 Good evening, good morning, good afternoon, whatever time you have there where you are. I'm based in Sweden, so for me it is 10 o'clock p.m., so it is a good evening for my side. I am Erbosja Nilsson. I will be the chair for this session, webinar number 11, Building Capacity, Developing Supportive Policy, and before I introduce the speakers, I know many of you who are speakers in this session, but I would also like to introduce myself. I am a professor in innovation in open online learning and I'm an independent consultant, researcher, review, quality reviewer in the field of open and flexible business learning, and of course OER and open education. In Sweden, I'm the vice president for the Swedish Association for Distance Education. I am, as many of you know, in the ICD board and also the chair for the third amended period for the ICD OER Advocacy Committee. I'm an ambassador for OER with ICDE. I'm also in the ICD board and also in the ICD Quality Network. I'm also working for International Council on Batches and Credentials, a rather new council started this year actually, or 2020, sorry, and in Europe, I'm in the European Distance and E-Learning Network. Some of you all are saying all the international organizations and the board member with them. I have a university experience, it's mainly from Lund University here in Sweden, but also from many of the other universities where I work as a consultant. So it's a great pleasure for me to share this session where we have a very interesting presentation. Those webinars are organized like that, that we take all the sessions in a row. I know that there have been some differences. I have my self-experience after those two days, but it was suggested from the guidelines that we take all the presentations in a row and then we have the last minutes for a common discussion because maybe some of the presentations are overlapping each other, so we can have maybe longer and deeper conversations and it's also more easy to catch up with the time spots we have. So each of you, you have 20 minutes and then we have the last minutes as I said for the discussion. I'm not sure if you have done it already. You will present if you have uploaded your slides in the connect area. If not, please do so because I know that participants will have a look even afterwards. So it would be great resource to collect everything there. It is very easy to do it in the platform and you just put the link where you have the slides. And yes, Lisa reminded us that we have the chat and as usually, please just introduce yourself where you are from and also if you have any questions, put your questions in the chat. So I will try to keep an eye on that. Do we have the repertoire here in the room? I haven't seen it so far. No one? Okay. So I will try to check the chat and yes, anything else to think about before we get started. The webinars are reported as you know and I think we have done all the practical things now. So again, a warm welcome to each and everyone attending this webinar. I see we have now 38 participants and a special welcome of course to the speakers and the co-authors for the presentations. So we start with Rory McGrath from Atabasca in Canada who is a UNESCO OER share. And you Rory, we talk about blockchain and OER. So with that, I would like to give the floor to you. So a warm welcome to you. Thank you very much for that kind introduction. But can you see my slides? Okay. Yes, they are perfect. Okay, I'll start off then. It's good to be here and it's great to be at another OER global conference and sorry we can't meet all together, but I'm sure most of us are going to survive this in any case. So today I'm going to talk about two things. Why OER are good for blockchain and why blockchain is good for open educational resources. And to start off just to let you know all these slides are under Creative Commons Attribution License. However, some of the images are under fair dealing in Canada or fair use in the US and other jurisdictions. So just to be aware of that. First, I'm going to tell you what blockchain is. I'm assuming that everyone does not have a full grip on it. And so the short form version is that it's a distributed ledger that provides a way for information to be recorded and shared by a community. So the community could be the creditors, the institutions, the employers, the students and or the teachers. And they use the blockchain in order to communicate the information. And it can be a public blockchain or it can be a private blockchain. So I think everyone here knows what a ledger is and that's typical old fashioned ledger. The key difference with the blockchain is that it's a distributed ledger and it involves multiple copies of the ledger stored on different computers. And the best example, the best known example of the use of blockchain is of course Bitcoin. And again this is based on this distributed ledger and it's a specific kind of distributed ledger called a blockchain. I'll be talking about blockchain for education today for open education resources and not making any further references to Bitcoin and that application of blockchain. So we can say it's a distributed ledger. It's not controlled by anyone. It's shared in a person-to-person network and it can be accessible from any node on the network. It facilitates two or two or more people to collaborate among themselves without the need for a centralized authority. The records are validated in blocks. And each new block contains a hash of previous block creating a chain. Altering earlier blocks alters the hash and breaks the chain. And a typical chain is put down below. So it's very difficult to break into or to decipher. So what happens on the block chain stays on the block chain. So once it's on there, it's there forever. It can't be deleted or changed. Transactions are easily traced. It's organized chronologically. So the first block is always there. The second block is put on top. The third, the fourth, the fifth. And they're all timestamped so you know when the block was created. And it renders it so there's no need for a third party to verify it. So it works as a secure private network on decentralized exchanges. It supports identity verification and secure certification. For example, credits at a university. It has enhanced performance and it's