 Okay, so let's start this meeting. There's just a question from Vanessa asking, can participants see there according to the information we just got? You can't, but we will make a list of what we see as a list from here onto the question answer in a little while when someone else has come. Okay, welcome again to the second session of the Alman seminar. This session is the Fritomatic Working Group. It's on the sustainability and we have with us today as a chair, Lisa Perchidis who's from Iskme in the United States and Tella Mio who's an OER chair in Brazil. The reporter today is also again, Neil Butcher from OER Africa, South Africa and also the communications chair. Before we start, I just want to go through some logistics and explain to you how it works. If you were in session this morning, this is not something new, but just to make sure everyone is on the same page. So, wait, I have to take control. Demanding a control. Okay, normally I can go down. Okay, just to start with, why are we here? The objectives of our discussion is to identify prior areas of action and in this case, the area of sustainability for the working group. This is referred to a survey in which everyone was invited to provide their inputs. The survey was open for today's and from the 10th to the 20th of July and we have summarized the outputs of the survey which sent to you by email earlier today and these will be the outputs that will be discussed in each of the working groups. The second objective is to identify activities and issues related to the establishment of an electronic tool for information sharing and collaboration in the OER Dynamic Coalition and how this tool, what are the user needs and what are the parameters that we would need to ensure that this tool serves. So, to start with, there's a couple of technical points. First of all, there's interpretation. It's here. You can see there is a little globe. If you click on it, you can get English or French interpretation. If you say deactivated or the top option, that means listen to what is on the screen. So, if the person is speaking French, you hear it in French. If they're speaking in English, you hear it in English. The means for discussion is the question and response box which is here and the reason that we're doing this is because it is very difficult to manage a lot of conversation with the chat box and this allows us to focus our interactions. If you want to speak, please feel free to do so. Please raise your hand so your hand here and when you raise your hand, we will give you the floor to speak. You're welcome to register. This registration that you have for this session is good for all the sessions. There's only one registration for all six sessions. It's also nominated. So, if you give this link to a friend or to a colleague, they will come in as you. They'll actually have your name on the screen. If they would like to register as themselves with their own name, then they should have registered directly themselves. We would prefer that because we will be doing an analysis of the participation and it would be good to have everybody's names and the institutions, etc. clear. This session will be recorded and we will be actually sharing the recordings. After this session, we'll be sending out some information on how we're going to do this. For those that are not in the timeline to provide comments, further comments to the discussion will be taken into account in the final report. So, with this, I give the floor to our two chairs, Lisa and Tel, to start the presentations. Thank you very much. Hello, everybody. My name is Tel Emile. I'm a UNESCO Chair in Distance Education at Universidad Brasília in Brazil. And with me today, Lisa Petriz, who's a CEO and founder of WISCME, and we're going to try to facilitate this discussion on sustainability, which is a very important topic for the OER declaration. So, the way we've organized this is our colleague Neil will be going through our slides. And the way we've organized this, we have the four main points that were raised for discussion. And we have your comments that we received via questionnaire. And we'll be going through each of these. And for each of the four points, we'll have about 20 minutes of discussion. We'd like you to use the Q&A to propose questions. And then by raising your hand, we can give you time to speak. Our main goal is to drill down on some of the things that came back as part of the questionnaire, the main topics, so that we can better understand what those mean. What are the priorities in terms of next steps? What topics are priorities for action? And once we go through these four, for about 20 minutes each, we'll go towards the end and have a discussion on the final point, which is on an electronics communication system that will support this area of action and what kinds of ideas that we have for this. So, Neil, if you don't mind putting our slides up, we'll start first with just a little bit of an overview of the results. And just two sets of slides to just summarize what we received back. The first one is if your institution has ongoing activities in this area, and there was a distribution around research and catalyzing new sources for funding with some on updating current provisions, and less so for supporting continuous improvement. And we highlighted some of the URLs and indications that we received in the text that we can look at them if we wish to. Next slide. In terms of priority, I think it's very clear that the second point, the one on catalyzing new sources for funding and resource sharing is very important. And then reviewing seems to go next, updating current provisions and becoming a policy, so focus on policies, then research and finally looking at supporting continuous improvement. So, this is just an idea for us to have in general what people think are our priorities. And I think we have a fairly strong focus on the idea of catalyzing new sources for funding, and we'll likely spend more time talking about those. We'll reserve about 20 minutes for each of them. So, to start out, our first point, if we go to the next slide, is just to present you with some general comments that weren't many comments that were general comments, but there were at least a couple of points that we thought were interesting to bring up. One is defining, in order to think about sustainability, is defining what kind of resources we are. And this has been a discussion, I think, that has been going on in some email lists as well, and it was replicated here. It's a fairly recent discussion now, whether it's a common good, whether it's a public good, whether it's a finite resource or not, and that helps us think about sustainability. The emphasis is less on issues of licensing and technical discussions, but more on a human framework, a sociological framework for sustainability was another point. And finally, a point made that we can leverage existing licensing frameworks to help open up public, particularly public funding for maintaining and sustaining OER initiatives. So, Lisa, I believe you were going to set us off at the first, or was it me? No, it was me, actually, wasn't it? I'm not confused. Yes, that was you. You were going to do it. That was me. All right, I was going to do it. Yeah, let's do it. So, the first point was reviewing, updating current provisions and procurements for policies. Policy, of course, is a very important aspect of sustainability. And here are the main points. I'll read them out loud for translation purposes. And then once we're done, we can start having a discussion on these. And the first one was to develop and share common frameworks across regions. I know we are development and utilizations. I think we have a lot of frameworks that have been popping up around the world, very different ones. And we could share these and have discussions around them. It would help us remix some of this advocacy efforts for policy makers to make publicly funded educational materials openly licensed. This has been a very important point. And it is a point, important point of OER declaration. And I think many countries have been focused on this identifying partner organizations that can help facilitate discussions and publish compelling cases, studies to inform policy makers. We have many examples of people publishing case studies that can help us inspire other organizations and other governments to do similar things. And finally, encourage learners and teachers and researchers to learn about OER is an important point as well. So, next slide. So, very simply, the idea is to open up for you guys through the Q&A. Remember not to use the chat and then raising your hand to give us ideas of based on these points that were raised in the previous slide. And of course, any other topics you would like to discuss, specific topics, what would be the priority for action in regards to reviewing and updating current provisions