 virtual event to this webinar organized by Eden on occasion of the European Distance Learning Week. And I'm happy to say that today we count with an interesting theme and an interesting, very interesting set of presenters. So the theme is open education and the title of the event is Perspectives on Open Education. So we want to give some original perspectives and some specific... Yes, I think you're right. Okay. Ten more minutes. Okay. Sorry, guys. Okay. Sorry, guys, but as I was telling you before, we are witnessing a live moment of a school setting. I'm in a school in this very moment and I was thrown out by a bunch of students from around. So I hope you can hear me now and very sorry for this, but these things happen. And now while I find a... Can you...? Okay. Now the situation is a bit quieter. Okay. So whilst I find a quieter place to speak from, I would like to give the word... So I would like to speak second and I would like to give the word to Diana if possible so I can find a quiet place to speak from. Hi everybody, can you hear me? Diana, can you...? Yes, I can hear you. Hi. So thank you very much for allowing me to join you very briefly live. I'm unfortunate because I'm holding now in the effort. So I kindly ask Fabio, I'm in Varsal, boarding to go to Kaurna. We've got my flight to Papua Castle. So I kindly ask Fabio to share the YouTube registration, the video which I prepared, or in any way, so there are two different ways in which you can listen to my presentation for today. Either you watch the YouTube video or Fabio will share the video now on the screen. And if you have questions, I'll be able to answer them in the chat because I will need very soon to disconnect my video and my microphone. Is that okay with you Fabio? Okay Diana, so let me... Okay, so I suggest we go with the video, so we have a recorded version of you while you're boarding. Thank you. With the video, thank you. I'm at the learning center of the Polytechnica University of Timshuara, Romania. And my presentation, part of the European Distance Learning Week, which is organized by Eden, an organization in which I'm a member for almost 20 years, is about augmented reality in open education. We are all aware of the digital literacy and what we need to teach and to encourage our students to gain as competencies and skills, especially in the higher education system, which we call digital competencies or digital literacies, skills and competencies. One of the things which interests me for many years is the computational thinking, which nowadays becomes quite accustomed for all the students, not necessarily students, which are in engineering or in science or STEM subjects, to develop as a new methodology of computational thinking, which in fact use abstraction and the composition for learning new things, for understanding and learning new things. Since 2011, I became quite aware of the new methods for the creative creators. We need to develop the 21st century skills for our students, which will need to become creative creators, which Tom Friedman described as the well-educated, imaginative, collaborative, confident people who will take personal responsibility and will go... Yeah, it stopped for me also. Very strange. Adding extra, besides the 21st century skills. There are students which will need to learn independently and digitally their entire life. Do we prepare them in our higher education? It's coming back. Sorry for this, everybody. Do we make them aware of the skills and abilities which they need to have? Do we prepare for their digital life after the end of the university degree? One of the methods to do this is to use augmented reality. And there are several examples of the use of augmented reality nowadays in education, like in math school or in chemistry or in science subjects, where you can learn and understand better concepts and theories by seeing and playing with simulations and so on. Or, for example, in schools, in engineering subjects, where you can understand how fluids work and not work in an engine and so on. But this will require a lot of development from the multimedia teams. And this usually involves just a tiny bit of the development part of the students. But, for example, new skills like these applications allow them to do, like to learn and to create content like the museum's application will allow them to do something more. Why is it important to use augmented reality nowadays in education? Mainly because it's here. And because students already start using it by playing different games which use augmented reality. And they use their mobile phones quite a lot. The added value is the collaborative learning experience which they can gain and also the encouragement and the motivation to learn something new more interactively and more digitally. A study done some years ago shows that the use of augmented reality in higher education is mainly related to science and medical schools and humanities and art, like these examples which I just showed. But they can be used in different subjects and in different areas. One of the examples which I'm going to show is based on my personal experience which is mainly using augmented reality tools in the TokTek project which is a virtual mobility project which is done between the students from Romania and the United States for every year since 28, 28 so almost 10 years now where students from university from Boston with students from my university in Tinshara work collaboratively in teams of two, two Romanians and two Americans to develop the multimedia artifact. In the 2016 project we asked them to develop an augmented reality application an artifact using augmented reality. A question for the group. Can everybody hear well the video by Diana because some people are having problem with some breaking up of the video. So it seems there are some issues with stops regularly, yes. Yeah. Okay, so I suggest we stop this video for now. In any case, it can be then put on the Eden YouTube channel and we move to Estela. If you follow the order, we move to Estela Daos-Leine from Bautat Magnus University from Lithuania. Sorry for the way I mispronounced for sure your name and surname and even institution. And thank you very much for being with us. Fabio, I hope you can hear me well. And today I will talk about how virtual mobility opens education. How we from at least our perspective open education with the cases of virtual mobility. And I'm Estela Dukshinia. I come from Bautat Magnus University and Lithuanian Association of Distance and Learning from Lithuania. And why should or how we can open education through virtual mobility. Briefly, I will focus on why we talk about virtual mobility and how we understand what is virtual mobility and how these cases or these activities really opens up our educational practice. So first of all when talking about education, there are really different perspectives and really different explanations and understandings or definitions how we define what is virtual mobility. However, most of them agree upon that in higher education institutions when we talk about virtual mobility we usually aim with these activities in cooperation of higher education institutions. Of course the cooperation usually is either blended or virtual. And so for that we apply technological solutions. However we aim at teaching and learning and virtual mobility will also aim at teaching and learning and communication, collaboration or research of the participants. And of course we try to achieve the academic goals and to recognize the achievements. And of course virtual mobility let us focus on the development of intercultural competence we call them as virtual mobility competence. And furthermore to elaborate usually how we understand what are these activities that we implement by virtual mobility sometimes someone calls them as virtual exchange usually in the best known practices that we and other European universities have implemented when we talk about virtual mobility is usually a course delivered in another