scalable up to millions and more users. So the way it works is explained in this chart from Amir Oseek. So you want to send money to a friend. It creates a block. The block is broadcast to every party in the network. Those in the network approve the transaction and validate it. They basically say this is a real transaction. The block is then added to the chain which provides a permanent non-reputable. And that's important non-reputable. You cannot change it ever and transparent record of the transaction. And then in the Bitcoin analysis, Ben receives the money from Alice. So what we're talking about a blockchain, the main features are it's decentralized. It's distributed. It's immutable. It's secure. And it's timestamped. However, there are some problems with blockchain. It's a big system. And any big system as it gets bigger, you can have unexpected failures. Another problem in implementing blockchain is if your present system is working, maybe not working at optimum performance, but working, why change it? And another big problem, and maybe one of the biggest problems for blockchain, is that the encryption is permanent. So you need a key to access your blockchain. And if you lose the key, it is gone forever. No one can access that blockchain at that point. Other problems is persistence. And what we were saying before about you can't change it. Even fake content can stay there forever. Or illegal content. Or just unwanted content. You may have had something you put on a blockchain in the past. You don't want anyone to know about it. It's always there. Leaked personal data that somebody else might put on about you. It's always there. So these are significant problems. Other problems, technical, is the network maintenance costs can be quite big. The transaction speed can be very slow. In the case of Bitcoin, it takes minutes quite often for one simple transaction. Storage stored all around the world and different places have different storage regimes. The threat of regulatory intervention is real. The governments are going to come in and take control over it. And of course, hackers. There have been some cases of hacking of the blockchain. One of the biggest problems it's mentioned by people about blockchain is that of energy use. And the idea of blockchain on a public blockchain, using proof of work, there are different types of ways of implementing blockchain. Proof of work, proof of stake, proof of authority, proof of identity. And as you can see, a simple server uses very little energy. But once you get into a centralized system, it's more energy. And the enterprise blockchain, which would be the one that I would think being used in open education resources, uses more. And the other bigger ones are public blockchain that isn't proof of work. And finally, the other. So there are major problems still with energy use that have to be resolved. Now, I won't at this conference tell you what open educational resources are. So why do we need OER for blockchain? Well, scalability, accessibility, DRM, and digital licenses, or in calling it digital rights management, I prefer to call it digital restrictions management. So we can have a global knowledge commons, where the institutions provide long term access to and preservation of content, and researchers and research communities provide the content for peer review. And with scalable solutions, it's only possible with open data or OER, OA, or OS. When you're talking about international collaborations, without open education resources, without open licenses, it becomes very problematic and very difficult. Even you put it on a blockchain, this blockchain, well, this can't be used in this country, it can't be used in that country, because of the international differences in copyright. And so there are exponential problems with licensing. If you put any kind of restrictive license on a content, it becomes very difficult if it starts being used by multiple users in multiple jurisdictions. So OER can be a major benefit for blockchain. The benefits of blockchain are best achieved through open implementations. And the open source industry has blockchain. So it takes in industry standards, the blockchain protocols, and industry blockchains. And they can all be connected together if they're openly licensed. Access and affordability, it needs to be inexpensive when it's needed by the learner. And again, open education resources free, a blockchain that is free is essential. And we all know that commercial content is not our property. Digital rights management, these locks they put on a commercial content, they own and control their content. So it's very, very important to make sure that they own and control their content. We don't. They own the content, they control it. And it's, as we say, don't control it with blockchain. How can we use commercial content on there? And of course, we've had some major problems with the commercial content and putting digital locks onto operating systems. And there's some that we remember from about 10 or 12 years ago, the great Amazon purge and Google's removal of animal farm, etc. So digital rights management software needs deep permissions into the operating system. And it can stop normal operating system functions. So it's very difficult to implement these using a blockchain. And of course, digital licenses prohibit you by law from doing this. Owners don't have any liability. They can use, they can use the product however they want, not however you want. And you have a privilege to use the product. You don't own it. So I'll quote David Wiley here that the openness is the skeleton key that unlocks every attempt at vendor control and lock in. And so OER for blockchain, it becomes a huge facilitator of using blockchain. Now, why blockchain for OER? Well, here are some faculty concerns about OER that we've heard that they're not being attributed, that they're disregarding open copyright requirements. So if they put an ND license on it, people disregard it or non-commercial or even SA, they disregard it. They misuse the public work. The sustainability of the OER, they're very concerned about it, that it can stay on and be used and accessible. And faculty do not like to pay predatory publishers for the privilege of publishing in open, with an open license. Other concerns, they want their records