOCs. Also, it's about learning analytics. But my point is that I think we're missing a vital part of education, which is the community. And I don't believe that should be necessary because like I said earlier on, digital is an enabler of social. It's an enabler of community. Now, let's come back to the vital parts of my student life. I said it was about content, it was about work experience, it was about networking, and it was about partner. And I think actually quite a number of these things are also possible online. First of all, the content. In open education, in online education, we have tons of content. Content is not our challenge. I think we can take that box. I think work experience, there are many examples that we can find that we could work on as well. For example, desktop publishing, tutoring, translating, washing dishes may be difficult, but other types of work experience are very much possible. Also networking, perhaps a gym is difficult online, but gaming, chatting, et cetera. Perhaps the partner thing is the most difficult thing to organize online. Now, if you look around you in the online and the open world, I think there are already some interesting examples of exactly this, social, community, online. First of all, work experience. Here is an example that Willem found for me, which is MENTIV. And MENTIV is a service for MOOC learners, where MOOC learners pay a little fee, a small fee, so once a week they can get tutoring online to help them with the content, to help them through their MOOC. So the tutor gets paid a little bit of money when he or she helps MOOC learners with this service, and apparently this service can be provided in different languages, different time zones, and different countries. I think that's an interesting example. An example of networking, that comes from my own university, which is called Delft Tulip. Tulip is a Ning site, which international students can join when they have decided to register at TU Delft. So once they've been admitted, they can join the Delft Tulip Ning site and they can do lots of things. They can post their hobbies, their pictures, their names, they can find friends, they can find, for example, fellow students who are from the same country, they can find out about supermarkets, banking, everything that may be confusing when you move to Delft. And the interesting thing is that even before they have actually moved to Delft, they have already acclimatized and they've already built a whole set, a whole group of friends. So I think that's also an interesting example. Now, I mentioned that the partner thing may be the difficult thing to solve online, but even here I found a very interesting example, again from the Netherlands, but this time from the open university in the Netherlands. And I read an interview with the vector magnificus Anya Oskamp where she said that research, of course, has showed that very clearly that students learn better when they are in a relation. So based on their learning analytics system, they've developed this platform where students can meet and perhaps date and find a partner. Interesting, huh? Well, note the date, 30th of March. So that was, of course, an April 1st joke, huh? Thank you very much. But I think actually this may be possible in the future, who knows? On the plane to Krakow, I was thinking about other types of examples I could think of the community, of social and online and open. And I wrote down, for example, job search or where to go next for your full degree or hangouts, digital hangouts or alumni services, new services, post-course, Ning groups, et cetera, et cetera. If we only use our imagination, I think it's very easy to find a community or the social things that we could add to the content of our courses. Now, I gave a speech, I think, about four months ago at the OEB in Berlin where I said that my vision for good universities for proper higher education, if we want to live up to our mission, is that we should be open and global universities. So open to different types of learners, business, lifelong learners, regular students, online students, worldwide and also a global university, meaning open to talent wherever it comes from. And that is also what I believed these years ago when I was the president of this consortium. That was my ambition. So my message for you would be, let's be an open campus, face-to-face and online, an open campus, a global campus, and a social campus. Thank you. Thank you very much, Anka. So our third speaker is Lisa Blaschke, a program director of the Master of Distance Education and E-Learning, the MDE graduate program at Karl von Notzjeske University at Oldenburg, Germany, as well as an associate professor within the MDE at the University of Maryland University College in the United States. She's a vice president and executive committee member of the European Distance Education and E-Learning Network, Eden, and an Eden Fellow. Her research interests are in the areas of lifelong and self-determined learning, UTOGGI, and the pedagogical application of web-to-point-to technologies. Okay, thank you for that introduction. As was said, I'm Lisa Marie Blaschke from the University of Oldenburg, and I'm gonna be talking to you today about opening up Europe through strategy and the added value of collaborations. I wanna start out, though, first with a quote that came from the COL meeting that was held last month in March, where it was stated that in general, ODL institutions have not played a leadership role in either the OER movement or in developing MOOCs, open universities have yet to adopt and appropriate these emerging options. Now, I'm sure there's some of you in this room who don't agree with this quote, and I'd like to present to you today three different universities, open distance learning universities, that I did research on during the last few months, where we talked about their OER strategies, how did they go about implementing OER initiatives, and what I hope will come out of this is that you will see that perhaps there is an opportunity