 Leavium Open World Learning Event, this is a knowledge exchange event and what you will see today is some of the amazing, fantastic work that 18 scholars funded by Leavium Foundation and the Open University have done in the last six or seven years and hopefully you will agree at the end of this amazing event that there is some fantastic work out there. The session will be recorded so if you have anything that you don't want to say or whatever, then don't say that because we primarily want to be open and share this also afterwards with the event. So it's my great pleasure to welcome the director of the Institute of Education Technology, Professor Denise Whitelock. Denise has been a strong supporter of the Open World Learning Program and she's an expert in assessment and feedback and has over the years also built a range of amazing artificial intelligence tools. So Denise, can I invite you to provide the formal welcome. Thank you Bart. Good afternoon everyone. It's my pleasure as the director of the Institute of Educational Technology to welcome you all to our OU Leavium Open World Learning Knowledge Exchange and book launch event. I'm delighted that Dr Tracy Henshaw who's the assistant director from Leavium is here with us today. Leavium has been a most generous and supportive funder of this work and it's multi-discipline work and this is something Leavium does fund and they are very good at supporting great ideas that actually fall between the cracks of other funders. And also we've got with us Emily Coyne who's editor of the Education, Psychology and Mental Health Research from Routledge and welcome and also RL scholars, it's a big day for them too. This Open World Learning Project started in September 2015 with six PhD students and then more joined us over the years till in the end we have 18 who have graduated. And why was the work situated here at the OU and in IET? As you probably know that before even Covid we were starting to understand and have been over the years looking at the way people learn with technology and that this is really changing. The world is becoming a more connected place with the emergence of immediate access systems such as smartphones and tablets and of course we've got social media some of which now we can't even keep up with as it's coming so fast at us. So Open World Learning really wanted to understand a number of facets related to education such as structures, access, presence of dialogue together with efficient support systems that can actually promote learning. However, I don't think we should overlook that there are ethical and privacy implications associated with Open World Learning through increasing levels of monitoring, surveillance and profiling. There are also public concerns about whether open education will shift the balance of power of government schools and educational institutions to a global maybe uncontrolled space. Finally, several groups of users, teachers, those of an ageing within the population, people with accessibility needs seem to struggle to embrace and integrate open technology which leads to resistance and anxiety towards these new technologies which often have been designed to help and support these target audiences. So this event brings together scholars from the award winning leave-alume doctoral training programme that was designed to generate evidence, encourage theory construction and lead to well described, dare I say, cutting edge knowledge that informs practice across a number of disciplines as evidenced from the work of the 18 doctoral students who studied with us in this programme. So we've done the work. So why are we gathered here this afternoon? We want to open a debate about how can Open World Learning supported by technology help or hinder tackling the global challenges that open and high quality education faces. So this afternoon we're going to have the 18 scholars, some of whom started with us in September 2015 and have now finished but we have a couple who still got to undertake their vivas but the work has been done. So this event brings together the scholars and we want to showcase some of the lessons learned from their work and who they've been supported by 30 supervisors from across the Open University and we'll also launch the Racklage book and we have two interactive panels to position and discuss the findings. I would like to remind you that we are actually recording the sessions today and the breakout sessions won't be recorded but the rest will so that we can actually share today with people who couldn't be with us. I'm very sorry because of COVID that we're not all together in IIT but hopefully in the future we will be able to get together. It's a very joyous occasion to see everyone. Thank you for joining us for this celebration which is a milestone in the careers of the next generation of researchers who will proudly be leaving scholars from the Open University. Thank you for listening. I hope you have a wonderful sessions and discussions and I'd like to hand over to Bart now. Thank you Bart. Thank you so much Denise for this warm and excellent welcome. So what we will do basically this afternoon is to basically have a short introduction of the kind of achievements we've made within the Open World Learning Programme and then we will start with a panel discussion and then there will be a short break for a tea or a coffee and then you can decide which of the two breakout rooms you want to join. One is specifically focused on language and learners and the other is focused specifically on technology and educators and then again we will come together after a short break for a roundtable discussion. So at any point in time if you have questions or comments just post them in the conversation and just add them as you as you like. So to get to give also the external people from outside the Open University a little bit of a flavor of the depth and breadth of all the work. I'm just going to provide a really brief overview of the Open World Learning Programme and what we have achieved over the years. So what is Open World Learning? So in the book that we will launch in a minute we basically have clarified this as an Open World Learning seeks to understand the access of education structure in the presence of dialogue and support systems and as Denise has indicated this not only leads to always positive issues it could be that particular groups of learners may not necessarily benefit from the opportunities of Open World Learning and