and procurement policies. So, we will time about 20 minutes for this discussion and we are ready for your comments. And just to be clear, you can actually speak now as well. You don't have to just put your type into the Q&A. Certainly, if you do put into Q&A, we will read it aloud for translation purposes. And then we'll have a record there as well. But we'd love for you to talk. And I see that somebody has raised their hand. I don't know Zaynab and Neil who can give, do we have permission to control? Olivia, are you there? Olivia, I can do it. Who's raised their hand? Christian has. I'm happy to do it. Can you do it? Do you have the rights? Yeah. Christian, you're open. You can talk. Okay. Hello. I hope that you can hear me. Hello, Lisa. Hello, Taylor. Hello, Zaynab and all the others. Very nice to see the activities are now going on. And yeah, I have put this point only on the third place because I thought it is not that relevant due to several reasons. And one of the main reasons is that policy is also a strict focus of another working group. That's why I think the policy aspect is not that relevant here in this working group for this specific perspective. But I really like the last bullet point, how to encourage learners and teachers to learn more about OER because I think this is the key issue here for sustainability and for improving OER usage. That's why I would really recommend and appreciate if you could do more collaboration with let's call them end users. I do a lot of cooperation with schools and other universities, but mainly schools because the need for promotion or even awareness raising in schools is that high. And if they got the idea and know what it is, OER, then it's that simple. But they need to kick off and to first start with it. And then it's, yeah, it's running by themselves. Thank you, Christian. Yes, thank you. And I just want to acknowledge, Christian, that that is true, that the that policy is obviously the the the topic of another another whole working group. I think it's important to have it here though also and to at least have that lens on policy because when we think about sustainability, and we'll talk about this in the next point, you know, so many times people think it's just about funding. And again, funding is is obviously key. But the idea that how we are also sharing in the making of policy and sharing those frameworks across to help others make the policy really is I think part of the organic sustainability in terms of the OER recommendations. And would love to hear. I know there was somebody asked about putting the slide back up. I'm wondering, is there somebody using them? Can we put the points in the chat? Oh, there you go. Okay, then we don't get to see each other. But I guess a lot of people don't have their videos on today anyway. So just so you can see them again. I have Vanessa with her hand raised. So I'm going to allow her to talk now. Vanessa, you're open. Thanks very much. Hi. So I think I've got a principal question before we get into the details. Would you mind just everybody just saying your your name? Thank you, Vanessa. And where you're from just so we know your organization and your country. Please. Yes, of course. So I'm Vanessa Proudman, I'm director of Spark Europe. And we've been working on looking at how to sustain open science for several years. And I'd like to do more in the area of open education. But what I was curious about is, what are the goals of this working group? What do you want to focus on in particular on sustainability from UNESCO's point of view? Or are you really passing it on to us to hear from us what we think is important? So I'd love to hear your thoughts about why is sustainability important from your side and what would be the goal with the UNESCO OER recommendation and how could then member states take action in this really important area? So yeah. Yeah, I think, first of all, it's not UNESCO. It's the member states that decided what's important. It's what in the OER recommendation. So whatever is in the section on rec on sustainability in the recommendation is what the folks is. We had a consultation at the OER dynamic at the coalition launch in which we we tried to drill down a bit more what that mean exactly. And we came up with report and further to the survey, we came up with an idea of how we can move forward in this area and what are some of the activities that are really quite pressing and of priority. And now in this discussion objective is to drill down further to see what we can do to support with new activities and what we can do to support the collaboration between the different entities that actually have ongoing activities. So I think it's not up to UNESCO to decides the member states that decided that it's what their priorities are and they've set it out inside the recommendation text. So just to clarify also, I tried to put in the list of participants in the chat. It doesn't stick. So I'll find another way to send this to everybody. Thank you, Zaynab. So when you, I'm assuming probably several of you that are on this call now to fill out the survey in July and that probably these answers somewhat represent some of your thoughts as well. So it would be important to, as Zaynab said, as we want to think about how do we sort of drill a level down deeper in terms of these points to imagine like what are some of the actions in the next steps that might be taken. So if you have some specific examples as you, when you answered the survey behind what you wrote, this would be a good time to share those as well. Again, in the spirit of what kind of projects might be undertaking, what kind of collaborations we might identify organizations or people from member states who want to collaborate on something similar as well. So drilling down a bit on onto some of the examples would be, this would be a good time to do that as well. Cable, I see that you have a question on financial sustainability. We, so we're going to talk about that point next, but specifically around, I'll read what you said, in addition to open license funding policies that require publicly funded educational resources to have them openly licensed, that we want to have open procurement policies and artifacts, handouts, slides, talking points. So that was exactly the point that I was making earlier, that it is so important to be sharing what these procurement policies are with each other. As Cable says here, they empower schools, universities and colleges to put open license requirements and the request for proposals in their contracts so that they can require all of their service providers to develop openly licensed resources. Cable goes on to say we ought to help governments do both open licensing policies and open procurement policies. I'll follow up on what Lisa said. I think we would be very interested in hearing on examples that you might have or things that you know of that are particularly useful. So, I mean, one idea of in regards to having a common framework is in what way can we go about looking for frameworks that exists and how do we compile this information? Is it useful to do so? How would it be done? Do we do it regionally? Do we do it globally? Is it what kind of frameworks are we interested in? I mean, some of these details would be interesting for us to tease out so that we have a bit more detail on what these four topics could entail in terms of action. Lisa and Tel, I have two hands. The first one is from Trudy van Beek. Trudy, I've allowed you to talk, but I can't unmute you. Can you unmute from your side? That should work now. I'm Sam Sneel. I was just wondering when can I talk? I see the unmute button. Thanks for that. My name is Trudy van Beek and I'm from the government of South Africa from higher education and training, not from school education and training. And I don't know if it will help, but I'm going to just to just give you a brief overview of is our textbook procurement in colleges and I think in schools also, but I'm specifically talking of TVT colleges at the moment. We're in the past quite the old model of an open market model where publishers would publish X number of different textbooks for a subject and then colleges would get allocation, financial allocation to buy those textbooks directly from the publishers as all rights reserved type of textbooks. What we have done over the last past three or four years is that we have changed the procurement policies in a way, not changing it away from that, but to have a parallel process at this stage of changing the procurement instead of giving money to buy textbooks. We are now contracting writers and in fact we are contracting in some cases even publishers to write open textbooks and then we are making it available in the as an open educational resource obviously at a much lower cost. So that is one of the procurement policies that you have changed. So maybe that can be