for these universities to be recognized as leaders, and that's something that we support through Eden. Okay, the first university that I would like to talk about is Athabasca University. Now, Athabasca University is the home of the COL UNESCO Chair of OER, Roy McGrill, who also received an OEC Lifetime Achievement Award last night. Roy, if you could stand up, I can see you over there in the corner. If you have questions about Athabasca and how it implements OERs within its organization, I would highly recommend that you talk to Roy afterwards. I'm only going to be giving you a short preview and overview of the different approaches that were used here. The goal at Athabasca was really to lower costs and speed up delivery of course design and course development, and they did this by using teams of learning designers, subject matter experts, visual designers, and they did this through using champions within their organization as well as workshops, and they had a bottom up top down approach within their management, where they didn't just have things just kind of happening where it was just done by the professors, and Roy has been a real voice within the institution and has been guiding them along the way. Now there isn't really a strategy in the sense of a written strategy about how it will be or an agreed upon strategy. This is how we're going to implement OERs. However, the management at Athabasca, the leadership at Athabasca, has shown their commitment to OERs through the support of Roy in the initiative at Athabasca. So what have been some of the results of this OER initiative? Increased number of OERs, increased awareness of OER, and of course more use of the open library and the AU press, which are open access publishing at Athabasca. And then here are some of the benefits of OER. There was more faculty collaboration that occurred as a result of the initiative, both in and out of institutions where faculty was, where they were actually collaborating with others outside of the institution, and then there was less dependency on commercial publishers. And in addition, students were also becoming more involved in creating and designing their own OERs. Now the next example that I have is University of Maryland University College. And full disclosure, as was mentioned, I work for University of Maryland University College as a faculty member, and know this firsthand some of the experience of transitioning to OER. We're actually going through this process within the graduate school at the moment. The University of Maryland University College started this initiative about two years ago, and the goal was to reduce the cost for students in terms of textbook costs, and to provide them with savings that would help them in managing their debt in pursuing their education. In addition, there was also a need for having mobile downloadable accessible OERs that they could use for their courses. A large base of UMBC students, they are in the military, and so they need to have access to the course resources by downloading them, so they can't just access them online. They don't always have access to online documents. Since this is for around 84,000 students, so the initial goal was really to reduce textbook costs, which in the United States, I think they calculated around $1,200 a year in textbook costs for students. Now what they did was they used a team approach with instructional designers, working with the people from the library, as well as with faculty. The results of that, well, first of all, they were able to transition 700 courses within, over 700 courses within the undergraduate program, as well as save over $10 million annually for their students in terms of textbook cost savings, which I think is a pretty big number. I mean, I think it has a real big impact in terms of savings. What also happened, which I found to be very interesting, and which wasn't really an expectation of the initiative, was that as they moved along and they started to move into OERs and to transition to OERs, what they found was that their curriculum became more learner centered. When they started, they initially thought, well, we'll just swap out what we have now in our textbooks and we'll just throw in something that's online. Well, they realized they weren't able to do that. What they had to do was they had to sit down and really think about what kind of learning outcomes do we want to achieve here? How are we going to go about doing it and what resources are available to support us? And as a result, they had to become more learner centered in their approach, which is a really neat approach. And by the way, UMUC was also the winner of the OEC 2015 President's Award last year. So the last example that I have in my research and this was through OpenLearn through the Open University of UK, which was first place in the open course for provider league table, I think in January that was. And Andrew Lane is here. If you want to talk to Andrew about OpenLearn, he's right over there and he's be happy to talk to you about it. I was really excited about this approach, this particular strategic approach to implementing OER because I think they took a real management perspective when they approached this because they looked at not just the KPIs, not just what do we want to do here in terms of OER, they looked at the full value chain, they looked at inbound logistics, they looked at the operations, they looked at the impact on marketing sales and so they took it all into consideration and what was the value added. Now the project started as a result of Hewlett Initiative back in the 2000s and where they approached the OUK and said, are you interested in producing OER? And so they said, sure, we'll do that. Now what they then did was they looked at how can we do this, how can we realize OER within the institution and what they came up with was a really well-defined OER policy that positioned OERs within the institution across the value chain and I would really recommend, this is available online that you take a look at