institution abroad. It may be a part of the course it may be a seminar or some other type of activity series of seminars or even the whole program delivered by another institution that the students and teachers can participate virtually in online study. But we also there focus on not just the distance learning but intercultural competence development as well. Also another type of activity may be the courses that are either jointly developed and or deliberate jointly with another institution for example a course that is developed together between the teachers from several universities for example develop a course together and then deliver the course online or in a blended mode when the students have the possibilities to collaborate on different activities in this way to internationalize and share their cultural approaches at certain topics for example. Also there may be a virtual placement or at the company abroad that is also an activity that may be developed and also there are a lot of activities that are combined with physical mobility or to foster physical mobility so either the courses before the physical exchange or either the courses to extend your virtual course or extend your physical mobility course or to get acquainted to learn language or to learn some cultural things before coming that are also combined with the physical activities and how these activities open our education of course when we look at it from institutional perspective as institutions when they start when they look for the collaboration and when they start sharing or at least think about collaborating in different online course delivery they usually have to open their practice not only for the internal revision but also they have to share what they do for other partners and to share their courses to share their delivery schemes and how the learning is organized in the institution so in this way they really open their practices for the revision when we start implementing virtual mobility so these activities really open all departments for collaboration for virtual collaboration if a student wants to do a virtual course in another institution there are different departments in both institutions that need to collaborate to agree upon how everything will be organized and where the student can come to and where he or she can come with the issues and etc. so in this way all departments are involved in this virtual collaboration and of course when we come to the learning process it requires a lot of openness from the teachers to share their practice and to open and for the students to participate and here I will focus in my presentation mostly on the two perspectives on the teacher perspective as there are a lot of of course institutional issues that I could talk about but maybe it would be more interesting for you to see more from the teacher perspective and student perspective so how teachers should be open and how this process of virtual mobility open challenges teachers with the openness first of all you as a teacher have to be open the changes in your course and of course you have to first of all open your practice for revision it's not only the internal revision that you usually have from your institutional colleagues but also if you want to collaborate on a joint course delivery with the teacher from another abroad institution you have to open your practices and what you do for the teacher and for that university as well and if you want to attract learners, virtual learners into your course you have to open and present your course also publicly and you have to prepare a lot of marketing materials which really attracts your course students from another institution to your course so there are a lot of challenges for you as a teacher that are related to the openness and when we talk about how you as a teacher have to change the practice you usually have it is if you are come from traditional university having your students in the auditorium and here comes students or at least come not the students but you have students, virtual students and physical students in your class you have to combine and you have to change your practice here by combining either group work of students or either delivery approaches that you have to do the presentation online and as well as in the group in the face to face mode so you have to be flexible here and you have to adapt also as a teacher sometimes meet this kind of challenges where students coming from virtually coming to your university from another institution come later than your semester started or they want to start learning earlier than the semester start in your institution so you also have to have this in mind and have to manage this joining of students earlier or later also this is a challenge for you as a teacher and you have to be open and flexible for this and of course these are the challenges that teachers usually face while working or delivering courses in virtual mobility mode. When thinking and talking about the perspective of students we have several cases where bachelor type of students or master type of students had these virtual mobility courses in another institution and how this first of all requires them to be open first of all I share here with you some testimonies from our cases of the bachelor students first of all it requires them to be open and to be really interested either in the topic of the course that is being delivered or either in the different mode of delivery and to come and to participate for example in Lithuania we don't have a challenge or the students with the English language all of them know English language however in these courses they usually are afraid to participate because of the English language because they fear sometimes that they won't know how to express themselves properly or how they really will understand what the teacher is saying there so it really requires openness from them to come and participate and of course these courses are focusing usually on the also sharing intercultural approaches it is they open their minds for other cultures they learn how the subjects are delivered in another institution they learn how everything studies are organized in another institution which are learning platforms other institutions use or how many contact towers do you really organize so it is really they gain a lot and this opens their approach to learning as well as only learning but also personal perspective and to share some some testimonies from our master program students that they are participating in the jointly delivered course on the global social problems the main ideas that we get from them is that when the course is delivered not only from Lithuanian perspective but at least Lithuanian and in our case American perspective as the teachers come from Lithuania and America the course really opens their minds in the way in the way how the course is organized but also in the way what kind of problems are discussed in the course as the course looks at the global social problems the possibility that the course is delivered not only by the teachers provides them with the possibility that they analyze the problems that are really global and not only in Lithuania and mainly to sum up this both experiences and perspectives from students and from teachers what it usually gives them is of course different knowing not only in the intercultural experiences that we usually aim at in virtual mobility but also language competence development they have the possibilities to improve their language competences and of course ACP competences as activities usually are virtual so the collaboration online competences and the use of different tools for communication for accessing your learning content the collaboration online and of course as we aim at at university usually at achievement of learning outcomes so these courses also improve their learning outcomes so this way educational perspectives but also personal and social competences are improved in these courses what the students usually mention