used as the example. Great, thank you Trudy. Trudy, I just wonder, I know this is another question Neil, but I wonder if just briefly about how that change was made might be very useful as well. How you moved from that process of procurement to authoring? That's a good question. I think one part is that there is a few people in government that believe in OER, so that internal drive from policy perspective is one of the issues. And then secondly is proof of concept. I believe instead of going with a big bang approach and say we have changed our procurement policies now and this is how we're going to do it from now, what I've done specifically in this regard is I've made use of donor funds. For example, we used funds from the European Union and so forth to prove a concept and to put a tender out on that money so we didn't use in fact the money allocated within the voted funds in the budget and we did that and then the one is not even completed by now because we are doing a textbooks for mass science in our TV colleges, but they have seen oh it's working and then we saw that there's now 13 other tech subjects that's going the same route. So it's a very organic way of doing it. It was not the policy drive from the beginning because you were always regarded with suspicion and with total antagonism from the publishing association and they still hate us for what we're doing, but the market luckily is very small. So there's not big publishers playing in this field, but we prove a concept now. Great, thank you so much Trudy. I'm sorry for my dogs that are participating. I think in this time of shelter in place we've come to accept all kinds of interruptions. We have Christian again so I'm going to allow him to talk. Yes hello that's me again, Christian Strucker from the European Institute for Learning, Innovation and Cooperation in Germany and that is a great initiative Trudy. Congratulations and I'm so happy to hear about that as well as from other countries like for example the Netherlands and Philippines doing the same. I think this is now a movement and changing point that can also make huge improvements to the educational systems. And having said that another example that I'd like to contribute is that last year I have designed an online course for innovative STEM education to be started exactly in March. This year and yeah then due to the COVID outbreak the number of participants grew dramatically up to 600 participants within a few days and we have also changed the content of that online course towards the main needs and main requests from all the participants. How can we start with online learning and we simply collected resources, tools, overviews on what is available, what can you use, what are first steps to take action in your school, in your community, in your region and we also started with a training program for teachers and maybe this is also something that we could think about next to collecting official frameworks that I have published about during the last two years many times but this is not changing the practice, the landscape. Such ideas and such actions like changing the procurement or practical training workshops or overviews I think they are much more needed and appreciated by the teachers and so on. Thank you Christian and there was a there was a question there was the question that Vanessa had asked what how do we understand frameworks here and I was just answering that I think they can be understood here as the formal frameworks as as Christian has just referred to that might be developed by governments with Trudy's example as well so that's sort of a framework as you think about how can I apply kind of a model it also could be more informal frameworks or research frameworks as well as models of implementation that I think we're seeing a lot more of those implementation models actually being more formally written up as frameworks and when I say more formally I mean posting them whether they're a google doc or an open educational resource itself that can be built upon and remixed and reused so that's how I understand frameworks but thank you Vanessa for that question. We have a couple more minutes and then we'll move on so go ahead. Oh just briefly so I so as we're talking about a range of frameworks and because this is actually quite a new area I think it would be great to to gather some of those examples so Christian mentioned some we would also bring some so I think sharing good practices however small they are would be would be a great activity and output for this I think there's one thing I don't know whether it fits into one of the next slides or not also in the area of open science what we're also looking at is that some governments or institutions are looking at developing values or principles that they follow when deciding on procurement choices so that might be something that we might explore are there certain principles or values that we might want to develop that would help influence our choices for more openness in open education. Thank you Vanessa and I just want to as we kind of close out this this particular point you know one of the one of the bullets on the slide was about identifying organizations that can help facilitate discussions and publish compelling case studies to inform policymakers so I I know this came up at our in the in the survey when we did for the launch as well back in March which is the more that we can be all talking about this writing about this you know if you've even done a presentation to policymakers about this what was your experience so I think so often in this work we are so busy doing the work where we don't often take the time to actually or we don't have the time to be really writing up and publishing our our learnings so I just want to make a call to action to say that many of these stories are so compelling and these are what others need when they're actually looking to do something similar in another country so thank you. Thank you Neil. Colleagues I just want to share one thing with you when I started with OER with Zinnab when I was still in Canada we were focusing much more on the development of OER and what I realized when I came back to South Africa is the importance is to focus on the use of OER and what is the benefit for the user and one of the benefit of the user is to adapt and do to repurpose and then it's got value for the user and that was for me I open to look at the approach that you're following not from the development side but rather from the usage side and that helped a lot in our advocacy of the use of OER in our country. Yeah I think there's a specific point that will discuss that and I think we're going to get to that and I think it's an important issue. Unless there are any other pressing issues on this particular first topic we'll go ahead and move to B and Lisa if you'd like to take it from here. Yes I was answering questions and the question and answer. Neil actually I want to just say one thing there was a question about Cable's question and it had disappeared and it had gone to the dismissed section of the Q&A I think on the questions there's a way to say that you have answered it live versus typed the answer so I'm not sure if we can change that or not and what's nice about that is that we can also be making sure that we've translated them and not just dismiss them just a small point. Thank you Tal. So yeah the second point is sort of what we think of when we think of sustainability which is about catalyzing new sources of funding for and resource sharing and so the points that came up in the surveys from all of you were very specifically around encouraging funding in the collaboration in OER between and within regions. I think we see some of that sometimes regionally but it is certainly something that we would benefit I think from economies of scale and would love again to hear more specific examples of this. The second piece is around emphasizing the importance of again the multi-stakeholder activity to unlock sources of funding so this could be between institutions and other stakeholders so think about who are those stakeholders across and then are there some synergies and again I want to say one thing we're seeing here in the US with some government funding is they around COVID specifically in remote learning is that there seems to be now kind of a realization and a little bit of an aha that we need to look more at the multi-stakeholder activity because we don't have for example classrooms are not in operating in silos you know so I think that's a good point as well. Providing a targeted support for individual countries to develop sustainability plans and like to hear from some of you who maybe have had that experience as well revise and reallocating existing budgets to support OER. This is again I would love to hear from examples of this I think often we think of new funding you know how can we get new funding for