secured and permanent. For example, institutions can disappear. And we see that happening that now with many institutions not surviving the COVID epidemic. There's an OER networks for scholars. The records are almost incorruptible and changes can be tracked. And these are all addressed by blockchain. Secure records, a good network of OER. The records are incorruptible. They will always know who created the object and what the original license was. And these changes, any changes can be tracked. Every single change can be tracked. But problems from OER, well, there's high operational costs, insufficient copyright protection, there's barriers to sharing resources, and quite often with the poor resource quality. So the solutions to some of these OER problems that blockchain brings is tracking and tracing. You know, every time the object is changed, proper attribution. Attribution goes with the blockchain right to the very end of the chain. Sustainability, it lasts there forever, persistent. Blockchains are persistent. Publishing time, the timestamp, make sure that everyone knows where it's come, when it's coming from. And there is no single point of failure because it's distributed on the network. So some of the advantages are there, the self-sovereignty, that is people using the blockchain, they're independent, they're self-sovereign. You can trust the blockchain. The provenance, you know the provenance where it came from. It's transparent, available to all to see. It's immutable. Again, I've mentioned this is not always good, but for most instances, it being unchangeable is important. And bio-unchangeable means you can change and adapt it, but the older version always remains there. Each change brings a new version with a timestamp. Disintermediation means you don't need a central authority and it enables collaboration internationally and between institutions. So blockchain addresses three problems that OER have. Quite often, too many, and this is a big problem for OER, they're hidden from view and inaccessible. People can't find them. OER on the web, they lack permanence. They come and they go. People put them up and the URL changes, the institution changes, they clean up the website, they're not permanent. And quite often, Creative Commons IP is not recognized, that people do not recognize the restrictions that some authors put on them. With blockchain, we know who they are and when they did it. So it eliminates the need for centralized repositories. And plagiarism becomes obsolete. Because if you change something and pretend that it's yours, the blockchain can go back and show that it wasn't you. Other things, OER records secured and permanent. It puts in the publication date, the location, authorship. Any change in a transaction gives a new value. The change requires consensus. Every node must accept it. And the author is always attributed. OER files will also include attribution. There's less resistance to remixing OER because of this. OER records are permanent regardless of changes. OER publishing networks can be created by scholars. And OER records will be almost incorruptible. So the process is outlined here where we can create, adopt, and share our open educational resources. And we can find, find them, evaluate them, edit them, enhance them, or adopt them. And we can prepare them, search them, repurpose them, add value, publish them, and then they can be remade again in different blocks on the chain. So blockchain solves the centralization issue. It's distributed. It's a network of trusted entities or gatekeeping nodes. It has access to content with a public key. And it's verification and validation based on quality. So it activates a decoding mechanism, which is, by the way, a Creative Commons criterion. It uploads a new version and maintains trackability. It's posted on a ledger. And when CC by ND or NC, then it cannot be changed at all. So it allows the implementation of the Creative Commons licenses. OER quality and copyright are guarded. There's no need of centralization. It reduces the time to publication. And it increases availability because it's decentralized and distributed. Now the OER distributed management platform will have user management, resource creation, resource management, copyright management, a virtual currency exchange, and learning certification management. So to conclude, Blockchain loves OER and OER loves Blockchain. But we must know we're in the experimental stage and we have a lot to learn in implementing OER for Blockchain and Blockchain for OER. So thank you very much for your attention. Greatly appreciated. So thank you so much, Rory. It was really, really inspiring and it brings some new perspectives, as we were saying, for the issue of OER and how we work with OER. So let's discuss that further on, but in the end of the session, there are already some questions here in the chat for you. So thanks again. And please remember to put your questions and reflections in the chat for all the speakers. So then we will move to the next one. There are several authors, but I think it will be Tel Amil presenting this one. So it is Tel Amil, Leonardo Vabera de Cruz, Dariana Salas, Maria Viola, De Bruces, Juliana Puerta, Sebastian Zapatero, and Natalia Larea Montaño. Maybe not right pronunciation. I'm sorry for that. So Tel Amil is also UNESCO OER share. And the presentation will be about civilians, capitalists and open education, large-scale data from Latin America. So the floor is yours. Well, thank you. Thanks for the introduction and for the great company on this panel. So what we're going to be talking about today is a bit of our research in the past five or six years, where we've been looking at the technologies that are around open education and open educational resources. And I'd like to present to you some data, some new data that we just launched last month on Latin America, South America specifically, and try to make the case for why we have to worry as open educators regarding issues of surveillance and privacy and things of the sort. So well, the obvious thing to happen, and I'll try to not make it so obvious by talking about my neck of the woods and talking a bit about South America. But the obvious thing to happen over the past couple of years is we've been in this COVID crisis. And we know from all the