here is that the courses mostly if you have more different cultures or different students coming from different institutions as the course on our university is also suggested for the students who are on a RASMO studies in the university to be joined so if more students in different cultures come to the course then the course is really more interested to be shared from different cultural perspectives that all this brings openness and opens not only educational perspective but also cultural perspective to our students so this is shortly what am I vision for how the courses from teacher and students perspective open virtual mobility courses open education and I'm really worried if you have any questions for writing elaborate or maybe we can discuss them later if you have thank you I will also sketch a relation between open education and virtual mobility so very interesting to see what you are thinking about I already told the participants to write their questions in the chat so please if you have any urgent questions just put it in the chat otherwise we will use some time at the end of the session and we will have questions to all the panelists so I would like now to give the floor to Susan Huggins actually it's a privilege to have somebody from the open education consortium with us especially because this year we should not forget is the year of open so we are in a special year for open education a year of many anniversaries a year of the lately celebrated UNESCO second world OER so it's again a special year and we are all looking forward to hear what happened and what is still going to happen and how you feel about this year long celebration about openness and education the floor is yours I know Eden has contributed quite a lot to this and we have our responsible person for opening thank you so much I appreciate it and I appreciate the opportunity to share a little bit about the year of open what we did where we're going and what what was coming for 2018 can everyone hear it come the presentation already let me get started here so real quickly the things that I'm going to cover this morning as I mentioned is a little bit about the year of open how it got started and what the intent was and then I want to share with you some of the vision we have for 2018 first the year of open we started talking about the year of open back in 2016 we realized that during 2017 many great anniversaries were coming together that needed to be recognized some of the significant milestones for open education that happened during 2017 for example the term open educational resources was created 15 years ago the Budapest open access initiative was 15 years ago there were also some significant 10 year anniversaries the Cape Town Declaration Creative Commons was the first license was released 5 years ago the first open education we launched as well as the Paris OER Declaration so as you can see many many many milestone events came together during 2017 so as we were thinking about what we could do to highlight these events and bring attention to them and also to show their importance in open education and how it got as to where we are today we coined the year of open we wanted to spend a whole year and highlight these many subjects that I was just sharing with you so the year of open was coined we aligned a different topic with each month which by the way our archives so you can go back and review each of our archived months but during the year of open we had contributors literally from all over the world and they contributed to a particular topic in which they were the subject matter expert many just simply wrote articles they contributed videos it was also a very social time of the year so we only have two months left we're very excited this month during November we're discussing the open web we already have two contributors we have four or five still lined up to go and what happens is on our website yearofopendart.org we feature a monthly topic and we also have subject matter experts that contribute to that topic so in November we're talking about the open web and wrapping up the year of 2017 we'll be talking about open licensing so taking there's our social you can join us, you can follow us at yearofopen Twitter is extremely active as well as our Facebook you can post a story contribute to a topic on Facebook so just to share with you a few things that happened during 2017 that to us were really extraordinary we did not anticipate quite the activity and response that we did get so we spent as I mentioned each month was dedicated to a different topic and as you can see the topics were everything from open education to open culture open software open policy some of the topics were quite engaging I think open pedagogy was our most active month very lively topics and we had a few webinars that month brought very a global perspective to that it's a very interesting you can go back and look at the videos our statistics to date I forgot to change September to October but we have had over 6000 people from 145 countries access our websites access our resources that we have built so far this year and this is what I think is really interesting is we expected to have at least 12 contributors one for each month during the year of open we've had over 81 and by the time we close at the end of December we will have almost 100 contributors subject matter experts in various subjects we've also hosted 6 live events during the year and just as an FYI I thought I would list our 5 most engaging topics from this past year open pedagogy, open education open science was very interesting OER and then of course open degrees which we focused on just a few months ago this just gives you an idea a visual idea of all the various countries that open education touched during 2017 now what I'd like to share with you a little bit about is what we have in store for 2018 we are real excited to continue our year of open events but 2018 we are going to focus on action during 2017 we discussed a lot of information shared a lot of information discussed a lot of different topics but in 2018 we want to see how these topics were put into action what we've done with the topics what various groups are doing with the topics how it has disrupted education and how it has transformed education we are really excited about some of the topics that we'll be kicking off with earlier in the year wanted to provide my information please email me if you have any questions contact me also if you're interested in contributing to a particular subject or would like to host a particular subject next year please reach out to me let me know of your interest some of the subjects that we will focus on as I was saying are activities that either have transpired have statistics and what we want to do is offer an opportunity for others to see what you've done so that the processes can be replicated and shared throughout the globe so that's it for me I am very happy to take some questions at the end of our webinar but thank you for joining I appreciate it I love sharing about the year of open look us up on Twitter follow us follow us on Facebook and join us next year thank you I don't know if we can make a let's say quick improvisation by asking her to give us a quick view of this important year from the point of view of the discussion I know this was not for seeing but let's see if she can join in any case I am asking still people to put your question into the chat and let me see okay Lisa can do that so if I would like whilst I thank again Susan to ask Lisa if you can quickly say a mini feedback on what Eden did during this year of open so that we can have even a broader view some of the live events that we held during the year were with Eden we did joint webinars throughout the month they were recorded and they were archived on our website we actually have held one every month since the month of September and we do have one coming up later on this month on the open web and we will have several subject matter experts that will speak to