 who are going to be speaking about the OE Policy Registry and Open Bench Learning Tool. Let me just get your slides. Oh, no, you've already done it. Awesome, thank you. So if we do a quick sound check, Leo, have we got you there? Hi there, can you hear me? Loud and clear, hopefully. Brilliant. Give us some... And here's Yann. Yann here. Hello everyone. Hi. Great. Brilliant. In that case, with no further ado, I will hand over to you guys for your session, many times. Thanks very much. So, hi everyone. It's wonderful to have so many people joining us for this sometimes regarded as dry topic of open education policy. And I hope that you're going to find it quite interesting. I thought we could just quickly introduce ourselves. So I'm Leo Harvman. I am a PhD student at the Open University. And this is very much in my kind of research space. I'm also a digital education advisor at UCL, which is why I was very interested in Kate's presentation, where she was talking about her use of the ABC learning design, which my colleagues were the kind of original developers of. And Yann and Javier, maybe you guys would like to introduce yourselves. Yes, my name is Yann Neumann and I'm working for HPZ with the North Rhine-Rosphelia Library Service Centre. We provide digital services for the higher education libraries in North Rhine-Rosphelia, which is the biggest data in Germany. And I'm also the project manager of the OER World Med project, which I will shortly introduce within a second, Javier. And I'm Javier Atenas and I co-coordinate the Open Education Working Group for Open Knowledge and I'm an associate researcher at the University of Barcelona. Okay, so thanks guys. So we'll move on if I can move it on. Let me just... yes, good. And Yann, you were going to do a quick intro to the OER World Map. Yes, the OER World Map is actually a project which has been around for some while. So it started back in 2015 and it is being developed by... with the generous help of the William and Flora Eulet Foundation and we are cooperating with a small development firm in Berlin which is called Graph Thinking and Fedex Ostrovsky. And we also cooperated for several years with the Open University especially with Rob Farrow and it was a pleasure to work with him. I'm not sure if he's here today. Anyway, so the aims of the World Map are to collect data about the OER ecosystem, about actors and activities. So it's about persons and organizations, about services, projects, events, all this stuff and it's a common misunderstanding that the OER World Map collects OER itself. So that's not the primary aim. You can add resources to it as well but it's not a search engine which primarily aims at collecting and spreading OER itself but it looks at the infrastructure before it. And it's a crazy, huge scope within the project because it mainly aims at collecting data from all levels, all sectors from all over the world and for sure this scope was too big and we learned two things out of the project so far. The first one is that it's very hard to develop a system if you have such a huge user group and the second thing is that if you collect data it's very hard to expect that people will contribute it by themselves. So there are people who are doing this but if you want to provide a comprehensive collection you need paid editors and these two lessons learned are being addressed in the OER Policy Registry Project which started some while ago. It goes back to an original project from Creative Commons and we agreed with Creative Commons to take over the OER Policy Registry to the OER World Map and one of the advantages is that you can connect policies there to all the other data which is already available We hired a paid data editor, Santiago Martin from UCL I'm not sure if he's here today. Anyway, great to work with him and we are currently working on relaunching it and we are pretty much advanced so I hope that we can provide a relaunched an improved version of the registry within the next weeks and we hope to finalize it for OER 20 but unfortunately we are a little bit delayed but there is already something available I can post the link to the chat in a second. Yes, maybe that's enough for the OER World Map and the OER Policy Registry. Theo, do you want to continue? Yes, thank you. One of the great things about having a policy registry starting to collect and collate these policy documents is as a way for organizations and activists and OER enthusiasts to really be able to get a sense of what's going on around them, what's similar and not so similar organizations are doing in terms of policy and so the idea of bench learning it relates to benchmarking but it's going a bit deeper that you're able to learn and share and this is very much in the spirit of the open education community actually there's an element of being able to see what others have done and remix it so Denise, I just seen Denise saying hi in the chat there thanks for joining us and so that's what we are talking about when we say bench learning so bench learning, that's one concept that you may not be familiar with but of course we all know what we mean by policy except do we really? I think that this is quite an interesting question especially as somebody moving into sort of trying to research the policy space when that's never really been my sort of focus before I've been learning about how complicated it is to actually define what it means and so here is one description of what policy is that I found quite useful this is a more generic high level one which as a policy can generally be thought of as a statement of intent that describes a problem and broadly outlines how the problem will be addressed but you know these authors say there's no single agreed definition so policy could refer to a proposal, outcome formula or informal decision bundle of legislation or positions implicitly taken so I think that's quite salient here and then looking at some things that authors have written about open education policies more specifically this is also interesting because from an education course briefing on seven things you should know about open education policy they said open education policies are formal regulations regarding support funding adoption and use of open educational resources and or open educational practices such policies are designed to support the creation adoption and sharing of OER and the design and integration of the inter-programs of study so that's one pretty clearly expressed view there and then we also have from Coolidge and Allen OER policies are laws, rules and courses of action that facilitate the creation use or improvement of openly licensed content so I think that what's quite interesting here is these definitions are a bit different and they both have their own strengths because I like in the education course definition that they're talking about how policy may be addressing OEP as well as OER