 Good afternoon, my name is Xenia Sheyman and my pronouns are she, her today I will be sharing with you my team's experience of developing open educational resource repository for the Canadian public sector with an inclusive lens. I would like to take a moment and reflect on the connection between land acknowledgement and open educational resources. As an immigrant and a settler, I'm grateful for the gift of presenting to you today from density to territories of Squamish, Musqueam, and slave or tooth people. The land now known as the city of Vancouver located in British Columbia Canada. Reflecting on this gift of living and learning on this land. I'm reminded of the words of Dr Robin Wall Kimmerer, the writer Brady sweet grass. She said gifts are not free with a gift comes a responsibility of reciprocity. In the context of land. It is a reminder to give back and to beat stewards. Similarly in the context of open educational resources, we also inherit them as both gifts and responsibility to keep sharing our own gifts for the benefit of others with inclusion and care in mind. And with sharing the gift of knowledge comes a responsibility of equity. That goes what Dr Rebecca Cara recently said about OER is roles in advancing equity, and they said doing OER with an equity lens is doing OER well, and I can't agree more. On this note, let's get into this presentation and see how might we integrate lenses of openness accessibility and inclusion into open educational resources platforms. This presentation will cover sharing context in the government of Canada decisions that went to into design of the open educational resource platform, framing of the collection development approaches, as well as marketing strategies that we used to raise awareness about open educational resources. I will also cover strategies used to engage with enabling to enable stakeholders and content contributors. In this section is covering different aspects of open educational repository, I will begin with a set of questions that we asked, and that helped us frame our decisions and actions from an inclusive and accessible lenses. My hope is that these questions can serve as a pathway for those who wish to apply some of these practices and to improve design of their own OER platforms. Let's begin by talking about the current sharing context in the government of Canada. Next year I have been diligently social listening and collecting stories that capture why and how people across federal government are sharing. I've just started into four main reasons so let's go through them in a bit more detail. Across all government sectors people are looking to develop relevant training to meet urgent and often emergent needs. These are topics that come to mind include agile project management, business intelligence, virtual meeting guides, mental health user research and change management. Meet these needs, time and money are of essence. And while the desire to reduce design costs may seem obvious, especially given that it takes approximately 142 hours or two months to design and develop a course in one language. This is a challenge for the government of Canada when it comes to the cost of translation, since experiences have to be offered in both official languages. While learning should be available to everyone, equitable access is not a guarantee. Canadian government has made up of organizations of all sizes, some are over 40,000 employees and they might have an entire branch dedicated to training and learning, and then other organizations under 20 people. So they simply have no professionals who could develop training from scratch. And of course this brings us to pockets of expertise. And I would say that there is a sense of awakening to the fact that the public service being made up of over 300,000 employees with a variety of expertise is really a place for harnessing knowledge and what better way to leverage this knowledge than to share resources. And surprisingly, sharing is everywhere and it has become spread across many channels it happens on Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn via email and government sharing platforms like GC collab and GC connects, Google Drive, Dex, direct messages, you name it. With over 300,000 public service employees at the federal level alone, there has long been a need for a more centralized way to share knowledge. In response to this demand for sharing GC share platform emerged and it was developed in collaboration with the campus Ontario, and was positioned as the content sharing and discovery platform for open educational resources initiated by the Government of Canada. Part of our vision for the platform was that anyone could share quality content and that sharing was for everyone. We wanted to invite a diversity of voices to contribute resources, not just those in official training and learning roles. We wanted to include practitioners and subject matter experts, whether it was a learning canvas a career tool or a wellness resource. All were welcome. But we also quickly learned that unfortunately sharing was not for everyone. We heard six main types of concerns related to sharing. People were worried that their content wasn't finished or perfect. They feared how others might use it. They wondered if they could take it down later. Some weren't so sure their resources were good enough as they weren't professional instructional designers. Many were unaware that they're learning products post accessibility barriers. For example, tables with split cells images without alternative text missing headings in flexible document formats to name just a few issues. On top of that copyright is an area that was very low awareness and government making it difficult to trace back what was used in any learning product and not surprisingly licensing and open licenses specifically were also not well understood. It is important to acknowledge that barriers to sharing do exist and accessibility and inclusion play a key role in creating a comfortable space where anyone can contribute. And also where people see the differences are valued and supported. Let's talk about design of the platform. Design includes many elements in this presentation I will touch on research artifacts that guide design graphics text metadata and functionality. Any good design process begins with asking questions. And this process was no different. Here are some questions we asked ourselves. Through design, how are we demonstrating what we're asking others to do. Are the images we use on the website open source. Why not. Who is centered in these images. What message doesn't communicate. Have we provided appropriate credit where needed. How can we reflect the values of diversity and website copy is the metadata reinforcing stereotypes are the categories and language use positively. Are the categories language used positively contributing to shaping the world we want to see. Have we made explicit our commitment to accessibility of the platform by an accessibility statement or a statement on inclusive writing. While we did not manage to address all of these questions or to fully implement them for the initial launch, we