reports, including some presented here at Open Education Global, that we've had to deal with this in many ways, including teacher-professional development and getting into platforms and doing all sorts of of strategies. And in Brazil, for example, this wasn't very different. This capture here from this screen capture from the right says that the Ministry of Education in Brazil started finding ways to get internet access to people with that didn't have a good financial means. So we realized that a lot of people don't have access to the internet. We realized that a lot of people have good access to the internet. And we had a lot of problems dealing with a lot of issues in a new scenario where pretty much everybody had to be online to learn with the exception of very rare cases where we had printed materials and so forth, which is a reality in many cases where we're using more legacy technologies like television and radio. So often in Open, we talk a lot about content, right? OER is sort of our mainstay. We talk about OER quite a lot. And that's very important. And that includes talking about licenses and repositories and services and the like. We often also talk about practices and the things that are related to OER, but also practices that are not necessarily related to OER, but are open as well. And we talk about how we can enact these. And this has been, I think, a common topic in many of our discussions. And they're incredibly important. But we talk less. And this is coming to be important now because of the pandemic. We talk less about tools. And we talk less about the technology that surrounds this environment of Open. And I think it's important to realize that we've, you know, we've always talked a bit about it in terms of repositories and the like, and Laurie just talked about blockchain and applications. But I think one of the things we need to do more now because of the scenario that we're in is to think about the overall ecosystem of technology that supports Open. And that's an important part of the OER recommendation is that it goes beyond some of the more common themes that we talk about and includes, for example, discussion on one of the elements that I want to bring forward here, which is this idea of when we design policies or we design for where we are and for open education in general, we need to be worried about infrastructure and related services. And we need to worry about data protection. And so this is not lost, I think, in the overall zeitgeist of open education today and including in the recommendation from UNESCO that came out in 2019. So what is sort of the issue at hand? What are we worried about and what's what are some of the concerns? So around the world, but especially in poor countries during the pandemic, we have found that a lot of educational systems have looked for support in getting their students online, their students and their teachers online. And they turn to basically two large corporations. One of them is Microsoft offering a service called Microsoft 365 or used to be known as Office 365. These names change every two months or so. And also Google with Google Suite or Google Classroom or now Google Workspace for Education have been two of these very big platforms that have entered the educational space exponentially during the COVID crisis, but also have been demanded by educational systems and institutions. And they are part of this acronym that's called GAFEM, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft that are, I think, well known. And they are these intermediators. There are these these entities that stand between the promise of a dissimilar mediated internet. It's basically impossible to do anything online, starting with your cell phone, which is owned by the operating systems, owned by Google or Apple. It's very hard for anybody to do anything educational that doesn't involve one of these five entities and just general life without these five entities. I won't spend too much time to to this effect because I think it's common knowledge now we've we've been alerted over this of this issue for the past few years. But let me talk about why we think this is a problem for open education before I show you some of the data that I want to share with you. So I want to share three basic problems which I think are incredibly important for us. And one of them is reducing choice and platform agnosticism. So the idea of open standards and open formats and open tools is a really important part for us in open education. We want to be able to choose and to move freely. We don't want to lock students into platforms, we don't want to lock students into systems. And what we've seen, particularly in the in the area in Latin America and investment in education is is that economic policies, the reduced spending in education have made it management and the IT infrastructures in institutions and in school systems in the region become downsized. And it has favored the growth of this educational technology market, which has been only very happy to join in and take over this this space. And this is a citation from from an article from one of our colleagues that is a co author here, we were studying higher education institutions in the region. So downsizing and reducing expenditures in education leads to quickly to reduce the investment in IT and essential services that are given up to the private market. We have also conducted a lot of interviews with folks in IT in educational institutions. And I'll just put some of these very small findings here to highlight some of the problems is is if we're interested in open and one of the consequences of downsizing is that a lot of the initiatives that are around free and open source software which are an important element of open education get downsized and they lose. So one of the rhetoric one of the elements of the rhetoric around adoption of these platforms is that it's just another initiative. It's another source. It's another LMS. It's another system that can coexist with others. But what we've been finding here is that a lot of the open source initiatives that exist in institutions slowly dissipate when other private initiatives come into play. So it's not exactly a level playing field even though the quality of the offerings might be better for floss or at least just as good. So