this and it's definitely time to be really looking at where that existing budgets are and is it viable and feasible for those sorts of monies to be reallocated and again I'm going to make the case from the first point that we need to really be looking for case studies that give it good examples of this and then lastly leveraging taxes on the basis that all education materials produced with public funds should be openly licensed and that is certainly a rallying call around open data open research you know open journals as well as OER. Next slide so actually maybe we could so we're going to talk about what are those topics for priority action let's actually I guess Neil you can go back one slide just leave that up for a moment so people can see that and I believe somebody typed that into the chat last time that's probably a good idea too so people can see it so would love to hear in terms of you know these were all these all have come up as priorities and of course within these working groups part of our goal is to say you know what are some examples of these how do we even prioritize these priorities within this so how do we drill down on some of those and you know let's link link them to the to the organizations that are actually working on them and are good examples from the countries themselves so floor is open and I'm happy to share the first the first point and Vanessa's hand I've got a couple of hands let's start with Vanessa and then I'll move on to cable okay and then we do have some points so after that when maybe if there's a break I'll read some of the quite the Q and A's that have come in go ahead so I think what would be super interesting if we're thinking about prioritizing here is for us to gain a better understanding of the different business models that are out there if we look at some of the larger commercial publishers and how they're moving into this space and how they're um using open to build new services new offerings and to look at though some of these smaller startup funding models newer business models I think it would be really exciting to map out the landscape to gain an understanding and then we could within that then we can identify better some of those examples and how they work where they're situated what the context is so I think that could be a really great concrete activity that we could do before we can move forward is to to have that better understanding of how funding works of of OER and the services and the infrastructure uh that supports OER thank you thank you Vanessa and uh um next is Cable Green Cable you're open great thanks Neil I was uh going to make a comment on the revised and reallocated existing budgets to support OER uh in my last I'm sorry I should have said who I am I'm Cable Green I'm the director of open education and interim CEO at Creative Commons in my last position before I was at Creative Commons we looked systemically at where we were spending existing budgets to make the case for OER so we did several things but one that I'll share is we lined up our highest enrolled textbooks and the cost of those across 34 community and technical colleges we picked the top textbook found out we were spending collectively 71 million dollars a year in public monies a mix of national and state funding around that textbook we we looked at what percentage of students financial aid was going into that one book and then we went to the state legislature with those numbers and made the argument that look we're already spending out of the state coffers every year X million dollars a year for this one intro to writing textbook and that allowed us the numbers were so large and people were so disgruntled that that there was that much waste of existing budget for a relatively meager outcome that the legislature was willing to put forth a bit of seed money so we got a little new money out of it uh to actually take the entire curriculum open or the entire general education degree and then that that we were encouraged to go back and look at the other existing budgets that were being spent on educational resources and to to reallocate those away from what we were doing to open educational resources that was a very effective strategy but it it took a lot of time and frankly some arm twisting to get in and get the numbers uh because nobody had ever asked for that before and so actually getting into these big budgets looking at the line items and trying to figure out how the money is flowing is a critical first step before you can discuss reallocating thank you cable i'm i'm wondering has that been written up as a as a case example that you know of and something that could be shared i mean because i think this is another piece that we need to understand is even what are some frameworks for how we share these kinds of cases that could be used and that might be uh an action item for later but i think that there's probably other great examples like that and how do we kind of codify them in a way that they can be very useful to folks around the world as as they're embarking on this work as well not just because they happen to be at this one meeting today here you know of the dynamic coalition so i just throw that out as a provocation provocation there is another question from is it no colanga i'm not sure where you're from it would be great to know what country you're talking about or what institution you're from so i'm not sure if you're uh if neil he has raised he or she has raised their hand i can read it um it says our institution has a professional development department for academics and it's in the process of consolidating all its resources for oer as they share these online and they're working now on collaborating across universities as well as locally and continentally at this stage as the as we collaborate we're seeing the wave continuing to reach other institutions the branch is looking at employing personnel to take charge of this responsibility we hope the application for a grant to fund this endeavor will be approved by the university that will determine its success and sustainability as this needs proper coordination uh thank you from south africa did you want to add anything to this feel free to raise your hand if you do and neil can give you access go ahead venisa so i have another question um so you have engaged with a wide range of um stakeholders i know in this um um publishers are they also invited to these working groups and are they also of course they there are all kinds of publishers have they have they yeah how how are they involved in this um in this process um how have they been involved uh so far and how are they going forward i'd be quite interested to know thank you hello um i'm maria soledad ramirez from mexico and chair in open education movement and i think that for our region is very important the first one about the current funding and collaboration and multi-holder too because we need more support in in this region and the other region i know but uh for example uh promote incentives with sustainability models that support the use creation preservation translation by public and private sector and research and development organization i think is is a support for this sport and also innovation and collective uh creation uh my partner here and i i am very glad to to see you again del and bernard in chile and brasil uh we know that in this region we need more support and more models that uh improve this activity for open education and i know in the other region too and thank you thank you for this session lisa and then thank you so much maria for sharing that example and uh it is very important here on this meeting that we really hear um all of from all of you who are here you're here because you're committed because you were part either of the launch group or have uh committed some time and effort to um this dynamic coalition and so we really really do want to hear your voice there is translation uh if you speak french so but we can tell you there's there is a little button in the bottom right hand it depends actually what browser you're on but there is a button that says language and you can see english and french in terms of that and also if english is not your first language and you're not as comfortable speaking then please do write your answer here in the q and a and we'll be happy to read that aloud as well um it is it is really important uh to all of us that we hear from those of you who are working in different parts of the world and i think we might have a couple of more minutes on this um tell were you tracking the time on this i think i've got one more hand from yan newman so perfect thank you yan you're open yes here's yan i'm speaking can you hear me yes thank you perfect um yes i'm the project manager of the oh yeah world map project and i've been interested in sustainability for a long time and um i've got two thoughts i would like to share with you