this if you haven't had an opportunity to because they've really defined some key issues that you need to have, I think, within your OER policies in terms of how are we going to handle our partnerships? What kind of business models are we going to use? How are we going to use our channels? And so these are awesome examples of how they went about implementing open educational resources within their organization. Now I also want to add that one of the key things, as I mentioned before, was the KPIs and the metrics that were used. Now, for some of you, this may be like, well, why do I need KPIs? Why do I need metrics? Well, management needs to hear that kind of talk from us. They need to hear from us. How are we going to save money in the organization? How are we going to make money within the organization by using OERs? Where is the value added? And so what I think that OpenLearn has done quite successfully is they've looked at how can we add value through OERs? And they've done this through their MOOCs, through the MOOCs where they actually have channeled informal students over a thousand a year to becoming formal students. And that means money for the institution. So that's another example. So what did all of these three institutions have with each other? I know the topic today is opening up Europe, but I think a lot of what I'm talking about today doesn't just apply to the United States and Canada. It also applies to what's happening here in Europe. Context is a very important thing. This is also something that's come up in a lot of the discussions that I've had during the conference so far. Also during the strategy discussion that was held yesterday about OERs. Context is just really, really important in defining how you're going to approach OER. So what was common amongst them? The mission, the OER strategy, the OER initiative, it aligned with the mission of the institution. There was sustainability and flexibility. They had to consider how are we going to have, how are we going to sustain this initiative within the institution? And as I mentioned before, a good example was what OpenLearn is doing with their KPIs and their metrics. Then they had to look at what's the value added? How are we going to measure where we're adding value through our OERs? So a lot of us, I think, start with the idea of, well, we want to have OER. It's a great idea. We want to be open, but we have to think like management. How are we going to get management to agree with us and to buy into the idea of using OER? And that's where strategy comes in. So these were really three of the key elements. Now, what does that have to do with the next part of my discussion, which is a collaboration? How can we realize this? I want to go back to the quote that we had previously from the president of COL. And one of the things that none of these institutions had when they went about or organization, when they went about introducing an OER strategy, is they didn't have a model to follow. They didn't know how to go about it. There weren't any strategies out there where they could say, ah, that's exactly how I want to do it. Or I'm going to take this model and I'm going to maybe make a few changes here and there. And so they didn't really have a model. They didn't really have an opportunity to access a model. Now, I think that these three institutions that they could provide, they could be leaders within ODL. And they could also provide us with models that could be used in other institutions, not just within their own institutions. And so now I'm going to go to the next part, which is about awareness and promotion. In order to really establish these institutions further as being leaders within ODL, to really show the work that they've done within open education, open educational resources, we need to have more awareness, we need to have more promotion. And we can do that through collaborations and partnerships. And the collaboration and partnership that I would like to talk about briefly is the OEC and Eden partnership, which was just recently signed just a few weeks ago. And this partnership really has evolved over time. Eden is an European distance education, e-learning network, the OEC. We both have very similar missions. We want to support and promote OERs, open education within Europe and around the world. And so we have similar missions. So the partnership, I think, can be very successful because we have those similar missions. We're both interested in sustainability and flexibility. Eden has been sustaining, I guess, has had a sustaining position throughout the open education movement, from the very start. For example, some of the leaders of the open university back in the 70s, Tony Bates, Tony Bates, John Daniel, and then Otto Peters from the Fenn University. They were all people that were involved in the open education movement early on, and they were also founders of Eden back in the 1970s. So we have a history of sustainability, and we want to work together to try to promote openness, not just within Europe, but throughout the world. What we also have to have within our strategy of being a partner is we need to show where there's value added. And I'm going to talk a little bit about that next. Okay, what is the Eden mission, just to give you an overview of what we're doing and what we see as our mission, and I'm not going to go into this in detail. We're modernizing education, recognizing excellence through our different programs that we offer much like what you did yesterday evening with the certificates and awards. Networking, collaborating, improving understanding about openness, about online education, promoting policy and practice through involvement in a number of EU projects, and also preserving the legacy of online distance learning that has been established. So our members are really our key and our fundamental, are really our core assets, and so these are institutional members, individuals, and networks, and this is just a few examples of the numbers that we have in terms of members within