this but it is an open Twitter event it is extremely engaging very insightful and what I have found is some great networking events finding out about events that we have not otherwise heard about so that's what we've been doing with Eden it's been a great partnership and we look forward to working with Eden in 2018 absolutely I think this presentation is very fruitful for both of us of our network and especially for the practitioners out there Lisa I can see your smile can I also hear your voice great let me see the smile is there just to give you an update or just an overview of some of the things we've done in Eden this year well in February we were involved in the UNESCO initiative in Malta where there was some regional European consultation on different open education resources and then in March we were involved in open education week and for example Cable Green spoke about open education some of the moral business and policy cases for OER and we had a panel session on how to be more open and of course we had the Eden chat lots of this is already on the Eden website was recording so please be sure to go there and check it out also in June at the Eden annual conference we had some keynotes and some workshops and a lot of different sessions around OER and open education and in September was the Slovenia OER forum so we've been very active and of course this week we've got European distance learning week together with national distance learning week put on by USDLA so if you haven't looked at their site please be sure to do that and then of course this week is also the open professional collaboration for open classroom conference in Tunis so we really have a lot of things happening right now in Eden in terms of just the topic of open and the year of open and so if you haven't had an opportunity please check out the Eden website look at some of the recordings that we have there on these different activities and take part for the rest of this week and also with the Eden chat that are coming up this month and next month and I put the link in the chat box so that you can see it and we hope to see you there oh my goodness there's a whole bunch of slides thank you for this last minute joining thank you very much so it's really great I was moving them I was trying to move them for you so I was more or less following you don't worry so saying that it's good to see when really let's say global and European networks like ours are working together for the same for the same objective I think it's really a powerful dynamic so I think whilst we wait for Andrew Law which should be our last speaker I have in my presentation which I wasn't able to give before since it was assaulted by a group of students who were really eager to learn about technology it wasn't a technology lab when I was assaulted by them let me look for it in fact my presentation should have probably gone first but now makes even more sense more sense let me see yes because in fact we have spoken about about technology with augmented reality we've spoken about virtual mobility and we've spoken about open education in fact the idea of this webinar with different perspectives let's say an open education started by talking about the relation between open education and international cooperation internationalization which is actually the daily life and the daily work of institutions like EDEN, of institutions like the OEC and so on and in fact we believe sorry for the slide sometimes the are moving a bit but in fact we think that open education and higher education especially cooperation are very connected but sometimes in terms of research there is to be treated as two separated world what do I mean by this I mean that the classic international education model or context with students mobility in the first place with teaching in different languages which is relevant only to some institutions and to some disciplines where internationalization is not so central to the learning process of the students and so on let's say is moving towards a new environment where we see a number of issues including massification of higher education especially in the number of developing countries we see a lot of students mobility across the nations and within nations, within countries we see of course an increased use of ICT Diana and Stella were pointing at before and especially we see the need to educate students for global competences and I like very much when Stella you pointed to virtual mobility as a tool for a better I would say globalization for a better international cooperation I think this is really the way we should go for and so we have a new environment sort of and let's say what we think is that we should put forward a different or a new kind of cooperation between and among institutions here I'm talking about higher education institution but the same can be true for schools or for other kinds of institutions and I would like to propose to you the concept of transformational partnerships which was coined by Susan Sutton an American lady like the two ones who preceded me before and basically we believe that open education can facilitate the creation of these transformational partnerships which are defined as collaborations able to develop common goals and projects over time in which resources are combined and partnership are expansive ever-growing and relationships oriented so the idea is to move from a collaboration which is based on projects which is happening only when funding is there and which is scattered by nature to a more intense and a more strategically oriented collaboration which should bring a higher transformation a positive transformation to the institutions and if we look this is some work we did within a project called Imundus where we had partners from all over the world exactly looking at the relation between internationalization of higher education and OER slash MOOCs slash virtual mobility in this project we looked at the typical activities of a transformational partnership what was mentioned before and we sketched some potential impact of open educational practices and resources there and as you can see from this table in fact for example resources sharing can be improved by using OER of course can be made easier, can be made cheaper can be made smoother and so on not only in terms of licenses but also in terms of technical standards and in terms of searchability and discoverability when we talk about collaborative curriculum development and I really like the mention that Susan made to open accreditation and we have all of us in front of us the example of OER university which is going towards this kind of open accreditation schemes and in fact OEP can facilitate these network curriculum developments same is true for students mobility and for staff mobility in fact the virtual mobility as Estela was saying we believe it can contribute to make exchanges more structural especially if you put some virtual collaboration before between and after the mobility of students and staff to make this more a process and less a single event in a student or in a professor's life same is true for joint promotion especially in this case through MOOCs and through MOOCs platform because of the inner capacity to reach a lot of students and learners and in terms of joint research thanks to open science and I again appreciate a lot the fact that open science was one of the key themes of the year of open because we believe open sciences well it's obviously an integral part of open education even if in some cases the approaches are different and the levels of development this is basically to say that virtually every activity of a deep partnership of a deep transformational partnership can be positively influenced by open educational practices by open education whether it's resources, practices, design open policies even with an institution and there you see the MOOCs logo I need to thank a lot of partners for this including Professor Rory McGreal who came up with us about this conceptualization and others