the first one is that we should maybe make clear what we are talking about when we are speaking about sustainability because i remember that um back at the second world congress um or before the second world congress the topic was a dress as business models so for me it's pretty much about money and where does the money comes from and um i'm um i'm fascinated by the different kinds of business models that seems to be around in an OER and my proposal to approach the topic would be to identify a number of services which have been around for a while because i know that there are several um services which have been longer than five or or maybe even ten years um and and i i would say as soon as we have this catalog of of of examples we could identify and analyze these examples and see where they get their money from and i think this would be very much interesting to learn and and maybe we could manage to identify archetypes of of organizational models to see who is producing what for whom and where does the money come from and there seem to be quite different um approaches to this because it can be state money and there are private initiatives and i think this is an call to make more research on this and and i think it's it's not so big i think um i i would expect that we could collect quite a big number of examples um which have been around um for for some time and i would propose to say which services has been there for more than five years thank you jan do you i'm just curious do you have one or two examples of of services like that just to kind of ground it in an example yes i i i shared some already between within the question and answer so i know that there is for example in germany um a pretty good initiative which was started by students and they are mainly funding driven um so they they really get a lot of money from different funders on a regular basis they also do crowdfunding and and this is quite different to another initiative in um germany which is teachers driven and this is mainly based on on not creating high costs and voluntary contributions by teachers so these are two different examples from germany in in belgium i know that there is class cement which is a now state driven unit so they have a portal which is um um based on collective work done by teachers so the content is created by volunteers which share single um working sheets and and this again could be compared to the norwegian approach and the alay nor Norwegian digital learning area which um i think has been around for more than 10 years and they receive about eight million i think euro a year to create contents and and they follow more publishing logic so that there seem to be pretty different models around there which are working fine and producing good results on an ongoing basis and i'm sure that there are examples like this um from from south africa maybe and and maybe also from the u.s for sure so i would love to collect these um examples of of long existing services okay thank you so the next hand i have is gendron um gendron wesler from uh creative commons over to you gendron thank you so it's wonderful to be here i work with capo green and just had um one other idea i wanted to share um regarding sustainability through partnerships i i expect that we can find some really strong opportunities for collaboration with the open government partnership which is doing um very analogous work and sometimes over overlapping work with the open education efforts so the open government partnership for those who are um not familiar with it is a partnership among 79 countries and NGOs around the world to strengthen an engagement with civil society um and they have um some similar open principles um so to capo's point about open licensing requirements that can be added to procurement policies for example um the open government partnership also focuses on open procurement but through a kind of a complementary lens i expect if we could collaborate with their efforts we might kind of strengthen their goals and ours as well and i'll post a couple links to the ogp and um in the q and a thank you very much gendron if there are no other points here um perhaps we should go on again Vanessa okay uh Vanessa very briefly sorry i'll stop then um i think it's just linking back to uh what yan just mentioned we're actually running a survey right now um um can you hear me yes you can hear me now yes yep we hear you fine excellent oh so we're we're running a survey uh looking at um open scholarship services and infrastructure uh and looking at how they're funded um what their costs are who funds them uh what models are they using uh have they changed over time so we could really quite easily repurpose that survey for open educational services and infrastructure in the future so we don't have to start from zero so if we wanted to gain an understanding uh of that landscape um we could reuse that uh if we wanted to thank you thank you and if there are any other links like that or uh points especially to URLs please send them to neil who's going to be compiling all of these in sort of our final report so if you even think of something after this please make sure if you haven't already posted it here in the chat that you get it to him so we could include it thank you so let's go on to the next point which is about supporting continuous improvement which is also one of the main components of sustainability and uh as somebody who uh runs an organization that is all about supporting continuous improvement this one is um super important I think to me uh and obviously to the community around sustainability so uh the first point is around identifying and sharing and applying common surveys and tools for uh for evaluating OER implementation and I think Vanessa at the point you just raised is certainly part of that um we uh often are recreating the wheel without knowing it and so um as we as we open discussion for this one I think it would be great to you know talk about this point in particular and also to make sure that we have shared those across um creating a review an improvement model I think that's a really interesting these are interesting but I think that one is kind of thought provoking because we haven't seen those as much uh in that in specifically in OER we see a lot of things around continuous improvement in other fields but if we actually have a review an improvement model so be interested to hear uh if we can drill down there and have some examples as well using research to help define the value of OER we are going to talk about research it's the last the last component as well after supporting continuous improvement but again if we think about research it's not just research for research sake but research that we actually then can apply so really applied research to help define and the value of OER it is key um the fourth point here is around developing and adopting feedback mechanisms for OER utilization and creation and again remember these are what we're reading here these points on the slide are from the survey so these are responses that you've given to this area of supporting continuous improvement so again it's one thing to say we have continuous improvement it's another one to say this is actually the feedback mechanism in place and then to adopt it and even refine that over time I think we see that we see that we're starting to see that more in the case of the actual authoring of content but I think we can think about this much more broadly in this term of sustainability because if we are not continuing to refine and improve not just content over time but policies and all the things we've discussed here so far you know where we are not sort of harnessing the you know the commons in terms of what is our common collective knowledge and how do we improve upon that and then the last piece is just very specifically around you know sharing survey instruments and other measures and I think what's so important too around this piece around survey instruments it's one thing to have a link to 10 other surveys that have been used for either policy or implementation purposes to understand what those are but it's another thing to actually understand how those surveys worked not only what they found because we can usually read a research report but what they didn't find and where they weren't where they weren't adequate for the context that they were used and where they might be more appropriate or how they might be adapted so really sharing that knowledge of the of the how and why not just here's the here's the link use my survey but really more context around that so again we have about 20 minutes would love to open this up now for discussion hello Lisa yeah I help so that you can hear me that's me again Christian I fully agree with you Lisa this is a very interesting point here and during the last five years I've focused in particular on a specific type of OERs that