Eden. And so really through this partnership we want to be able to provide our members with really value through our partnership. And one of the things I would like to members we mentioned is that we also have a network of academics and professionals which we call the NAP, which we use for collaboration, and our members use for collaboration and for forming small communities online. So strategy, extending the reach, what can the OEC, the OEC, Eden partnership, how can it extend the reach through our strategy of creating this partnership? Well, we're providing new communication channels. We'll be able to use a lot more channels to send information out. We're having, for example, our Eden annual conference 25 years of Eden will be held in Budapest from June 14th to the 17th. I know I have to put that plug in there. And we will be inviting the OEC to come and to serve on a keynote panel and to promote OER and open education at our conference. We also have networks for creating partnerships and alliances and of course we are deeply involved in many of the EU programs, policies and projects, which are shown here to the right. So what's the added value for these three institutions? How can we help these institutions, the three that I just talked about at the beginning in terms of strategy, all three of these are Eden members. And so what we want to do is we want to be able to help them by connecting them with other institutions, by giving them an opportunity to share their experiences, to really provide guidance for others that might be entering into the OER jungle and want to have some kind of model to follow and also as well to help develop policies and standards and share their best practices and strategies. And also their models for openness, I think is also very important. So finally, some paths to opening up Europe where I see the three of the OER, the OEC and the Eden partnership helping to promote that is to really promote the value of openness and broadcasting our successes together, creating platforms for dialogues around research and practice and making them open, making these strategies open, making these best practices open for others, for our members to have access to them and to learn from them and also then to maximize the potential of these alliances and partnerships, not just within open and distance learning, but also across a number of different disciplines. So that's all I had today, thank you. Thank you very much Lisa. So to sum up, we could say we've seen the need for open policies, for data, software and education and when drawing up open policies for open and online education, it's important to remember social issues. There's more to getting a degree and a certificate than in education. It's also about, as Anka told us, it's also about socialization and personal development. And we've also seen the importance of partnerships at governmental level with the Open Government Partnership and at institutional level, the partnership between Eden and OEC. So by forging partnerships between our educational institutions will be in a stronger position to further open and online education. So I'd say all of these issues are key elements for moving towards an open culture. So we have about 10, 15 minutes for questions from the audience. So who would like to break the ice? Yeah? I have a question about the UMUC initiative. The cost savings are so amazing at such a large scale program. Do you have any evidence on efficacy, what's happened to student grades or dropout rates, things like that as a result of the open adoption? That's it, okay. Initial results, they did do analytics, they did analyze the data in terms of was there an impact on student performance? Did they perform better? Did they perform worse? Was there a higher dropout rate? And there was no identifiable change in what happened. So there was no change in implementing OERs in terms of that aspect, in terms of dropout rates and completion rates and quality of education for the student, I think. Well, thank you, Lisa, for your reference to those three examples, the OU and the UK, UMUC in the US and the Canadian Open University, Atabasca. Known down pretty well, I would like to modestly add an example from the Global South, which is the National Open University of Nigeria, who just recently decided to become a fully OER based open university. To my knowledge, it's the first one in the world, not the OU and the UK, not Atabasca, not the OU in the Netherlands, but Nigeria is taking the lead. So I would just like to share with you this example. I'm very happy with reference to those examples and the struggle that Open University have had in the last decade with the OER developments. And some of them are doing very well. Some are really still struggling with the new emergence of digital openness. But in Nigeria, National Open University, I think it's an interesting example and to be striking that Africa is giving this example to all of us. The Global South is also on track, more or less. I'd also like to add that UNICEF was the only institution that I found, University of South Africa, that I was able to find where they actually publicized their strategy online. I wasn't able to find another institution that publicized their strategy outside of the OU policy paper. Thank you and thank you for a very interesting presentation, for good examples. And I also agree with you that Asha has to modify her statement. And I guess she will, with pleasure. She's a great promoter of MOOCs and Open Education Resources. My name is Garth Hittlister and I'm Secretary General of International Council for Open and Distance Education. And Open came into the name of ICD in the 1980s. So ICD as an organization has a long and proud history of promoting openness, both in the broad sense and also in the OER sense, as you might know. So I thought I would add to your examples a couple which all work on OER and even they are not 100% OER universities except for obviously the OER university led by Wayne McIntosh in New Zealand. And there are examples