it is a really difficult and challenging environment which even before Covid lots of scholars were aware of but in a way there was relatively limited good empirical research to explore what are the enablers and the disablers for Open World Learning. So the key question that we basically raised within the Open World Learning Programme is this in a way simple question. So how can Open World Learning supported by technology help and or hinder tackling the global challenges that open and high quality education faces. When we drafted that question six seven years ago we of course never imagined that Covid would happen. So I think everyone now understands why it is so important to really get to grips with this situation and how we can make sure that everyone across the globe has the opportunity to benefit from Open World Learning. So what you see here and it's really too small to see on a small screen but what we basically have are 18 PhD students who over the last six seven years have worked tremendously hard each focus on their individual topic to try to make sense of the affordances and limitations of Open World Learning. Many of those scholars have continued as a postdoc in MIT or in Michigan or at the Open University all went into business to apply some of the lessons they've learned during the during the Open World Learning Programme. And as Denise has mentioned before we're we're nearly at the end where we're having two more viva's and then hopefully most of the of the leaving scholars will have finished which is a fantastic result. But I think these numbers don't really show the commitment and the community that we've developed over the years. I think the next picture or this picture shows some of the amazing activities that we've been working with with these students. These students come from 17 different countries across across the globe. I've done a quick map exercise and actually we they are from six different continents on this planet. So they bring this really wealth of diversity of perspectives which is I think an amazing achievement and and approach. So beyond basically their individual thesis they've also been extremely productive in terms of producing academic outputs, outputs in terms of blocks, outputs in terms of amazing videos, etc, etc. But what you see in this this snapshot of their the kind of production if you like is that they published over 119 academic articles during those seven years which is amazing and on average because I'm a professor of learning analytics I like to do data and number crunching. They produce an average six and a half outputs per scholar and there is one scholar who produced 32 academic outputs during his or her PhD and what you see from the list of journals is some of these journals are really the top in the field of our discipline. But I'm also really proud of the fact that many of the journals are so called open access journals. And last but not least have been a tremendous effort to also share these experiences across the globe. And today is another example of all the hard work that they have been doing. So one of the things that we've tried to do because each of the PhD students have basically worked on their PhD on their specific topic. What we wanted to make sure that we can also learn from all the 18 topics and what can we how can we make sure that we bring this together. And one way we've done this is to work together on a jointly created an additive book and this additive book has now been formally made available today and that book is fully available freely online open access. It contains 19 chapters and I will give a little bit more information about this in a second. But can I give Emily Cohen from Routledge a brief one, two minutes to tell us a little bit of why this book is so important. Hi, everyone. Thank you. Yeah, it's a real pleasure to be here to celebrate the publication of the book on behalf of Routledge and the book itself is a really ambitious undertaking from the four editors. And there's a really impressive scope of chapters from topics such as internet kiosks in Uganda, player creativity and gaming, language learning facilitated by WhatsApp and plenty more. And all of these have the aim of showing creative and timely research insights into how education and open world technology can be used for teaching and learning in these diverse contexts. So I think the book will be a really significant contribution to the field. Personally, it's a book that I've really enjoyed working on, especially in seeing the idea develop, you know, right right from the start, right from the idea and getting to this point now where we have a physical book and and as part says, freely available online. So I really encourage people to read it if anyone who hasn't and it's an excellent read. Yeah, thank you so much for this, Emily. And unfortunately, the link is really long. So I've just posted the tiny URL in the chat so people can just freely access and download it as they please. And as indicated on the next slide, what you see is just a snapshot of the topics that the Levium scholars have worked on. And in particular, if you like me like to quantify the chapters is we specifically categorize these based on three broad themes in terms of the power of language in open world learning, the power of innovative technologies in open world learning. And last but not least, the role of educators in in supporting this open world learning program. And what you see with the tick boxes is how do these chapters relate to the so-called four piece that we've used in the Levium program? So some chapters specifically focus on the people. So how do they how do people use these these approaches? Others are specifically interested in the places in which people work, as for example, the example with the Internet kiosk by Khalid J. Mohamed. Others are refocused on the kind of practices that teachers or students are using with open world learning. And then some chapters are focused specifically on the properties of open world perspective. So, for example, how do we take into consideration privacy? How do we take into consideration big data? So in a way, in a nutshell, this book brings together an amazing insight. And if you just have a brief read of this slide, it brings together and it's an incredible number, if you think about it, it brings together three hundred eighty seven thousand one hundred and thirty three learners and educators that have been involved in this book. And the book