this is just a quick sentence from an interview with one of these IT folks from universities. It says you know we're led to the closing of the floss initiative and it was a very clear response. You know the partnership with the university with Microsoft led us to close down our free and open source initiatives. Another way in which we reduce choice and agnosticism is that we become slaves to platforms as a service or PAS or basically an institution or an educational system only controls data and some of the applications that are used but everything else is managed externally. And this is another quote from one of the IT administrators that says basically without the pandemic we would not be using Office 365. So there's been a huge move to these platforms into private corporations because of the pandemic as well and they lead to the kinds of things we were mentioning earlier. Finally there is this idea of the reducing choice agnosticism is also related to the idea of zero rating and that's particularly problematic for poor nations. So the idea of zero rating is that once you reach a quota of access to the internet which is a common thing for poor nations you get a free access to certain systems so you may have free access to WhatsApp or you may have free access to Facebook but ironically you might not have free access to your own institutional website so you might get access to to WhatsApp but not to say your university side for example. And so when you get this free or zero rating access you have free access to certain things but not others and that also reduces choice and concentrates people in the same set of platforms and services and so we've been seeing these things happen that slowly reduce the options that universities and school systems have and concentrate us around platforms from private corporations and that is should be a huge problem for us as open educators. The second thing is platform loyalty which is related to the first but a little bit different in the sense that you get people to be accustomed to using only a particular service to the point where they don't even know others exist and that's us as open educators is a huge problem because again we're interested in opening up possibilities and not concentrating them as much and usually when I speak about this I needed a lot to talk about this but I have been blessed with one phrase from the director for education from Google in Brazil and he kind of explains what we always knew in one very simple phrase which is an advantage of offering the service to schools is to promote loyalty early on and as again as open educators this idea of promoting loyalty to Google for eight year olds or nine year olds should be something that scares us quite a bit because what we're basically doing it's concentrating all our educational tools and systems in one platform that's going to be a platform for life basically if you get children fairly young involved in these platforms. The third which is probably the most important one for us is the idea of losing control of our technology and also losing control of privacy and most people don't read terms of use but eventually we have to and so we did this analysis for Google Street for Education and Microsoft 365 published a large report on it and one of the things which I think is is really quite important for educators is this idea that institutions and school systems often they often give out this this essential control to these these businesses in thinking that these that Microsoft or Google are going to be responsible for everything and they don't have anything to worry about but truthfully this is not quite the case these platforms are only responsible to a certain degree and the school systems and institutions are also a client and they're a data controller so they're co-responsible for a lot of things and one example of this is that they're responsible for getting permission for for children to join the platform so they have to as school systems and institutions to get permission and a lot of them don't know this as we've seen this in the pandemic here where schools and institutions put everybody online and only six months or seven months later we're asking permission from parents to put the the kids online and this is a huge problem and just to exemplify this we've done a very large freedom of information actor in Brazil it's called live request to every institution in Brazil and higher education and public higher education that's about 140 of them and one of the typical answers that we get is the Institute of the university does not have agreement with Google or Microsoft and then the second answer is we use Google for education and also Microsoft 365 because it's free of charge and this brings up one of the very important elements for us as open educators which is this idea that because it is free there's really nothing for us to worry about right and this is a very common perception even with high level administrators because we've gotten something for free there are no commitments we have nothing to worry about so do we have an agreement no not really it's free so there's nothing to nothing to think of that's a of course a paradox and you know and a problem finally uh to to wrap up these these points uh the the final one which i think is really important for us to think about as open educators how these platforms are uh controlling also our common goods so you know the commons is a very important aspect of what we do in terms of open education creating space for commons not only for collaboration but for resources so when amazon comes up with something that is already kind of dead which is inspired where they say you can post your online content here uh we have to worry about where we're posting our OVR the same thing goes for a google drive or or uh any other place where you post your content massively uh thinking about what these platforms mean and now whether your content's going to last and whether they're going to be available in the future and and remembering that these free platforms or commercial platforms really makes us think whether this is related to open or if it's just a free initiative and this is particularly important now for us during the pandemic because we know that students are are heavily involved in these platforms uh so we