like in South America which also is represented here which are strong on OER. It is of course UNISA as you mentioned but you should also mention African Virtual University which is the key provider of OER. And well, there is a long list to be honest which all are very much into OER and to complete your picture. And what is also a characteristic for many of them they are also into the provision of distance education. So I agree with you, Asha, which also is on the Executive Committee of ICD has to modify her statement and we should all join up in partnership for the good sake, thank you. I would like to ask Jan Gondel. Are there indicators of this wonderful project of open governments that the project would expect from the governments? How they would be opening up? Do you have any concrete examples of these indicators? And do you think education as public good is possible today? The second part is an interesting one. If it's possible, we can have a philosophical discussion over coffee about that. When it comes to what the governments do, there's a very interesting range of what is happening within the open government partnership. The way it works, there are two-year national action plans and every government comes up with their own. And there are currently 69 countries involved in OGP and they have these plans that are set for themselves and they walk the walk, you know, they don't just talk about these things but they also publish all these commitments so you can even find a spreadsheet where you will find an overview of all these commitments. Open education is something new that's happening here. There are also a number of very interesting ideas and because innovation is one of the core values of OGP, there's a lot of interesting stuff happening. So if you'd like to look into what can happen within OGP, I think it makes a lot of sense to look at those commitments and also come up with your own maybe. You know, we did a little experiment. It's effects still remain to be seen. There was no open education just a couple of years ago. Now there is and we will see how this develops. So if you're interested in, you know, promoting openness in various areas, I think there's plenty of room to do that. Maybe this is not a question as much as a comment. Stimulated by Anka Mulder and I was going to answer her question but then I was shy, I didn't. But just in context, my name is Alex Romiszowski and with a Polish name, but I'm retired professor from Syracuse University. I still teach online. In fact, right now I'm teaching adult learning. This morning already I was online with students in US. And I happen to have a very small group on that course, six students. We had a very big fight in our department, Instructional Design Development and Valuation, to have six and five students on a graduate course because 10 is the minimum number for a course not to be cancelled. But we showed quite clearly that the cost of an online course don't make sense to have the same as on campus so we can get away with any number now on online courses, which means a very close relationship with the students. And in fact, of the six students, two are so-called student athletes. I don't know whether, United States people know this very well. They're there just with a scholarship for sports and they happen to have to study something. They're not very much involved. And in fact, one of the two is in the basketball team that lost the final in the March Madnesses, it was called, the National Inter-University Championship. So she wasn't around very much during this semester so far. But we managed to keep in touch even though she was turning around. Now, that's a level of interactivity that I have not experienced to go to Anka's question since my own student days in the 1950s at Oxford University, very traditional university. But it was the highest level of interactivity that I've experienced in university courses until online courses recently with small numbers. I had a personal tutor throughout three years of undergraduate study, he was the same one. I changed from physics to engineering, kept the same tutor. And he told me, don't go to this guy's lectures because it's not worth it, read his book. It's quicker and more effective and so on. Indeed, not only for that reason, but also because I was very much involved in extracurricular and happiness activities. I was not a fantastic undergraduate student. And in some semesters, I didn't go to a single lecture. But one thing I did always do is go to the laboratory activities because if you didn't do them on Monday's three o'clock because that was your slot, you wouldn't do them any time. And so the practical activities could have been added to the learning as well as books and so on. Plus, this aspect of interactivity, it existed in medieval universities, it doesn't exist in typical universities today, but online can bring it back. Thanks. Now it works. Well, thank you very much for your comment. And of course I do believe that interaction during lectures or during the learning part of education is very important. And at the same time, and while you mentioned your activities beyond the curriculum, I think those constitute to becoming an adult or learning something as well. And I think that is true for campus students as well as online students. And I think my point would also be that we instead of broadcasting or understanding sort of knowing in advance what our learners want and expect from us, but perhaps we should ask them. And then we will probably find out, it is about the contents because a lot of the learners will want to know something about physics or mathematics or whatever. But I think we will also find out, we may find out that quite a number of them want other things from us as well that they want to set up a network perhaps with fellow students or share knowledge or share information or perhaps find a job in a particular area. So my point would be that interaction is of course vital in education, but I think if we want to take the next step for this