 My name is Willem van Valkenburg. I'm the director of the TU Delft Extension School, and today we have a great speaker here, and that's my colleague, Bea. And the TU Delft Extension School has been doing open education over courseware since over 10 years, 15 years now, I think. And it's still a challenge to get all teachers interested in open education. And a couple of years ago, Bea came up with a very simple concept, and that's what she's gonna present. Sometimes the most simple ideas are the best, and I think Bea will lead us through what you've done and what the result is we have had. So the floor is yours. Thank you, Willem. Okay, let's go bananas. Just before we start, the QR code, if you're interested, will bring you directly to We Like Sharing, which is a photo bank we are talking about in this case. If not, if your QR code does not work, one of the slides contains the link to the repository, and I've also added this presentation to the schedule. So if you want to download the slides and have a look at the photographs, they're all there. Okay, so let's go bananas in this. There you go, it all starts with a banana. And this was, so I was very lucky in 2018, I was in Vices to give a talk in Medellin in Colombia. And the hosts were lovely, lovely, lovely people, and they brought me to this place called Guatapé. And in Guatapé, I took these photographs. So I'm not a photographer, I just go around with my phone like probably all of you, but the place was so beautiful that I just love these bananas. And I said, okay, I'm gonna snap these bananas. And at the time I was into sharing my photographs on Flickr purely because I was doing a lot of traveling and it was a way for me to keep record of what it is where I had been and also show my family. So I put the bananas photograph in my Flickr account. And I never thought about it anyway. Like next in months later, I saw my bananas in a website for a radio station advertising a program, a radio program on some kind of a plague that some crops were suffering in, I don't know, where in South America, right? So I just went like, wow, my simple bananas, a photograph that I took when I was in Guatapé and I shared it and this is the story of my bananas. So my bananas became like super, super important, right? Having a purpose that I never actually thought of. Okay, so fast forward a couple of years, this is we're in the middle of the pandemic. And then I had this idea of saying, okay, why don't we open a Flickr account? And initially it was to share all the photographs that we use in some of our courses. So we normally work with teachers to produce massive open online courses and by default our courses are shared on open courseware. So we run them once on Enix and after they run once we move the content over to OCW. But the idea of opening a photo bank and inviting everybody at the university to share a photograph was for me a very, very simple way of talking to people about doing open and what open was about. Sometimes when you say to, I'm working with different course teams and I'm telling them your course is gonna be shared on open course where they just go like, okay, without really thinking what that means exactly. So the idea that I can actually ask them to share a photograph makes it much more concrete because I can say to you, look, this is what happened to my bananas. Think about what could happen to your, okay, it's not always about bananas, but you get the gist, see? So it's a very easy way for me to kind of start that conversation as in, you know, what do you need to do when you want to share something? What are the implications of sharing? What are the implications of actually letting others reuse your work, yeah? So the photo bank started, yeah, it was February of 2021, so nearly in three years, excuse me, in three years now at the moment, we've got just over 1,000 photographs in there that's as roughly around 150 people have contributed. When I say authors, I didn't want, I didn't know whether I should call them photographers or people or what, these are staff of the university, so support staff or teaching staff, but also the students, also alumni, and also friends and families. So when it comes to sharing, it doesn't matter who you are, you know, everyone is very welcome to share a photograph. It was very important for me to use the repository as a way to talk about creative commons, so the only condition to submit a photo or deposit a photo in the photo bank is that each of the authors, each of the people who took the photograph, they need to choose the creative commons license of their choice, right? So they need to know that they will retain the copyright of the photograph, so it's not the university, but they need to choose what rights they're gonna give to others who want to reuse their photograph. Apart from that, it was very important for me to teach people not only about creative commons licenses, but also about the fact that you just can't, and I know in this day and age, you might think it is amazing, I mean, amazing in a bad way, in the sense that we're still seeing a lot of our teachers just grabbing an image from anywhere and just put, I wanna put this in my course without correct attribution. So the idea for me was also to say, I want you to understand what happens when you want other people to reuse your photograph, but I want you to also understand what it is that you need to do in order to reuse somebody's photograph. So you will see how, if you go into the repository for each entry, I always have a little text that shows to people, it's a suggestion I've seen, if you want to use this photograph, this is the correct attribution. So the idea is to make it as easy as possible for people to actually, you know, it's a copy and paste, you don't need to think about it, right? All those images are tagged, so I want people to be able to find them because that's what you need, so you can't use something if you haven't found it in the first place, right? So all those photographs are tagged and I also want people to give me a description, a very objective description of what can be seen in the photograph because then that helps me with the conversation, especially for us when we're working with online materials, that when you have a visual in there, this for decorative purpose does not