know from surveys here national survey here in brazil that's done every year for the past 11 years that students in 2019 a lot of them have profiles in many of these platforms and just as an example 61 of them say that they use whatsapp for educational activities so they actually use it in in schools with teachers which shows how much of this is appropriated within the educational system so for about five years now we have this this observatory which is called the surveillance and education observatory and that's the the site uh education vigilade in portuguese where we map these partnerships so we we've gathered data on on these partnerships in the region and only last month we launched a data from every public higher education institution in south america and so from this very simple map and you can navigate the map better in our site you can have an ideal the reds are partnerships with google and microsoft and the greens are our other systems which are normally maintained by the institutions and just to give you some idea i won't go through too much detail it's better to look at the map and you can click on every point and see all the details uh if you look at all four hundred and forty eight institutions in the region nearly 80 percent of them are already either google or microsoft so the adoption of an email service is a very strong indicator that every other service is already uh controlled by google and microsoft as well such as an lms or something like that uh and so 80 percent of the institutions in the region and that in some countries is even more drastic so if you look at at colombia for example of 75 institutions only one institution is not served by google or microsoft and um this data in peru is similar if you look at the map it kind of gives you an idea and only two institutions out of 64 are not served by uh google or microsoft as well and this shows it should kind of be scary in a sense because what we're saying is the place where we get things done uh in in education is now controlled by two very big large corporations in our in the whole country um in brazil we have more detailed data and we know by looking at not only uh higher education in public institutions but also school systems at the state level and municipalities with over 500 000 uh inhabitants 66 percent of all these are already google or microsoft so that shows that we have kids of very young age already being co-opted by these systems so uh some of the consequences of this which i think are important one is to think about you know what what after covid will digital and learning be uh the new normal uh what kind of legacy are we leaving post-covid for educational technology uh in these schools who controls the content we create the platforms we used to communicate and where we do our teaching whatever hybrid sort of model might emerge after covid um and i i bring back a phrase from a colleague about the hard which is i think a very very powerful phrase it says that just because we claim openness just because we say we're open it doesn't automatically uh call it to be a natural neutral or a progressive space free of political tensions you know the choices that we make as as managers educational managers administrators but also educators really uh really open us up to having our values of open being subverted and these technological choices are i think a really great example of this just being open on google uh doesn't necessarily make you very progressive one of the most important things we've been talking about uh quite a bit is this idea that we must insist on um uh educating in between the difference between free and open and that is a problem for high-level administrators at university it's a problem with teachers it's a problem with students people i still don't know and don't understand the difference between free and open and that's a big problem related to technology and you know taking up the centenary of paulo fredi here i can not mention him and he has this very powerful phrase they said many many years ago for me the question is in whose service these machines are he's not against it but he wants to know who is who who are they serving and generally generally free things are not serving you they're serving somebody else and it's important for us to to realize this that there is no such thing as free and i think that's been a discussion i've seen in many of the OEC talks i've been uh participating so far is that we know that even open has a cost and we have to know where the costs are you know who's paying for what who's benefiting from what and we have to be much more alert and educate people about these things as well and realize that there are there's a power imbalance in in working with free the free creates hierarchies you know you're you're you're a slave to certain platforms it constrains and conditions of practice it provides you with only certain tools and only certain ways you can use them it doesn't allow you to extract data in a way that's appropriate for you to move somewhere so it doesn't necessarily work with open formats it it allows you to get in but makes it very hard for you to get out and if you have to get out you have to pay somehow or if you want more you have to pay these imbalances are inherent there but also inherent in practice when we condition people and we force people to join platforms like saying let's create a whatsapp group or you're going to host your site on google sites for example you're inclining on people you're sort of telling them that this is what they have to do they might not determine people might find alternatives but as educators as administrators we have a certain power over people and it's important to realize when we're we're inclining on them technologically as well making decisions for them that don't really allow them to make real choices and finally i think the most important thing is that we lose a valuable opportunity to realize that as open educators we're not stuck with the technological systems that we have we can participate we can be part of this we can create new technological features and futures and it's okay to be a user but it's very bad to just be a user all the time so we have to realize that we can be part of this and to wrap up a final message which i think is important is that there is no