movement, we have to look beyond the contents and also think about other activities. Thank you. Is that working, Anka? Yeah. Okay. Anka, two things. First, Tony Coughlin from the British Open University. I'm really interested in the notion of the relational between the students and the networking. It feels like that we have worked out with books and materials how the open equivalent looks. We know what that is. So there's a... The value transaction is quite clear to us. We see that books cost money and the open source stuff is usually free. The open education stuff is usually free. For the networking, the financial exchange is different. To use social networks, we pay with our data, with the information about our lives. What does the open education equivalent of social networking look like? Does that make any kind of sense at all? You know, we don't pay Facebook, we don't pay Twitter. What we pay with is with our personal details about our lives. I haven't solved that bit yet. But what I thought was, why are big universities so... Why does everybody want to go to the Ivy League universities or perhaps even to my university or to Oxford? You studied in Oxford. I think part of that is because you learn a lot there. So the content value of the diploma. But we all know it's also partly, it's the network, it's the people you know that also defines the value of that particular diploma. So that is one of the reasons why people want to go to Harvard, to MIT, to Oxford, Cambridge, it's both. So I was thinking, wouldn't it be great if we could set something up like that online as well for those people who cannot join these top universities but do want to learn something and do not only want to learn something but have this valuable network that will help them in their careers. And I'm not sure, I mean, data protection or do we pay with our data? I'm not sure about how to solve that bit but I'm convinced that this networking part is vital. Thank you, Uncle Malda, for a very nice presentation. I'm probably going to comment on one thing you raised which I somehow tweeted and there was some comments on it. So oftentimes, education, we talk about education equality, people say. It's not only about learning, it's also about those, you know, kind of entertainment networks. But there are networks everywhere, even in developing countries. There are networks, people meet in pubs, there are networks but they are not learning. And actually the outcome of defining equality in terms of network, that entertainment, those gyms, you know, which are there, what it is, so it's hiking the tuition fee and lead to exclusion of an overwhelming majority of people in many countries. And that's where the comment from, I think someone from, I would not be able to pronounce your name, but he commented that in the EU, tuition fee is, let's say, 1,900 euros. We know EU is doing very well in many countries is even tuition, there's no tuition fee. But in many other countries, it's really an issue, a serious issue. And if we look at the issue globally, so we find that that kind of defining court in terms of those entertainment lead to exclusion of an overwhelming majority of learners who are willing to learn and cannot afford it. And I find many underdeveloped countries, for instance, where access to high education is even less than 5% of second education graduates. And this lead to another question is public education, public good enough from a global perspective? No, that's what I tweeted, because it's an exclusive privilege, obviously, for the very true top kind of privilege. So it's really, we need to look at the issue globally. And probably the failure, what I say as the failure of the open education movement is when I see the report, I see we have this million downloads, we have these likes. I haven't seen anyone who say, we have used these resources to create educational opportunities for this number of people who had not been included otherwise. So that's the kind of result which we would probably like to see. Thank you. I'm a pragmatic person and I'm an idealist. And which is, I think the latter part has been the most important reason for me to be active in this movement. And if I can just get into the point you make about exclusion, I think exclusion to education is appalling. But at the same time, I see that there are tuition fees and some universities tuition fees are really high and other universities they're quite low. I think the Netherlands 1900 euros, that's relatively low, but it's still higher than education being for free in some other countries. But to come back to my point of networks, I think people have, for your career, for the future, for your future, for your working life, it is important that you have access to education. But I think this network, having access to a relevant network that may help you with a career, that friends or colleagues who will point out the jobs who would tell their colleagues, well, this person, Lisa, is a fantastic colleague, you should really hire her. I mean, I think we should also focus on the exclusion to that sort of network, those sort of networks, which is what is happening today as well. So this is one of the points I wanted to make in my speech. Let's focus on providing content for an affordable price or for free, open content is really important. But the next step, open networks, I think is perhaps even as important. So that really advice, my advice would be, let's take that next step as well. So thank you very much for your questions and contributions, we've no more time. I suggest that if you still have questions to talk to the speakers during the coffee break, before we close the session, Jan Kusiak would like to give the speakers a small gift on behalf of the university. I just wanted to mention that anyone who's interested in open learn and what they've done over the last 10 years, they're actually, they're celebrating their 10 year anniversary this year. There will be a session this afternoon, so be sure to attend that if you're interested. Thank you.