cause it and people need to understand that for accessibility purposes, you need to describe what it is that the photograph says. So you will see how for each of those photographs, there is a little short description that people again can do a copy and paste if they want and use that as the alt description. Yeah? So far so good. So one of the most difficult things and I'm telling you, I've been, we've been doing this now for nearly three years but one of the super very difficult, most challenging things is to actually keep that flow of photographs coming into the repository. It's my idea that, so we are a big university, we have a lot of students, we have a lot of staff, if each of them just gave me one photograph, I'll be a very photoreach woman, right? But no, it's actually quite, quite difficult to convince people to share one photograph and despite the fact that we all go around with photographs in our phones, right? But it's the kind of this thing that's saying, but sharing it is a bit different, right? So I've tried multiple approaches when it comes to actually asking people to share. The one that works the best is just personal pestering. So you just go to somebody, oh, you went on the holidays, show me your photographs. Oh yeah, whoa, would you mind sharing this one? This is really cool. So that works very well. But it's actually very tiring, okay? So what I've tried to do is just put the photo bank in as many places as possible. I've tried embedding it and embedding that invitation for people to actually share a photograph anywhere and everywhere where people are actually working with photographs. So one of my MOOCs, for example, is from the Faculty of Architecture and it's about facades. And where we ask students at the beginning of the course is very much just go out and take a photograph of a facade because then that building, that facade is what they're gonna be using during the course in order to assess different elements as the weeks go by. So I said, wow, these guys are already gonna create all these photographs, so hey, there's the invitation. You know, you've taken the photograph, it's a facade, it's nothing dangerous. Would you like to share it publicly? No. So it's actually very, very, very difficult. The thing that has worked really well has been the open photo competition. So the open photo competition, we run it every year to coincide with Open Education Week. And it's the moment when we say to people, send a photograph to participate in this competition. You need to send us a photograph that represents what open means to you. So there's the Open Education Week connection. And again, it's the same thing, choose a license to give permission for others to reuse your photograph. Even if the competition is actually an award, it's a prize. The price is only 20 euro, right? And it's not, I'm never gonna give them the 20 euro, there you go, there's a 20 euro note. No, the prices are related, they go back to kind of support the community. So it's a voucher to spend your 20 euro in Ernest cookies, for example, right? But that helps a lot. And it helps a lot is the time of the year when we see that's not only the number of participation, the number of photographs, the number of submissions to the competition keeps growing, but it's the time of the year when people visit the repository and they know that those photographs are there and then they hopefully reuse them, yeah? So this is in a nutshell what the context is about. So now we go back to the, that was the connection with the bananas actually. So in order to get people to submit a photograph, I said to them, this is what happened to my bananas. Let your photographs have a life of their own and it worked really well. But what I wanted to talk to you today as well is, and it's partly what it says on the abstract of this presentation. So now the extension of school, we have been tasked with leading the life long learning strategy of the Hollow University. That is still kind of in process. We're still thinking about it, I think why exactly that looks like, but it kind of got me thinking because we do have an open courseware. So I envision that the open courseware is gonna get much more important because life long learning is so much more about sharing. So the idea that if you're working with this repository, what I ask people to share one little something, so one little photograph, that has got me thinking, it's like a little pilot of what happens when you ask somebody to share a whole course, for example, right? So this is all my reflections and then this is all kind of the personal, the person, yeah, my personal reflections. So one of the most important things I think we, that needs to happen is that we need to, we need to have a vision, but I'm not talking about a vision in philosophical terms, sorry Beck. So I don't mean an abstract, I mean having a vision as in you need to have a very clear idea in your head or what does this look like as the output? What's the final thing, right? Because if you have a very clear idea of what happens at the end, then is when you can decide, this is what I can do, this is what I cannot do, this is what I need to ask help for and this is what somebody else needs to provide for me. So in submitting a photograph for the repository, I'm the creator, I'm the filter, but I still need to have the process in place for people to give me the information that I don't have. So I cannot choose, well I can, but I don't want to choose a creative commons license for these people who share the photograph, they have to choose their own license, right? I can add the tags and I can, but in terms of kind of giving a title to the photograph, for example, that's something that should come from them. So if you imagine if you translate that into a bigger course, the message is that if you have a very clear of what the end point looks like, that is gonna help you put the steps in place, asking what needs to happen at the very beginning. How are we doing time wise, ooh. And I put the questions here, sorry. I love people to ask questions in the sense that it is by listening to those questions and trying to answer those questions that you will realize what it is that you have missed, what is not clear, what it is that you need to do. So, and that's happened a lot of the time. I have