including Wayne McIntosh from the OER foundation and basically we identified six patterns let's say of open education and hence the international collaboration and you can see from the bottom you have OER contextualization and adaptation which is happening all the time and it is a sort of collaboration should be a sort of collaboration you have a number of practices of knowledge sharing in open education is what we are doing today basically but of course when this is done between a couple of institutions or between more than two institutions this is contributing to an important transformation of the institutions we have joined promotion through MOOCs platforms which is something that universities are doing together many times we have and this connects a lot with the first presentation we heard open educational resources based virtual mobility schemes and I would like to hear later what Estela thinks about this pattern that we found a lot emerging from our research we have collaborative open courses development which is not only jointly promoting what you are learning but jointly producing your content and your courses and finally and here I think of examples like the OERU for example we have the collaborative accreditation of non-formal learning possibly using OER this is actually the cherry on the cake that is why it is on top because we believe that if we would be able to accredit collaboratively so by sharing the responsibility and by sharing the work learning which is also non-formal and especially by which was taken by using OERU we would be really that would really be a high connection with high transformational impact and in fact as you can see in this picture the higher you go in the scheme the higher the transformational impact is and at the same time the higher the institutional engagement is because for the institutions for all stakeholders involved from the institution and then and this is the end of my quick say post production it wanted to be an introduction but it's coming a bit late in fact what we also found out is that soft skills and soft collaboration skills are fundamental when it comes to open education because open education deals with let's say openly sharing deals with giving away what we are doing and being happy about it deals with using what others have been doing by recognizing their work and respecting their work and so it's not only a matter of trust which is a keyword which comes out all the time when we discuss these things it is a matter of sharing ideas at the very beginning you can see the two blue men there mounting a bulb by themselves this is like simplification of the fact that ideas should be shared openly from the very beginning and it is at the end of the day a matter of collaboration where like the ends on the bottom of the slide are doing something all together that nobody of them could do on and on so that's just the claim of the importance of let's say soft collaboration skills and soft collaboration I would say dynamics when it comes to opening up international collaboration through open education practices that was it I think didn't want to go in detail but just to pinpoint a few possible let's say a few of the possible relations between open education the way we are considering it now and internationalization and international cooperation do we again I'm asking people if you have some questions to put them there and in the meantime while we wait I'm asking the secretariat if Andrew Lowe from the Open University UK has joined the meeting wasn't there before let me see if he's there in the meantime Estela if you don't mind I would like to ask you what's your opinion about the relation between or the use of open educational resources within virtual mobility schemes do you think that can represent thinking about it while you were talking from our perspective and the teams that at least Lithuanian at Lithawa University in the project teams that we had like six to seven projects virtual mobility and we had what was the approach based on this experience I can say that we looked more at the virtual mobility from institutional perspective and our virtual mobility schemes they focus more on formal education and here I see from our perspective then the open educational resources come only as the resource you may use it or you may not use it while you are implementing formal education courses or at least courses in higher education which are recognized by other universities so from this perspective then the open educational resources are only the resources that you use during these courses of course there may be if you look at virtual mobility that comes from institutional perspective if you look at it from the student or learner perspective where you can learn an open course online then of course these courses may also be either with open educational resources or without them or the course may be as open educational resource here so there I see two different approaches if you look more at the higher education as the formal solution who implements virtual mobility scheme then open educational resources are only the resource if you look more as different open courses that are full of open educational resources and if there is virtual collaboration there then it may be different approach so there are different perspectives and different understandings as I see from different representatives or different projects when you define what is virtual mobility and if you don't look at it very much from institutional perspective then of course there may be open educational based virtual mobility scheme however in higher education when everything comes to recognition then these courses are either jointly delivered or either just delivered for the abroad students or receiving the abroad students then these open educational resources are just a regular resource either to be used or not to be used I'm not sure if I answered your question innovation possibility so thank you very much that's in line with my thinking so if you don't mind I'm asking the participants we have 28 participants up until now and I would like them to put your question please put your questions in the chat I cannot see them also because the chat is very small so I'm also asking the secretariat colleagues if you can spot some questions just ah thank you better now so now I should be able to see maybe the questions but in between I hope Lisa you are still with us even if I see your your image stopped I have a question for myself for both Susan and Lisa and it has to do with well the international side of open education in the sense that I know Lisa you have been studying institutional strategies for openness and Susan I guess you are aware of a lot of let's say collaboration strategies for open education so members probably of the OEC doing things together so my question is do you think that something more could be done to put open education as one of the issues of international cooperation among universities and among educational institutions or is this something that should be first digested at the individual institutional level and then brought into the international cooperation arena in collaboration at an earlier stage than the institutional appropriation of the idea because you say that by that you can learn from others mistake and from others previous work that's very interesting Lisa I know you have been studying both European and American universities so what's your view about that I will jump in with that one I kind of I go back and forth because I you know being inside of a higher education for many years we tend to talk within ourselves talk within our group talk within our own university and then we share but often when you do take that path you find that others may have already overcome obstacles and may have resources that you spent time and money to develop so I would like to see the collaboration happening sooner than later I think it's you know facilitates a better use of resources and time etc etc and I have just one of the