are massive open online courses MOOCs and when looking on the literature as well as the practices we found that there was a huge need and a huge debate on the quality of MOOCs however we could also not find such survey instruments and also not in improvement in review models that's why we started with the first global MOOC quality survey and we are currently in the process not only to publishing the results yet several hundreds of participants but also to publish all the questions and answers with all the indicators on the archive that everybody who's interested in be deprecating the survey or comparing the results by him or herself can do it in the future and we would like also to repeat that global survey because we would like also to compare what we were done in 2018 what happened since the last two three years and from the first because we have already developed a review and improvement model that is called the quality reference framework for massive open online courses online available I will just type the website into the 2a section in a second and we are also not developed that review and improvement model but arrived a checklist for beginners of online learning out of that with simple questions that everybody can ask him or herself how to start with massive open online courses for the very first time and that is for designers as well as for learners and we have also a complete list of quality criteria for open education resources for a massive online course and also available online and I'm wondering if we could also use such instruments to compare also different practices for example we did it in Asia in three countries and we found out in the countries Thailand Malaysia and Vietnam that the participation is different also the backgrounds and the expectations from the designers as well as from the learners and I would be very happy also to see that happening also in other regions of the world. Thank you Christian I'm kind of curious and this is not just for you but for others as well you know we we think a lot about the adaptation or just the use of surveys so we have comparable data across contexts I'm curious in a specific example you know are there are there places where the survey does not transfer well in terms of context you know we like to think that we can develop one thing that really goes across all but I think it's important to also look at where it doesn't and I'm wondering if that was something that came up for you or maybe other examples as well from others and thank you for the links to that in the in the Q&A and and I go ahead yes yeah just a short answer on your question what we found out for example is that there's a huge difference between the expectation and recognition of online interactivity and online interaction between the designers of online learning and learners of online learning. The online learners are highly appreciating online interaction whereas the designers are thinking it's not important at all for online learning activity and that's why also several online learning opportunities are not fitting to the needs of the learners this is for interactions but for other aspects designers and learners have similar expectations and perspectives and that's why we also would like to see more research on that to find out commonalities and to improve and to grow for design of online learning. Great thank you so much yeah it's good to understand that the the differences in terms of what is working online versus not online you know and I just want to say also as a researcher we spend so much time trying to prove what does work right because we want to show our success as researchers but if we think about just the world and how much there is to learn from failure that's often where some of the greatest learning can come from so what doesn't work in these kinds of surveys and instruments and whether it's the implementation of them or findings that we thought would be similar across and aren't we often don't want to share those but I think it's really important in a continuous learning model to make sure that we're learning from from what failed as well. Are there other questions or comments? Nukulanga thank you for the example also about the professional development at your institution that is helping academics develop MOOCs and you say these are offered at a fee I'm sure they would not mind sharing their design model well this is a great place to put into practice but we just discussed I think on the first point here that Telva was leading around reviewing and updating current provisions and procurement policies let's ask them you know and are they would they not mind sharing their design models I think sometimes we find things that we think it's so obvious that people want to share and then when we go talk to them they're less keen on that for some reason especially if there was a fee attached to it initially so that's a great example of I think that the shift that needs to happen across the member states other thoughts about continuous improvements and the priorities around supporting continuous improvement perhaps we should move on to the next point thank you Lisa and so our final point is was very very simple one one comment but a couple of examples as well one was to use research to help define the value of where we are and I think that's been a growing area of interest with very different types of research being conducted and then trying to tie that into not not whether people are using what are their preferences and attitudes towards open but how we can help sustain and some of the some of the things you guys mentioned as examples in terms of looking at case studies and models that are being used and researching that as a is a great way forward there's one study that was fairly recent is from Uruguay on adoption models for Latin American institutions and somebody else mentioned a policy paper has a bunch of case studies and examples that also talk specifically about sustainability so these are two references that work were suggested to us but we'd be interested in hearing what you think are what specific could be the role of research in sustainability beyond what the examples that you guys already gave us in terms of identifying specific cases and how they sustain themselves and things of this sort so floors up and again I'll make a provocation and so hopefully to get us started so one of the one of the tendencies I think we have in discussions particularly I'll say global south but I'm not sure what how specific that would be but with a lot of colleagues from the global south is that we have we see an advance of research focused on cost and textbook cost and cost savings and the discussion of costs in terms of sustainability but that seems to be one aspect of it right there are other aspects of sustainability that we need to research one of them is thinking about how organizations get funded what are the possible models how do how organizations or structure themselves to use that funding our governments propose models for procurement that are sustainable how do we how do we get out of existing models and move to different models we've often talked about brazil being as an example we have 350 million dollars worth of funding spent every year on textbooks but changing the model to an open procurement model is very difficult what are the factors that come into that and other governments deal with the same things so I think there's a there's a when we're talking about cost they're just they're even in in the field of cost there are lots of things that we can think about and I think we have one question so Trudy mentioned something we put a standard clause in our tenders all copyrighted intellectual property rights and respective materials developed by the service providers during this project will vest in the department of higher education and training which will have the right to allow any individual company agency organization to use or modify these materials for any purpose approved by this department including selling the materials or releasing under an open license so I this was a she's mentioning Trudy's mentioning something I had asked earlier to just give a sense of what how the procurement was done in terms of of opening it up and this is this the response so it doesn't pertain specifically to researchers I think it's an answer to a previous question but it also feeds into the discussion of research into this as an example of some kinds of things we would find out through research um anyone have any any comments in terms of research what you would what kind of research should we be focusing on but what sort of question we should be asking kind of models we should be using I see there are some examples of some links to some research sites and those are great but I would love to know you know more specifically like Werner you're talking about the the study here for the mapping