specifically although the Coolidge and Allen definition is more specifically focused on the openly licensed content I think what's really interesting there is that they highlight that it is not only laws or rules but also courses of action so in other words this could be just simply the way that we do things can also be understood as policy even though it may not be written down in a place that somebody can read it and so another angle on the question of policy is sort of what type of policy, the nature of the policy and also what kind of level it's at and a really useful tip for which I must thank Igor Lesko was that these authors talked about policy as being a carrot stick or sermon so in other words a carrot policy is one where you are encouraged to do something you can gain something by doing it a stick policy is more of a regulation you must comply with this policy and a sermon is really more of a call to action it's more of a like hey this is something that we should all believe in and please come along with us on this journey of doing this thing and so these are all different sort of policies of a different nature and then also at the different levels when we're thinking about education policy super national level so in other words talking about kind of the UNESCO declaration and declarations and the recent recommendation as a super national example national level policies and then institutional level policies are all kind of trying to impact they're trying to impact the same kind of activity but they're trying to do it very much at different levels and you know from the sort of macro to the much more micro and a super national level is much more like calling on states to enable action to happen so that's much more of a sermon approach to policy in a way institutional level might be carrot or stick or might be sermon and the institutional level is particularly looking in my research so I think that's really interesting but in any case bearing in mind the previous definitions that I was referring to I think it's also important that we recognize that policy can be a continuous process rather than something that's frozen or captured into a product like a written policy document now that's tricky because the evidence of policies that we have tend to be those things which are captured into a document so which I was the policy traces such as we might find through the policy registry Hi Leo, just for Jane here quickly, sorry to interrupt I just want to know that you've moved into the last five minutes if you'd like to talk about content and questions Great Right, so as we know super national policy interventions have highlighted benefits and calling for increased engagement by states we've got some national level initiatives and we've got institutions where we might have staff that are engaging in different kinds of practices but we may or may not have policies going on in those institutions and Jan did you want to say a quick word about the consequences for the registry if you can in any case I think I'll just speed through that bit so this means that what we need to collect for the registry is not absolutely completely clear so at the moment we've been calling for people to provide us with policy documents but we're thinking about broadening that scope to tell us about your related activities in order to really broaden our understanding of what's going on in terms of those aspects of policy that may not be written down as some kind of document and so looking at the what we've actually currently got in the registry we have quite a lot of strategy documents so that's interesting it's more of a strategy level focus than actual policy and on a more granular level of what you are necessarily enabled to or can and can't do or things like that it might be more of a like institutions intending to engage with this or promote this and also we've got some policy documents and legislation and calls for tenders or in other words where funding is being made available and people are asked to bid for that funding at the policy level we've got quite a lot of national policies currently not as many institutional policies as we would like and a few other levels like sort of multi-institutional multi-national and a lot of state local policies policy scope is an interesting one so we've been trying to look at the differences between the aspects that the different policies focus on or kind of the angle that they're coming from some are dedicated open education or OER policies but also we have quite a lot of educational policies with an open education component and then other kinds of policies that again have some open education component but where it's not primarily about open education and again there's the focus of the policy what space is particularly trying to act upon we can see that content is the way in the lead and providing access also is very high in this graphic so again some other areas like capacity building and pedagogy, awareness raising we would hope to see or we would like to see maybe more focus being placed on those areas as time goes on we've put some links in the slides about activities that we did around open education policy for OER week and it would be of interest to some of you to follow up those links I'm not going to talk about them and we also have some next steps in terms of what we're doing with the registry about trying to engage people increase the data sets work on our bench learning to foster this learning amongst members of our community about the policy development and conducting research based on the findings all of these stuff that we're collecting again there's a link there that goes into detail about the relaunching of the work that we've been doing on the policy registry and we will share these slides so that you can follow up these links yeah so thank you, thank you Leo it's been great so you actually summarized months of work in a few minutes just to quickly round up and good job we are happy to keep this conversation going on with you the idea of bench learning is also that we can help institutions and countries to build up the policy we have workshops and we have materials that can support you guys doing that and if you want I'm just going to post a link on the chat we have two ways to ask you to contribute with your own policies or also if you're just on the idea of starting a policy or you're drafting one you can deposit it you can do it by logging and registering in the policy registry or you just can fill a form that we can share with you now you guys but please talk to us if you're looking for good examples or for best practices just let us know we can sit with you and help you to find what you're looking for and yeah, that's from us Brilliant well thank you all for another fantastic session talk to us if everyone would like to share can we really become a very warm round of applause then we will hand over