things the year of open to me has created is networking people have come together that would have otherwise not even known the other existed so I think collaboration and sharing realizing what each other's doing is still kind of lagging behind I think we still need more activities like year of open like open education week and distance learning week more of these kind of events to bring us all together so I would like to see collaboration earlier I think a lot of it is context I think a lot of institutions are just now exploring the ideas about how they can become more open and so they're looking at it from the perspective of where is the positive impact of going open and how can I get more of a competitive advantage how can I meet my student needs in a better way so I think a lot of it depends on the social and political situations of the different countries at least from my perspective when I looked at Canada and I looked at the US there were a lot of similarities but at the same time there were differences in terms of their strategies for OER in Europe it was more I actually looked at the open University UK how they were using MOOCs to channel students using open education courses to channel them into becoming paying students I think there's a lot of a lot of it is about perspective in the US they were looking at how can we reduce costs for our students so they started to use OER in order to reduce the cost for students but at the same time they found that by doing so they could create really learner centered content and so they were starting to really redesign their courses to become more learner centered which was a real bonus for the students and also for the faculty and there were lots of opportunities for them to learn from not just the students but from each other so I would really agree with what Susan was talking about you know there needs to be more of these opportunities, communities of practice to come together to collaborate and to share resources and it really makes a lot of sense to me so I just read an email from our last speaker who is coming I think we had an understanding of the timing but in the meantime we have a question by Irina the president who is asking a very difficult question in fact basically related to the school sector so who should be authoring OER for schools she says some say private publishers in order to secure the quality of these resources while others promote more community development ideas and teach a training on OER development and adaptation so it's the usual question which is valid for school still a bit also valid for higher education so I'm also curious to know what is our panelist opinion on this who should be authoring or mainly authoring OER for schools Estela you have an opinion on this in countries like Italy I spent half of my morning I was telling Irina before talking to teachers in a school in high school at the moment discussing exactly about this the issue there is what do we mean by professional community a teacher is a professional in teaching but maybe he's not a professional in producing content so it's not so straightforward at least in a number of countries you might need some fine tuning of the concept looking at OER who is the source who wants to be developed I always say that it shouldn't be given to the private publishers because it usually is closed when the publishers or at least companies come in here usually because they look more or focus more on the business model here and I really would say that these OER that are being developed for schools and licenses and they should be the author of them should be the teachers themselves because usually even it will look who creates resources for the teachers the teachers themselves so I think these teachers should be the authors and no publishers should be involved here at least this is my opinion I've seen at work very successful both ways mostly with faculty and schools developing their own but what I also have found has been very interesting is when students have an opportunity to contribute often the students are well they are the consumers but often they are also in the industry or working in the industry and to have them contributing as well makes it more meaningful to that particular group we also have some publishers in the U.S. that are starting to jump on the open resource wagon so to speak and are trying to be more accommodating and open etc etc but I think the publishers are just now getting it they still don't quite get it and they still have the mindset of the money and the closed licenses etc so it's mostly been in the U.S. developed inside the schools I see Frank's comments about OER being developed by professional communities I do agree with that if I could expand on that professional subject matter expert communities for instance faculty faculty are typically subject matter experts within their particular content when faculty are involved you know you've got more of a quality product and especially if they are currently teaching we'll see product that is kept up and is more quality I know it is you so I will put on your presentation now so we can have some 15 minutes presentation by you and then some final words by all the speakers maybe a quick question let me get your presentation I should read it in the meantime as usual of course participants can go on discussing in the chat Andrew can you start your mic and video we can welcome we cannot see you though but we can hear you go ahead for the 10 minutes in fact we all look forward to hear your answer to the question on the title of your presentation thank you very much Andrew in fact we have still 25 people listening and I think we have just had a few dropouts but really not many the perfect pre-conclusion pre-conclusive presentation in fact you are putting a number of let's say delicate points and interesting so the video should just be arriving yes okay so firstly if I had a clock behind me it would say 5 past 1 I'm so sorry I have the time zone do I still have 10 minutes to rocket through this presentation is that okay? as you point out I mean most of these things are debatable and you can find evidence pro and cons the every statement so I would like to ask yes when I was asked to do this presentation I was having a fairly bad day and part of me was thinking it's failed and I'm pretty miserable and fairly despondent about where we're going and for some of you there won't be new news in here but I'm hoping for some insights that perhaps those that haven't been following the recent announcements from the consortium and so on there might be some new news so let's move on so just to check that we're all using a shared understanding of open education I'm sure for many of you it will mean lots of things but I'm using the rather formal and precise definition of open education to mean that it sits with the 5 hours and the 5 hours are that you can retain reuse, revise, remix and redistribute the content and although these can be seen as quite religious goals they are not in a sense the goals as far as I'm concerned and many people are concerned as a end point in themselves the real goal is to make sure that people have access to education that might not otherwise have it and I think the reason I was beginning to be rather concerned about that goal is whether actually open education has managed to achieve that goal or whether it was going to achieve the goal in the longer term in some senses OER should be fine it's a grassroots methodology and it's a grassroots crowd and it's a grassroots crowd that wants to do a good it's powered by technologies and interconnected internet services which means that that crowd is well armed to potentially meet that long-term goal I think the problem in terms of whether it will grow is will it grow enough and will it grow in the right direction and could it actually do unforeseen harm why do I say that or why do I think there might be a worry so this I guess lots of people won't be a big surprise but my major concern is around the impact