public funding for OER in America are there you know are there specific pieces of that that you think are relevant again it would be good to just roll up our sleeves a bit here while we're all together and sort of take some of that provocation from tail to say you know what are some of these questions that haven't been asked right we have seen lots of studies about the cost I've seen very few I don't know if I've even seen a study specifically around procurement and how that has changed over time I mean I hear examples and you know what we have some other you know what kind of anecdotal data on those but what are some of the questions that we really should be asking in research I think I think this is really an open an open book so to speak that is not a pun was not intended to be a pun but what are some of those questions that that you want answered in your work and if we're not thinking deeply enough about research and what kinds of questions could be answered then this might be the time to actually do that together Neil I think some people have hands up or cable in general not sure how that process is not raising their hands so okay and I can't I have to actually kick the raise hand button okay please kick the raise hand button you know I've actually got access like the whole um zoom change just so the panelists know we now have we now concede panelists and attendees and we also have chat access and we have video and and mic access just so you know so Lisa I was I was going to ask answer your questions slightly differently not with a specific research question but I think this is goes to really what tell I think was pushing us to think about as well I think one that when I've seen research done to answer important questions when oftentimes when that research is the most useful is when multiple parties have gotten together and collectively had a conversation about what what questions they need answered through research and then the research results are useful to many instead of a few and so my hope is that through the through this group through the unesco dynamic or our coalition there would be a process an opportunity for governments around the world and NGOs around the world to come together and have this exact conversation and say where where are we you know where are we getting stuck in our conversations around developing new policies or procurement for example where are we stuck in persuading officials practitioners lawyers whoever the stakeholders might be in our arguments and if we had research on X would our work in open education would it be more informed would it be would we get it unstuck and so my hope is that one of the outcomes of this process is that there's a way to have those conversations globally and while we can't research everything immediately you could imagine some kind of process or mechanism where we we could collectively say oh yes you know 60 percent of us would love to see research on X that seems to be the next most important thing to do who has the capacity to do that research how can we get that research funded etc great thank you here here are there some research questions that people would want to offer here we'd like to say in my organization you can't be wrong so anything you want to offer up hi this is Jenrin what's there again I just wanted to say that in our I suppose persuasive discussions with policymakers it might be helpful to have a list of cases of reuse of materials where oh we are have been remixed and even more popular with the the remix than maybe the original works to help convince skeptics so it'd be nice to have some research around reuse great thank you yes Vanessa has proposed another question on the Q&A which is how can we demonstrate the value of OER and practice on specific communities and I'll follow up with another question from Christian which is how can open education open science be combined and join forces for a better and sustainable society not only in COVID-19 times I think Vanessa's point I think a very shared and some other folks shared the war for a deep project with with all these case studies from different places around the world speaks to this sort of research where we can look at very situated practice in OER and not you know mac or studies of value which is a quite a different perspective as well complemented but different so it's good yeah that's a really good point till you just made me think of how so many of the early years of OER research were spent on proving its value that its value was as good as something else and in some ways I feel like maybe that's kind of hindered our creativity and really thinking about what are those questions that we that we could be asking so thank you for some of those questions specifically from Jenrin around the reuse and cable about the questions what questions could we be asking globally there are no more comments we still have one sort of section to go wait just a couple more minutes Zaneb you had also mentioned that somebody had joined the conversation late that perhaps wanted to speak to one of the earlier points was it around the reviewing and updating current provisions and procurement policies the colleagues they were about to join they were in another meeting so they will I will let you know when they come in but if they come in before we finish I'll let I'll make I'll contact you okay great so Neil could we move on to the final arch question we have so one of the final goals and so we had two basic goals one more specific which was discussed the topics and then the second one is the development of an electronic communication system to facilitate this area of action well what would we need it to have what kind of features what sort of experiences you have with other sort of systems that you use what do you expect what would you expect from an electronic communication system that could be used to facilitate the discussions we're going to have and what we're going to do around sustainability that would be our final point for discussion today and we'd like to open the floor to you know features examples suggestions things that we would like to have those are all valid points considering of course the four main areas that we discussed previously I'm going to just start by sort of um tagging on to something that Christian had asked about a research question and I'll give this I'll give I'll see I'll show how it's relevant in a moment here he he wrote how can open education and open science be combined and join forces for a better and sustainable society so I wrote that yes I think that a lot of the various open sort of open science open data open research open education they have been working in silos and so part of this question is what is it that you know how could basically virtual communication systems help us begin to have these conversations I think we've seen this I mean while I think the field of open education certainly has stood on the shoulders of open source and open data and open publishing it's I think now is the time and I think COVID is while you said Christian not just in COVID times but that is certainly the impetus because I think it has enabled us so allowed us to say we have to be looking across all of these areas to really serve the need of learners globally so so that's one thing that I would say is how do we begin to not only just I think we want to actually talk about examples of communication systems that folks are using that are working in this kind of collaborative action-focused way but so one of my provocations then is really specifically you know how do we work those in open and what does that look like because there's just an open education alone you know I must belong to at least 12 or 14 listservs you know how do we begin and most of those are English listservs and so they're very English country speaking based and I'm sure there are many others as well I'm going to just make another comment and say that often a room like this with you know 40 people in it it's not the same as having a breakout room and having stickies or a whiteboard where we can be drawing diagrams together and and moving you know moving pieces of paper around on a board to try to make a point or make a framework together as we are needing to do this in a virtual environment would love to hear some practices that are working for you or some suggestions of what you think this community could be doing to really accelerate that sort of communication and collaboration. Can I hit cable? Thanks Neil. So Lisa I the broad response I would give them I think this my comments are for all of the working groups I think that communication systems would probably all use them anyway and the basics would go a long way here so for example I think it would be helpful to have a listserv for each one of the working groups that interested governments and people around the world who want to work on these areas could join