can use this as a roadmap for future improvements. But for now let's talk about the areas where we did respond to these questions through design. In addition to these questions, it acting as a guiding post we also created for personas. Based on user research to help keep our designs include and diverse and real needs. If you're not familiar with the concept personas are fictional portraits that capture real characteristics traits and pain points of your target users. They help illustrate how we can bring everyone along and remove barriers with identified. Here's an example of one of them. Tony uses pronouns he they and they're relatively new to government. They work remotely from Vancouver. As someone who values learning and helping others it's important to them that the resources share resource sharing platform it's easy to use so they can quickly share content with colleagues. They value sharing, but have not shared their own work is they're not sure if it's good enough. We benefit from resources when we are creation and evaluation personas served as a reminder throughout the design process of who we're designing this platform for. As I mentioned, it was important for us that our designs felt welcoming, and this included how we use graphics. We know that visual representation matters when we talk about inclusion. It is important to be able to relate to the people you see, and to be able to see yourself in these images. So as an organization will have a subscription to paid image bank will also opted to use at least some images for the launch that were shared under open licenses to really practice what we were promoting. The first image on the slide is one of open source illustrations that we've selected from on draw website to represent different resource types in GC share. The second image which is the main image on GC share homepage is from unsplash a website that offers a range of photographs that can be used with or without attribution. Both images on the slide center women of color, and where an intentional choice to ensure a diverse representation copy or text is often treated as an afterthought in design. And as someone with background and content design, I wanted to make sure that inclusion was also integrated into the language that was used. Many different forms including conventions around which sentence case to use for headings using plain language to explain complex concepts like conditions of use, and how to integrate inclusive writing into French copy. For example, based on plain language and readability guidelines we know that sentence case headings are easier to read. So whenever we could we made sure that headings such as resource title and different metadata elements on the resource details page, which are shown in the image on the left were written in sentence case rather than title case, where first letter of each word is capitalized. When explaining what the different creative commons licenses are, it was imperative that this is very basic and clear. So we opted for a longer explanation such as use and adapt for free credit author, rather than using a shorthand of CC by, or even a full name of the license which would have meant nothing to most of our users at this point. So when it came to French copy, we decided to approach it from an inclusive writing perspective. In French, this is called the redaction, which literally means gender inclusive writing to provide some context in French language, all nouns are by default either masculine or feminine. And when representing a group of people, the language defaults to masculine, no matter what the group's composition, making women largely invisible in language. There are many approaches to fixing with the two fixing this one such approach is making both genders visible by fully writing out and doubling the words. Even better, if you start with feminine to prioritize it and reverse masculine first convention. For example, on our share page, we tell people that we're happy they're here. In French, we double the adjectives happy to be both feminine and masculine to represent diversity of our own team. Nous sommes heureuses et heureux que vous vous joignez à nous. While it doesn't solve the challenge of including and making visible other gender identities. It still felt like a step in the right direction. By helping metadata schema for the collection. There are many decisions that can be influenced by an inclusive lens. The two that I will touch on are which metadata data elements to choose and how to express the values within these elements. In the last year, we decided that accessibility element was essential, not only because we wanted to highlight that we care about it and that it's important, but also to use it as a way to nudge people to have a conversation about accessibility. We had a lot of different points of view on what values of this element should be. While using we can criteria was what we ended up going with, we look forward to making it more plain language in the future by finding other ways to communicate how accessible something is. In the meantime, we used an approach that many other or our collections use where we reference the accessibility checklist from BC campus as a way to assess resource accessibility on a basic level. In terms of values included for the conditions of use element will also included traditional knowledge licenses to indicate that we're aware of different considerations necessary for indigenous knowledge, and that we welcomed indigenous contributions on their own sharing terms. An example is the language used in the delivery method of training called mode utilization in French. We once again used inclusive language for the values describing whether content was to be used for virtual or in person instructor led training. The word for instructor was modified to explicitly indicate in brackets that instructor could be either male or female. Once the designs were completed and the platform was live we were able to have the functionality of the platform tested by user navigating with with assistive technology as part of an amazing service provided by fable. We were thrilled that the overall results were pretty good with a score of 90 out of 100 on an accessible usability scale. We also carried our partner you campus Ontario to provide us with an accessibility report by the end of the project implementation to ensure that we eliminated as many barriers as possible. Now let's hope over to collection development. It is all about aligning purpose vision and values, developing one is a really great reflective exercise that forces us to ask some difficult and important questions. In the scope of the collection, it was important to ask the following. What will make this platform inviting and useful. How is it different from commercial training and learning platforms who might be excluded from using or contributing to the platform. What resources will we include exclude. Why, who will be making these decisions. What we heard in doing user research for this initiative. Here's a quote that certainly stood out to us as it relates to collection development. I feel if enough