of MOOCs I think they're well intended they're run by well intended groups and I think they probably have similar goals or at least some of the goals overlap with the OER movement but although they may be well intended and maybe this is not used to you and it's certainly not used to me they're usually not OERs and the most important thing that most people value about their outputs is that the thing that's most valued the certificate or the marker of completion or confidence is rarely free they're hardly able to claim they are democratic or inclusive they tend to be clubs that you have to pay to join or be rich enough to own or in a position to be able to own and it's not clear that they aren't in danger to some extent centralizing them there is some evidence and I obviously can use evidence from our own platform FutureLearn but I think it's probably true of some of the other platforms in terms of serving that goal of serving the educationally unserved it's not clear to me that they are serving the educationally underserved and there's certainly a danger that they're serving particularly the bandwidth well served and so without intending it they may be unintentionally smothering both techniques of the OER movement as well as its overall goal so I sat and thought about this for a bit and I looked at some of the outcomes of the Lubeana agreement and the Cape Town 10 years on agreement and thought what are the really big things and certainly the OU some of the things that we think we ought to be doing so one of the issues is around support what can we do to facilitate or support people that are working with OERs and a critical one is if I search now on Google a free course on maths the chances are that nine out of ten of them will come from a commercial MOOC provider who are not running OER in an OER model so a critical challenge to the OER movement is a massive improvement of understanding of metadata search engine optimization and understanding of what search engine optimization means means speaking out of the silo I'm not necessarily doing a good job here doing what I'm preaching which is we often talk to ourselves about this but we don't talk in the mainstream about the OER movement and in particular maybe one of the things we haven't done yet well enough is to make sure that we are engaging the content with major public platforms like Wikipedia or Facebook certainly our small experiments we've done at the OU with Facebook have proved to massively increase the awareness of what we're doing on a scale that we just did not predict where OER might need to do more in terms of support in terms of those that are participating we've got to find we have some platforms that can deliver the ability to allow people to make OER content but sometimes you go to these platforms and they're broken including our own sometimes sometimes they're not easy to use and certainly there isn't a one stop shop to go to that allows you to make OERs quickly and easily that I'm aware of and perhaps the OER world needs a better form of production support and in terms of where those groups do have OER production tools they're not necessarily available or made aware to those that are most underserved or most underrepresented it's not a fault of those platforms it's just we perhaps need to do a better job at promoting these platforms and others or building new ones where else might OER need to do more I think it's around the motivation factor and for the user what we do know about MOOCs is it's the certificates and the badges which people most love and we know that when we've introduced credentialing and badging onto our platforms it's produced the most significant uptake of use when people can walk away with a certificate in the case of OpenLearn they walk away with a certificate for free OERU and Sailor are doing amazing work in the credentialed world certification and micro credentialing there's much less of that work going on away from the HE world in the TVET world I've yet to see but maybe I'm unaware of the work that's being done around micro credentialing and badging technical and vocational education it would be great to see a lot more of that again the other issue is to do with quality markers I think we need OpenUpEd is a good start making quality markers around free and open education materials but we may need to be more imaginative about thinking about perhaps crowd based quality markers where the crowd can recommend and bless and promote excellence in the domain where else might OERU need to do more well I think in terms of the provider I think a lot of providers are still in a some senses often confused for themselves why they're bothering to provide OERU beyond wishing to do a social good and a piece of altruism I think one of the issues that we've got to get much better at is promoting the business models and the benefits beyond altruism and ideological commitment they need to be really better articulated business models of being open and we need to get more projects weaned off project funding and looking at more sustainable business models and it would be great if we were blessed with platforms that could also deliver better analytics around OERU Finally I suggested that we might be doing harm with OERU and you'd think by releasing open educational content into the public frame you couldn't do any harm but actually there is a slight danger and I think it is a perennial danger that we have to maturely work through and this is the tension between technoromantics and technophobes so we don't want to be technophobes and there is a slight danger with the MOOC movement the ex MOOCs have generated a view of e-learning which is relatively flat and passive and broadcast and non-participatory and non- actively engaging and reflecting and feeding back there is a slight danger I think with the massive progress that's been made with open textbooks that the whole OERU movement becomes rather dominated by a rather flat non-participatory non-engaging non-digital experience beyond the delivery mechanism itself but at the other end we have the dangers of everybody's technoromantic and we exclude those by making OERU's which are only usable in a meaningful way in a bandwidth which environment and so treading that boundary is going to be quite difficult but there are some real dangers that OERUs could do by either excluding by being too bandwidth intense or being too conservative by flattening the learning experience because the easy thing to do is to release e-books that's me done, I hope I did it in 10 minutes and I'm really sorry to have been so late I'm not sure if there's anything I'm going to leave it to Susan and I think now Lisa had to leave so I'm asking Stayla, Susan and myself if you have a comment on what some comments on what Andrew presented in terms of the I would say the delicate equilibrium between something which can be extremely powerful for the good of learners and mankind but also extremely I don't want to say harmful but in the best chances useless and costly, let's say, for most of us. What do you think, Susan and Stella? Thank you very much. Yeah, I agree. And I would say that I do feel like Andrew some days when I get up and just think that things are failing and this is getting more difficult and more challenging. But then I get the results from the year of open and events such as this where it is really not failing. It is still a very new movement even though it's been around 10, 15 years, 20 years. It's still fairly new because I think so many of us are still working out processes and how we do things and how we collaborate and how we grow. So I will agree with Andrew. So I have to admit, I was in a particularly bad, I have to admit, I was in a bad and despondent mood on the day I was asked to think about doing the presentation. And I have taken an instance which is attempting to be perhaps not very delicately or diplomatically or indeed fairly to the amazing work and energy that people put into OERs. But I think the reason for being in the UK