people coming to me with a photograph saying, can I share this photograph, right? And then, for example, in the Netherlands, we've got portrait reacht, so you can't, if there is a person in the photograph, the person has a right to say, no, I don't want my photography publicly available, right? So people will come to you, this is my photograph, can I share it? So then you're gonna have to say, yes, no, why? So that's only kind of a little example of what happens, what could happen in kind of the much larger scale. In connection with the questions, you need to, especially as an open educator, or open educators, or people interested, or committed to open education, one of the things that I find myself trying to decide is, and I was gonna write the word lazy, and I actually then deleted it because it's not about being lazy, it's not about being chilled out, like this cat. Some people don't really want to think with you. We, at the extension of school for our MOOCs by default, we use Creative Commons attribution non-commercial share alike. So that means that most of my colleagues would not even think about what permissions they want to give to their photographs. They just say, I just used the default, I don't, you know. And I don't want them to do that. I want them to go through the process of thinking why they are sharing what they are sharing, what do they want others to do with that photograph. So it has to be kind of a compromise between saying, it's how much do you care as an open educator? So is it enough that your colleagues tell you, well, I'm sharing a photograph, you choose a license for me, or we just go by the default. So if you take that as, okay, this is fine because they're being open, they're sharing something, so I should be happy about this, right? But the compromise is, no, I don't want that. Okay, yes, I want that to happen, but what I want really you to do is just to think what are the implications of choosing this license or choosing the other license. So that is a compromise that for the person who is on this side, so me as a curator, that is actually quite some, it depends how you feel in the morning, but sometimes it does not make me happy completely, yeah? We talked about the idea of reward. There's always this idea that G&E, I think it was mentioned before in the conference. We don't do things, okay, open education is free, but we need to compensate people somehow. They open for a competition, there is a reward, but there's a reward there for the three, four winners every year. Everybody else gets the satisfaction of seeing their photograph on the repository. And I say it, not in a sarcastic way, but I think the biggest reward that I can give people is to be able to go back to them and say this is what happened to your photograph. So it's this idea, the reward in a way is the information. So I'm not, I wish I could give 20 euros to every single person that submitted a photograph, but that's not very sustainable, right? But I can keep an eye and track what it is that happened to this photograph, who is reusing it and how they are reusing it. And that is what, in my opinion, serves as some kind of a reward. So it's not something that you did something and then you forget about it, but that they trace back and you know what's the story. We've got one of our photographs that has been recently picked up by the algorithm in Flickr and it's received thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of views in one day. And when I told the lovely woman who took the photograph, she was just totally like, wow. And she told her, all her friends and all her family and then she went into the Flickr account and you can see all these messages from complete strangers going, oh, your photograph is fantastic, right? So she was totally chuffed. So think of a reward. Think of the reward and think of information as a reward rather than a monetary reward. Do not reinvent the wheel. This is something at the very beginning people were saying to me, but why did you, why Flickr, right? And I said, well, Flickr, what I was looking for, I was looking for a community that was a community, a photography community. That's what it is. So why would I go looking for another place when I have the community there and I have the interest there and I have the appreciation there. So I'm just kind of joining the club. It allows you also to kind of make the connections, use a positive photograph in Flickr and immediately, not immediately, but the doors open in terms of joining other groups and other people see your photograph and they say, oh, actually, your photograph is really cool. Can I please add your photograph to my album? And so then again, that helps, you know, that the more people see that photograph, the more people see that photograph, the bigger the chance that somebody's going to reuse your photograph, which is what I want. Time? Okay. What I was just saying, it helps with the connection. So you do not do things on your own ever. The more you connect, the better things happen, I think. And it is what it is. So you're joining a group that has a common interest and it helps also this idea of community that has been also mentioned in this conference and in this last couple of days. We create a resource and that's easy enough to create the resource, right? The photo bank is an open resource, but you need to kind of have the community around the resource. It's the people who actually keep the repository alive, either by depositing more photographs or by creating the connections around this. And that is something that I haven't been able to, grasp completely, but it's on my to-do list as in how do I manage to keep a community, not necessarily engaged because that's a bit, I'm a bit too early for doing all that kind of stuff, but at least that you keep that community connected. So it's not only me and my photograph that I just put this here, but through that photograph you get connected to people with very similar interests. Ooh, resilience, it takes time. It takes time, it takes energy, it takes patience. There'll be days when you think, what am I gonna, I mean, why am I doing this, right? I started, this is a hobby really. Now probably most of my colleagues think I'm bananas and they see me and say, oh no, here she comes again. But it's worth every