basically brings together one hundred thirty six unique learning contacts across the globe. So I think it will hopefully will soon become a kind of encyclopedia of amazing research, but more importantly, it also provides really practical applications of what should you then do if you are a learner and you're unfamiliar with open world learning, what can you do? Or if you're an educator, what would be the best way to introduce open world learning practices in your educational practice? So I've provided some small snippets of some of the work that these scholars have been doing and some of the work you will hear more about in a in a minute. But it's it's a fantastic hopefully resource that people will will will will use and reuse long after this project finishes. So what I would like to do now is to move to the panel, the first panel of today. So let me first introduce Dr. Tim Coughlin. He is a senior lecturer within Institute of Education Technology, and he is a guru in accessibility. He knows everything about accessibility, so it's great to have you here. And more importantly, Tim has been always very actively involved in the Leave You program. And secondly, I would like to welcome Rebecca Ferguson. Rebecca Ferguson is also a guru in the field of learning future. So she's done fantastic work, always trying to to see what's the next big thing that will influence us as educators. So thank you very much, Rebecca, for joining us as well. And then last but not least, Arina Retz is here. And she has done amazing work in her PhD within the Leave You program, focused on how we can simplify text for learners who are non-native English speakers like me and how to make sense of that. And currently she's a postdoc at Lancaster. So everyone basically can post any comments or questions in the chat. You can raise any questions to the panel and then use the like button. If you think that's a good question so that we and I will keep a track of the conversation together with Christina, Michelle and James. So if you have any questions to post them in the chat, but maybe first I could start with Arina. Based on what you know about the open world learning program, could you perhaps provide an example of how open world learning has helped or perhaps hindered learners? And how did you deal with that? Well, I think it's a really interesting question. And the book that has been launched today talks a lot about enablers and barriers to open world learning. Probably the first thing that comes to mind when you think about open world learning would be access. That's physical access enabled by technology to platforms that aim to educate people who otherwise would not have access to these things. So of course we think about low income countries or global contacts that might be less privileged in terms of access to educational materials. So yes, I would say that access to educational materials is probably the biggest big thing about open world learning. But at the same time, I think the book also talks about the equilibrium that salmon enablers can also bring about barriers. And on the one hand, although open world learning does claim to help certain groups of learners who are historically marginalized or less privileged, at the same time, perhaps it doesn't do as much as it could have to help the target group of learners. So I think there is still so much more that we can do about it. And the book and the 18 PhD projects that they do focus on on the different barriers and provide solutions how these barriers can be potentially overcome. So just to give an example in my PhD, I looked at accessibility of open online education to the group of learners that's not generally represented. Let me talk about accessibility, which is people who are not proficient in English. So they might not have as much access because as I found out in the PhD, they need to have advanced English language proficiency to be able to follow and understand resources. That's just one example. So I think it's an interesting conversation we might have that an enabler can also bring about barriers that we need to think further of how to overcome. Rebecca, do you want to build on that thread or perhaps provide a different alternative or perspective? Yeah, well, I'd say that one of the aspects of open world learning is being able to get at the resources and the courses is around open educational resource and whether people can access those, whether they can retain access to those. And that's really important. But something we've also found is that people then need the skills to be able to use these resources effectively. You know, it's all very well giving people a key to a library. But if you haven't shown them around and if you haven't given them guidance, they're not going to be able to use it effectively. So one of the things I've found really interesting has been Barbara Cunde's work on self-regulation. And self-regulation is really some of the skills around learning to learn and supporting yourself as a learner. And these are things that we're quite used to teachers taking on for us. So if we're in a physical classroom, we're used to the fact that the teacher will set our goal for us. They'll provide the resources for us. They'll give us a time frame. They might tell us how to approach the problem and who to work with. And that works really well if you're in a classroom. In fact, you know, that has to happen in a classroom. It's one of the constraints of physical world learning that you need somebody coordinating that. But in an open world where people are engaging at different times with different experiences behind them, they need to be able to take charge of those things themselves. They need to be able to set their own goals for learning. They need to be able to reflect on if they're achieving those goals. They need to work out which resources they need to access, how they're going to access those things. And so Barbara took a really in-depth look at one of those those aspects, which is a personal goal setting within learning, which you would think of as a fairly straightforward thing. And what she's shown is that it's really much more complex than you would expect that learners on the whole don't know how to set reasonable goals for themselves. And they try to fall back on educators, even when the educators not there. So when you say, well, what is your goal? They'll say, well, whatever the goal for this lesson or this course is, and they don't really think about