people put enough good quality resources on this platform, people will use it, but if there aren't a lot of useful resources. Most people probably won't. What will drive us are the resources based on what we heard and what we asked ourselves who've identified six important objectives for the collection that respond to the concepts of good and useful in a meaningful way. Let's start by talking about accessibility in government of Canada content is required to be bilingual and it has to meet important accessibility requirements. But what we'll also know is that it's a real struggle for those doing the work to be able to integrate many of these essential requirements into their demanding workloads. So we wanted to show that accessibility is important, and we also wanted to position the repository as a place where things don't need to be perfect. So resources across all levels of accessibility levels were welcome by sharing what folks had so far as a starting point, it would allow someone else to improve the content. Instead of everyone always missing the mark. We would advocate for shareable content that is in plain language targeted and results and concise learning objects that are easy to reuse. We also touches on formats that make reuse and adaptation easier. We wanted to contribute to professionally focused rather than academic areas that can support training of mature learners, and those seeking upskilling a career change. We also broaden the definition of what is accepted as a learning resource to include a variety of content types including templates and case studies, as well as content at different stages of development, such as drafts and iterations with feedback. As I mentioned earlier in the metadata section, we also wanted GC share to be a welcoming space for contributors of indigenous knowledge across Canada. We also wanted to recognize and respect that traditional knowledge does not always align with the Western conventions of intellectual property. And we wanted to learn from the community about the best ways to support them. To support the work of the government of Canada and contribute to the global OER community we also wanted to encourage the development of open educational resources in French. Building something no matter how great an idea it is and expecting people to just come and use it is simply not realistic. You really need to spend some time thinking about how to meaningfully promote what you do. In the approaches we use for GC share we were inspired by social innovation methods, which invite us to ask the following questions. What are the communities that have the most to gain from open educational resources? Who is working on similar initiatives? Whose voices can we amplify by including them in this work? I just want to show you a few examples of how we tried to connect to communities with similar goals in our marketing approach. The image on the left is a tweet that highlights resources that were shared, thanks to our connection with two like-minded organizations. Alpha Plus, which is an Ontario organization focused on helping adult literacy education professionals to incorporate digital technology and civic actions accessibility in an open agile project and a community. The image on the right shows one of our pre-launch campaign messages which highlights that learning that integrates different points of view is valuable today and in the future. And it includes a graphic of a person in a wheelchair to reinforce the point visually as well. Celebrating contributions was another important aspect of marketing that allowed us to once again highlight great content and great sharers. Here are two examples of celebrating contributions. First tweet is highlighting an accessibility handbook released under Creative Commons public domain license by Canadian Digital Service. And the second tweet celebrates thematic resources shared by a number of contributors from across different government and nonprofit organizations. Telling a story and sharing your journey is a valuable way to get people familiar with the new concepts and ideas. We started writing about open learning in government more than a year before the platform launched and we've been able to generate some interest and awareness for the project. We created a publication on Medium and wrote about usability testing, importance of accessibility and sharing. We wanted to align our messaging with the values that the platform stands for those inclusion and openness. We also encouraged all of our team members to contribute and we will soon be publishing an article about what it is like to work on the platform project and partnership with another organization from a perspective of my colleague Shaziane. As I mentioned earlier, there are many barriers to contributing resources in the open so in this section we will talk about how we work towards overcoming this. As we connected with more people and learned about their perspectives on sharing many questions emerged. And we encourage contribution from those who are not sure they have something valuable to add. What are the biggest barriers to contributing? How do we want contributors to feel? How can we help? As part of this discovery and experimentation with identified for main areas of support that was needed. Accessibility review. This included areas like headings, title clarity, tables, all text, content order and flow. Image review. Checking if images used in the current products were copyrighted and sharing alternative free image sources with contributors. Licensing advice. This involved explaining creative commons licensing as well as what crown copyright meant, which is the default copyright licensing applied to government of Canada content. And it also involved explaining copyright in general and how if any third party was used, any third party content was used in a product without explicit permission this content could not be shared under an open license. And finally, but not the least important would be the metadata draft. This often meant filling out the metadata for the resource and asking the contributors to review the draft rather than asking them to fill it in from scratch. In addition to this one on one support, we also did some tailored presentation sessions that address specific concerns of business lines at the school and communities like open government. What we heard from the contributors we worked with has been very reassuring. And here's one of the quotes that showcases a little positive change that we were able to accomplish. I personally doubt that people are interested in what we have created, but it's worthwhile to experiment. This vision excites me in training and learning, how we can share and reuse learning content. We learned that by investing time, tailoring help to the individual contributors needs, offering flexible and manageable options for how they can contribute as well as providing encouragement and asking our contributors how they felt. We open up sharing to more people. We capture these stories as we go along so that we can share them with others in the future. Thank you for your time, and see you out there in the open.