would call it EOR-like. This rather critical view is in some senses to draw a line in the sand about where we really need to focus to make OERs as effective as they can be given what I perceive as a unintentional but real threat from the MOOC world. I maybe, yeah, let me, yeah, just a couple of sentences. I can share from our Lithuanian perspective here that when we really talk about OER, I think at least in our country it is still very much a process that needs to be understood correctly. Yeah, I agree that, I mean, I think it's important that this is probably the main conclusion out of the study we run for the JRC European Commission on open education policies across all European member states and the luck we have in Europe is that countries like Lithuania or Italy or Spain can learn from countries like the UK or others. Even France, I would say, where we are more advanced in terms of experimentation, let's say, of OER possibilities. So I agree that in some contexts, let's say, awareness raising is still very important and let's say we have the luxury of being able to learn from others within our European context. In the meantime, in the chat, an interesting discussion is going on on open business models. And in fact, we almost provided a new title for the next year of open on opening business models and I would say opening up institutions also because at the end of the day, what I see many times is open educators within closed institutions and this is very sad because typically the educators either changes institution or gets, let's say, gets more close than they motivated. So I think the institutional level is very important, let's say, and I have an interesting comment or question to Andrew by Irina. I'm reading it for you, Andrew. Would you agree that there is already a tangible longer-term impact of OER development and use for academic community development? And in the OUKs, for example, how could you describe this long-term impact of OER development? In fact, what I see and I also would like, like Frank who is living now would like to participate in some open business models for university, let's say, discussion, which I think this is, I don't know if this has taken place already outside countries like the UK, but for example, from my university in Spain, we have an open education policy at the moment, freshly announced, freshly launched and it's probably the first in the country. So and of course, we've been inspired by Edinburgh, by the OUK, but I think such a discussion would really help the, in general, not only Europe, but at least for sure in Europe would help the, let's say, raising a bit the bar of the objectives of open education within the institutions. Thank you very much. We have three minutes left. So the university's been providing OERs in the classic sense, openly licensed. We use a non-commercial share alike license, so it's not a pure license, but it's pretty good license for 10 years. This is our 10th year of operation. Now, one thing we have is a business model doing that, it works for us. It generates several forms of business benefits to us. We do it for social mission reasons, but we extract business revenue out of it, literally money, registrations, brand, and some other forms of assets. I'm very happy to come back on another occasion if people wanted to know more, although we do publish our policy openly under, I hope, Creative Commons license, so people can look at what the business dynamics of what we do are. So we have a worst-case cost-neutral provision of OERs from the Open University. We have about six million people a year visiting our OERs on our platform and on Open Learn, and another four or five million on other platforms as well. So from an OER point of view, we have an internal consistent business model, and we're very happily, and do, I think, share it, but it's not going to be the same for everyone. It's also causing very interesting disruptions about changing the way we think about helping people come into the institution through acquired prior learning on OERs. So we're experimenting fairly positively with using OERs as part of a credit transfer route into, not credit transfer, as part of a required prior learning experience beforehand. So there are definitely tangible business impacts on the Open University. There are definitely positive disruptions to the way that we're thinking about producing content. There are definitely really large opportunities to think about. We currently only release 5% of our content under OER license, and the rest is kept locked behind doors. There are major opportunities for us to think about using that other content in other ways. So in terms of business models at the OU, it's not perfect, but it's strong, and we're very happily talk about that reasonably openly, if not all of the details over the money, but certainly the dynamics of what makes up the business model. In terms of, I think there was a very specific, Arianna was asking about the use for supporting academic community development. So we've produced some open courses on how to write open courses. We've produced some open courses on how to search engine, optimize your content, because we think that's really important. Those things are available and I could share afterwards if people want to know about them. And we have, I think, not been as good as an institution at encouraging our own academics to use OERs. So there is a slight danger and never quote me on this, that the OU is telling the world to use OERs but then doesn't use it themselves for their own teaching. And I would love to see the Open University UK do more of that. And I know people like Martin Weller are pushing to do much more of that in the future. Thank you, Estela. Thank you very much. And so I think we have now, Andrew, please, if you wanna say a last word. Yeah. Thank you very much. A very, very good hint, in fact. And I also like very much. Absolutely. First, I would just like to thank everyone, thank Eden for this opportunity to talk about the Year of Open and what it has meant to us during 2017 but also to look forward to the future. And I think a lot of the conversations we've had today, I've been making notes during the presentations of people to contact for 2018. I think we are set up to have some great conversations next year on actionable items such as open business models, open institutions, so that we can be more sharing so that we can share with those that are just developing their OERs. So thank you very much for the opportunity. I'll look forward to all of you during this. So I would like to say a final word on behalf of myself and of Diana Andone, who also from the Eden Executive Board had to jump on a plane, cannot be with us for this, couldn't be with us for the longer part of the seminar. So I think the seminar was quite interesting. We were able to look at open education from different perspectives, which was a bit the challenge at the very beginning from the perspective of the same, international cooperation, virtual mobility. We heard a bit about augmented reality and about how the technological solutions can move things forward in terms of open education. And then we heard about an update from the OEC and from Eden about many things which happened this year and we closed there. I would say with a not too negative view by end. I think it's a falsely negative view. At the end of the day, I think if you look really within your slides, you can find some seriously positive signs for the future. So I would like to thank you on behalf of Eden for your participation into this event, which again has been recorded and will be made available on the Eden website as soon as possible. Tomorrow, as you can see from the chat, we're gonna have a webinar entitled Designing Learning Spaces in Odiel at the same time in the same room. And you can see there the link. So for the ones of you who can be with us also tomorrow, thank you very much in advance and happy European Distance Learning Week to everybody. Bye-bye. Bye-bye, thank you.