single, yeah, it's worth every, it's the, my heart skips a beat every time somebody sends me a photograph and I see the photographs and I say, wow, some of them are beautiful, some of them are maybe not so beautiful, but they're all, they're all, thank you, they're all, you know, for somebody to, they're all usable, which is the most beautiful thing. We have one of the photographs that has been reused multiple times is a measuring tape. So somebody just got a measuring tape and it's a bit of a bundle of a measuring tape on a table and then she snapped us and she shared that photograph. Well, that photograph has been reused, I don't know how many times with this idea how do you measure impact? There you go, see, we've got photographs, oh my God, COVID was fabulous for that. So I snapped the, when I went to have my vaccination, there's a sign, vaccination point, I took a photograph of that, shared it in the repository, next time my photograph is in the national news, right? So, that's pretty cool. So every time, so you go for the small victories always, without those small victories, you know, it's just never gonna happen. So you might as well enjoy the moment. And of course, if you're not having fun, it's not, it's really not worth it, really, really not worth it. If you're not enjoying what you're doing, then you might as well just don't do it. And there you go, that's me. So I'm gonna leave it early, but if you have any questions, I'll be very happy, yes. How, say that again? Oh, how could you add a picture? I will add a link to the schedule. Normally what I have is, so I've created a Google form, and in that Google form, I explain briefly what the photo bank is about, and then there are some fields that you need to fill in. So you need to give me the title of the photograph. You need to suggest tags. If you don't suggest tags, then I'll use my own tags, the ones that I think are, and then you need to choose a license. So that's normally how it works. So you just need obviously the link to that form, but it's a good idea. Actually, I didn't think about it, but I will add it to the schedule, to the program. It is also possible just to email me the photograph directly, but then I will still ask you to give me the license and all that, and then, yeah, we'll kind of enter a bit of a conversation. But yeah, no, thank you, that's nice, thanks. Yes. Oh, sorry. Yeah, sorry for the livestream people, that question was to do with, how did you add a picture? And my hearing is very bad, so it took me three times, but yeah. Well, also then the people online got to hear what it was. My question is, you mentioned that you compensated some of the winners, or what did the winners get of the competition? The winners of the competition, so every year the competition, it's funded by the extension of school, and what we get is 100 euro. So I break that in, so the first year we have five awards of 20 euro each, and those awards get allocated by an international jury. So that international jury, so it's Alan, for example, Alan Levine is always one of the members of the jury, Willem is the other member, and what we did this year is we, we instead of having five awards of 20 euros, we decided to go for four awards of 25 euro, three of them would be chosen by the international jury, which is again like a different jury every year, don't get me wrong. But then this year I decided to go for the people's choice, so that anyone and everyone could actually vote for their favorite, which was an excellent idea because then everybody, even if they had not submitted a photograph, everybody came in to look at those photographs and to vote. But going back to your question, those 20 euros or 25 euros, it's never a 25 euro note, so what I say to them is I give them the choice if this year they could spend their, because I'm always interested in giving back to the community. So the first year because I did it very, very quickly, it was an Amazon voucher, and then I said, no, this is, we can't be doing this. So this year what we did is they could choose whether they wanted to go to spend their money in one of the local cafes in Delft or there's a colleague who started a business and she sells cookies. You could, I can't remember what the other ones, but anyway, it's just kind of always kind of local businesses, if I can. So in gift card form, because that was easy. Yes, exactly. And just to summarize or follow up, for being a little jet like, so if you already said this, I might have just like zoned out for a minute. It's like once per year you kind of have a push for people to contribute content for this competition. At the moment, yes. So the bigger push every year so far has been this competition. I would like to possibly do another competition, maybe only for the students on campus, closer to, for example, well at the beginning of the academic year. But I've got all these ploys to get people to still go and look at the repository and the positive work graph. So last year we celebrated the 180th birthday of the university. So I said to my colleagues, come on, we can probably make it to 180. So I said whoever sends the 180th photograph will get an award. I didn't, at the time I just thought about I did not know what the award was. So that kept them busy because they kept me sending photographs and I kept uploading them slowly and giving them a number. So they were counting up 135, up 136. They kept sending the photograph without knowing who was gonna be 180th. So then I stopped at 179 and I went on holidays. So they kept, so when I came back from holidays I had all, so I had many more than the 180. But I need to, this is when you really need to be creative in order to keep reminding people that the repository, I got, so there's, I'm not so worried about the reuse side of things because this is Flickr, things happen in Flickr anyway. And I'd say at this stage 90% of our traffic comes from Flickr. And I know those photographs have been reused. But the real difficult part is there needs to be new stuff in there every, not every day but every week, every couple of weeks. So I'm very strategic about when I upload a photograph I don't upload them all in one go just to keep people in the, cooked in a way. Thank you. You're welcome. Okay, that's it, they are telling me that's it. Thank you guys. Thank you.