what their personal goal is or how they're going to achieve it. And I think revealing that lack or that problem can really affect how we as educators prepare open world learning and prepare learners for open world learning so they can really make use of it. Yeah, thank you. That is extremely powerful, Rebecca, and I've just posted the links to Barbara's chapter in the chat. Tim, do you want to take this thread along or do you want to take a different thread? Yeah, yeah, happy to take it along. I think, you know, we have to remember the big potential positives of openness. You know, that's a really important starting point that there is this ability for it to make huge difference to people. But, you know, and we have seen evidence of that too. So, you know, in Paco and Yester's work, we saw that disabled people were using MOOCs and online courses to kind of dip their toe into education a bit. You know, it might often be that people are not able to access formal education or feel that there's barriers to that. So having things like that could be really beneficial. So I found evidence there. I think another nice one was Khadija's work, Khadija Muhammad's work where you could see that putting an internet kiosk in a sort of low income community in Uganda led to somebody learning skills just by watching online videos, you know, that they made a difference to their lives. And so, yeah, you've got to keep those kind of positives in mind. But I think then there's always this sense that there's a level of unfairness that people were either, you know, kind of privileged or perhaps lucky or there were various barriers, you know, that they either didn't face and others had to face. So I think, you know, as Irene has always said that one of the obvious ones there and that was a really nice study and data to show kind of quantitatively that, you know, that these courses actually required a really advanced level of English even, you might not think that that was appropriate for these kind of things that were supposed to be a taster for education. And so, yeah, and I think the same came out in the other pieces of work. So there's always been this kind of balanced view, hopefully, of remembering that, you know, the big potential positives, but then seeing something like, you know, MOOC designers and MOOC platforms not necessarily putting enough thought into accessibility or, you know, in Khadija's work, the kind of social structures or technical problems that meant that people couldn't always use the kiosks or whether we're kind of certain people privileged to use them. So, yeah, I think that's been a really nice feature is that sense of examples of both, you know, the positive and negative that we see in open world learning. There's a really nice initial question in the chat with the analogy of giving a key to the library and showing them how the library works. And I think what Shailie is indicating that, okay, it's great that you have all these resources available, also these open education resources. But how do we actually make sure that educators are using them? Does anyone have an idea how we can make sure that all these pearls of wisdoms on the Internet are actually being used by teachers and learners? Perhaps the first thing that comes to mind is making it attractive by providing alternatives in terms of design, in terms of language proficiency level that's required, in terms of different accessibility features. So, if the learner who is accessing the platform understand that it's tailored to him or her, then it's going to be a high chance that they might take on the learning from that platform. Any other thoughts, Rebecca or Tim? I'd say one of the key things here is making people aware about open educational resources, what they are and what they can do and also how to look for them and how you might need to adapt them. You know, Tim was talking about accessibility earlier when you find an open educational resource, it's not necessarily accessible in ways that are going to support your students, so you need some support there. But another thing is encouraging people to be so aware of open educational resources, they're producing their own and they're putting them in places that they are accessible to other people who will be able to make use of them. So, we're working on a project at the moment with educators in Kenya and we're getting those educators to look at possible resources and to consider how they can use them, to consider how they might have to adapt to them and to consider how they'd be useful within their institution and with their colleagues. So, as Shailie says, it's not just a question of saying, well there are some open educational resources out there, it's really supporting people to use them and also to add to the collection. Great. Yeah, I think that's the kind of key. Encouraging people to be comfortable creating or adapting resources, having that awareness that any educational resources was designed for one particular audience and parts of it could be very, very useful. I think, as Rebecca's mentioned, there's been a lot of probably good examples of OER being used in places like Kenya and other countries where you can make very good use of existing resources, but there has to be an awareness and probably some kind of process of adapting those. I think we've always found that in the projects we've done around OER over the years. Okay, I'm just having a check in the chat if there are any further questions. There's a really interesting point about the lack of clarity in terms of language MOOCs. Does anyone want to tackle that question? I think this is obviously linking back to Barbara's work and Barbara found that when you looked at, she was specifically looking at that MOOCs for language learning or MOOCs connected with that, that the educators sometimes weren't terribly clear what they were doing with the course. They might have been asked to produce a MOOC without any particular guidance, or they might have been concentrating on something else, or they might just have had the aims in their own heads, but they weren't really clearly sharing them in a lot of cases with the learners. So the learners were having to guess sometimes at what the overall goal was, and just coming up with goals like, well the goal is to complete this rather than, well actually my goal is to improve my language in this area or to work on this specific area of language learning or to work on my pronunciation, all sorts of goals