it'd be helpful to have a shared document space Google docs or Dropbox or you know it doesn't matter what the tool is but a space where docs could be shared I think it would be helpful to have some kind of live chat tool Slack or whatever doesn't really matter where people can share resources in real time and step into those spaces when they do have time and get notifications if they want to just those and then some kind of you know ongoing master document where people who are new to the conversation could come and get caught up on what and then I think around that what's going to be in order to maximize the opportunity there to encourage people to come in and participate each one of the working groups might have in a future phase a facilitator or multiple facilitators that could help organize this make sure it gets in the UNESCO database of resource sharing encourage others to join that may not be part of the group yet etc and that through that through that kind of open sharing infrastructure we could encourage a whole lot of people to join in the areas in the working groups in which they have interest in and expertise thank you thank you just quickly uh I'd like to pass on the word to Zaynep who was asking for the floor hi I would like to just talk a little bit on the focus on this area because our now from the discussion it's clear that there are two there are many facets of this discussion first of all there's a question of communicating between the members that are working in the dynamic coalition the question of communication with the outside those are not working on the on the uh on the uh or dynamic commission coalition uh activities but want to know what is being done external communication there's communication that's done one one there's one on many and then there's also a collaboration space that has to be done and we have to also be able to uh I also they have to also be able to um they quickly we'd be talking about some sort of site or something we can share information to the outside and collaborate within the inside on activities and so another space where one-to-one communication can be between the members of the community and at the same time another space that can be kind of like a more useful for uh or targeted resources that can be between the different colleagues for example we are talking now about different models for procurement that would be these would be documents could be shared internally and externally so there are many different dimensions to this tool and I think the one that Cable was speaking about with the one that's really uh asks that deal with one-to-one discussion and also I think we have to think about another point and as I think we can't forget about data security a lot of people want to be involved but not everybody wants everybody to know everything about what they're doing all the time so we have to be clear on how we protect the identity issues of the different colleagues to the point that they wanted to protect it and to the point that they want to share so they're it's another area where I would like to know how you see things working and with terms of the data protection I thought it's a point that will have to be somehow meted out a little bit because we talk about data protection for OER in a text of the recommendation and because here we should have data protection in the electronic tool that we're doing while maintaining a sense openness and ensuring that we're giving voice to everyone a platform which is accessible tool and of course I have to say it have to also look at issues of accessibility for instance with the well all the issues we're looking at with OER we have to look at for the platform I'm not talking to make things impossible or difficult but I think that we do have to be coherent so if we can think of this from the binning it'll be easier to plan forward to which we'll be able to take in place these these areas also there's a multilingual aspect we will have to do it whatever we do it has to be at least in English and French and it had to be able to accommodate eventually other languages so I'll lead to that I'll add to that because I think it's been discussion in one one very interesting example of of openness and platforms has been OERU and their radical approach to openness is an interesting example compared to say when we have listservs which are useful but but not appropriate for the kinds of things we want to do here exclusively so looking at trying to be open first would be or you know at least allow people to comment and and join in the discussion whenever it's it's appropriate and to only close when it's absolutely necessary I think give us some interesting possibilities and examples of when it might be necessary to close but trying to do something very open and also I'll add because this has been contentious issues it's using open source software and opening up the platform would be I think a very important example so they can be replicated in other clear cases and used by other people would also be a symbolism of what the recommendation talks about as well anybody else have comments or experiences or examples that we could look at things that you have done or other platforms you use I think we're about to hit our two a program about people around about two hours I think we're still at a little bit more time if there are any comments but if not we can have some closing remarks too which would be another couple of minutes if I could just a point yes this point I think it would be good if we were to we're going to be speaking about this point on the electronic communication system in each of the four sessions so I think we could perhaps foresee sort of a discussion with a snowball effect you like and develop it further as go along and see where we're at when we get to Friday but I think even though this is the beginning of the decision on this and it is how we realize is that it's complicated it is it is probably a good start I just want to add one thing again maybe this people might have a thought on this which is even if we don't think specifically about the tools like Slack or Zoom what are the the means of virtual collaboration that you would like to be involved in specifically that work for you is it's is it being able to have conversations in text is it having for example we could have done this this workshop today we could have broken into smaller groups where we were in groups of three or four and is it easier to have that kind of conversation in that environment so we'd love to hear any even just feedback in the spirit of continuous improvement you know how do we improve the way that we as a group can really be collaborating and making progress right this is really what we want to see here is how do we make progress and be able to encourage action on behalf of the member states so I think I'll pass on the word design so she can provide us with some final comments in the next steps okay thank you thank you very much Tal and Lisa thank you to all the participants and all the panelists for your inputs it's been a very intense day it's the first day of our discussions I think we're still ironing out some of the technical points but what is clear is that there is a lot of work and a lot of issues here and it's a very it's very good that we're able to have this forum to to be able to hash it out together we will be making this this session available online we'll send you more information the recording of the session that is and we will ask for those who are not able to participate because of time issues or other to um to send their comments and in terms of the list of participants we will share it with you after the discussion there has been some confusion about about exactly how to get to you but we will get it to you very shortly we've had over the course of the discussion we've had 41 42 people involved and we've noted the different points and this is the beginning of our discussions so thank you very much for joining us and I leave it to you Lisa would you like to say anything uh no I think I think you've done the conclusion in the summary here so thank you well would you like to say anything well thank you all for participating I think it's the beginning of uh we're in the middle but sort of the beginning of this of this conversation specifically on sustainability and it'd be great to have you all collaborate with us and together move this forward so and thank you Lisa and Neil for facilitating thank you and thanks and we will we hope that you can join us next for the next one which is at 10 o'clock CET tomorrow and it's on on inclusive quality OER and it'll be moderated by Molina Bandeleria from the Philippines and Papa Yuga Dieng from uh from um from OERF the Organization Internation de la Francophonie and we will uh we look forward to continuous discussion and we'll wish you a nice evening or morning wherever you are okay Neil Kitt