that they could set, but the course wasn't really helping them with that goal setting. Being provocative, haven't we then failed as MOOC educators? I mean if I go to Netflix quite quickly it learns the kind of movies that I like and the kind of documentaries it likes and it automatically adjusts the recommendations to what I like to watch. So shouldn't these open educational resources quite quickly adjust based on the kind of motivations or interest of learners rather than providing a kind of one-size-fits-all solution for all learners? I'd say one of the problems in the context of learning is that we don't know what we don't know. So we might have a good idea of things we're having a problem with that we want to learn about, but we can't necessarily move to another level without somebody supporting us to set new goals or to see holes that we haven't identified ourselves. I think Netflix is often held up as oh yes this can do things automatically, but one thing Netflix doesn't necessarily get it all right, it's not as brilliant as every of you makes out I think, but I think education is a far more complex problem because there are so many contextual aspects to take into account and I think sometimes when people are talking about open world learning they're assuming that that is some form of learning where you can take the educator out and I think you can never take the educator out, the educator may change their roles they may have something more different to do or even more difficult or challenging to do but there's still a role for the educator in moving people forward and helping them to develop skills to move forward. Do you agree Tim or Irina or you disagree? I think that sense of support is the is the big challenge I guess we you know looking back say 10 20 years it was probably more of a naive assumption that you could do things without support and I think that still exists it's not gone away but I think in terms of research and obviously in this program we're quite aware that as you say Rebekah that the teacher or the general the support there as a learner is still absolutely necessary if in some cases it's more necessary if you're trying to tackle inequality I think. Yeah and rightfully so James said that there are other video demand providers available. Kirk and Glyn writes a really interesting question about the kind of standardization of certification of for example micro-credentials or credits from MOOCs. There is there well I mean there is no one electrical plug but there's definitely no one universal credential. Is that a problem or is it just you know eventually we will all go to one dominant form because a big educational provider will take it or what do you think? Just to share my experience I've recently come across a platform where anyone can design and launch a course and you don't necessarily need to have specific credentials if you feel that you understand the topic you can just create the course and then sell it online and perhaps you'll get some learners so I think this discussion about standardization is an important discussion to have in the field definitely. I think also micro-credentials aren't necessarily an example of open world learning because micro-credentials tend to be associated with some form of quality assurance some form of credentialing against academic and industrial norms which requires them to charge for for that repeated labor. So while I do think it is a problem micro-credentials aren't necessarily aligned with each other I think it's a little tangential to open world learning but I think that sort of links into one of the the questions we got on the slide there what is the largest challenge in open world learning. I think one of the things we see in open world learning is where it is becoming successful and popular. We see companies and investors coming in and trying to profit from it so we see MOOCs as originally conceived as something which was open where learners could support themselves where they had continued access to course content and we've seen more and more of a movement towards things like micro-credentials where learners are charged for what is on offer and so this is sort of blurring from open to closed and people tend to keep the same name even when it's not still open so I've seen this with with quite a lot of things actually they're not open so they're MOOCs they're not MOOCs or they've lost some other part of the acronym. I'm also mindful of time so maybe just one final word from each of you you can you can pick any of the three questions maybe in one sentence and you know maybe you can pick any challenge you want and then maybe in one sentence what do you think you've learned from those seven years of open world learning maybe if I start with Tim for a change. Sure well I thought the what were you most proud of was a nice question that we obviously didn't recover very much I think the some of the methods used you know particularly field work and working with big data sets you know some of the students did some really you know quite brave ambitious field work and some others we know open education the data can quite often be messy you know students are not really controlled and pushed in certain directions so you know again with the sort of quantitative data you can be working with quite interesting difficult data sets so I thought that was you know there was a lot of ambition and bravery in the methods that students were using. Thank you Rebecca. I'd say I'd come in on the what are you proud of as well and I'd say what I'm proud of is that we have now got this very strong network of people with doctorates or people on the verge of achieving doctorates who have worked together who know each other well who have supported each other in the past and we know that going forward they are going round the world they're already going round the world forming a really strong network of people who are experts in open world learning and can really help to move things forward as they as they progress in their careers. All right last but not least Irina. It was amazing to be part of Libreheim and I feel like when you research open world learning by definition you are working on a nice social impact just because this topic is inherently about diversity it's about equality and fairness and it's one of the few not every research topic is concerned with these things and it just feels that you are doing something nice and you're making a difference with this research.