education without technology especially now i think we finally come to this realization and that open education cannot ignore this this theme of digital rights and we cannot stop thinking ignore the idea of thinking of of technology as a core part of every aspect from the development to implementation of open education and so we have to put the digital rights agenda as the OER recommendation declares we have to put that into our discussions of our open technologies as well so thank you very much and i'll remain here for comments and questions thanks again thank you so much tell it was really really interesting and you brought up a lot of new questions which is very important to to reflect on and think about what is free and what is open and how how is that connected and i also agree that technology is maybe not so much discussed but hopefully hopefully we can discuss that more later on in the end of this session so please write your reflections and questions for for tell and his team about this topic so now we move further on and the next presentation is from TG Bliss and Jonathan Lashley and their topic is look around you a model for developing open education policy at the regional level so please the floor is yours thank you have a greetings everyone i'm tj bliss and you'll see jonathan lashley perhaps on the screen as well but in case not here's a picture of us jonathan's is the sharp clear one mine is the grainy one and i'm the chief academic officer at the state the office of the state board of education in Idaho and jonathan lashley is is my associate chief academic officer here and before we jump into OER policy at the regional level we want to help you understand the region we're talking about the region we're discussing is is at the state level in the united states of america so some background on on Idaho which many of you may not even know where Idaho is because many americans don't even know where Idaho is is it Ohio or Iowa or is it Idaho Ohio no it's Idaho that's where most of your potatoes come from Idaho is in the northwest the pacific northwest at borders washington and oregon and nevada uh is fairly close to california too close to california for some people in Idaho i think and it is not Iowa or Ohio though those are also great states the governance of Idaho like most others i think every other state in the united states has three three branches of government there's the governor in the middle here represented by this icon there's a legislature of elected representatives and then there's a supreme court and in Idaho the legislature creates laws and provides and distributes funding authorizes funding to education and a lot of the laws that the legislature passes relate to education on most of the funding that our our legislature gives out is for educational purposes there's also a in the constitution of Idaho there is a there's a state board of education that consists of eight people seven of those people are appointed by the governor who is elected one of the members of this board is actually elected um in the general election and becomes the superintendent or secretary of education and oversees primary and secondary education or k-12 education the board in its entirety in Idaho is is almost unique in the united states in that the Idaho board of education oversees all public education in the state from kindergarten through all of higher education or post-secondary education there's only one other state in the united states that has a board like that most states have two or more boards like california probably has six or seven boards it feels like uh that oversee their education system but in Idaho is one board that oversees them all and another unique uh aspect of the state board of education in Idaho is that the state board has legal authority to create and adopt policies that govern a lot of the higher education or post-secondary education that happens in the state and i'll talk a little bit more about about that here so in Idaho there are eight public post-secondary uh institutions and there are several private uh institutions as well that have some regulate the board overseas in some regulatory fashion but but the policies of the board um over uh directly impact the institutions and are binding as law on our public post-secondary institutions especially our four-year institutions the university of Idaho boise state university Idaho state university and lewis clark state college those four universities and our three universities and one college all of the policies of the board are governing and binding on them as as equal to the law of the legislature the community colleges are a little bit different they have their own local boards and so only some of the policies that the board enacts are governing over the community colleges all of the laws that come from the legislature govern all of the institutions as they pertain to them so understanding how the structure is set up i think is important for understanding the role that the jonathan and i play as the as the chief academic officer and associate chief academic officer we serve as executive staff to the state board of education we are not elected officials but being in a small state the board are appointed volunteers it's not their full-time job they they um enact policy and adopt them formally but it generally falls on board staff to create those policies and and draft them and bring them to the board so we have a lot a big role to play in bringing forth good or bad for good or better policies to the board and jonathan's going to take it from here and talk about a little bit of history of policy related to open educational resources and instructional materials in Idaho and the role that we've played and how we've developed a model that we we think is is worth considering as you think about policy development in your own region so i'll advance slides for you jonathan go ahead thanks tj and i just want to take a point of personal privilege and say i'm really excited to be here this is my first time presenting for oe global and i appreciate and admire so much of what others on this the session what they work on and what they do and i agree tj and i we have seen as he said um good and bad policy as it relates to we are in our state and naturalities have emerged in recent years go ahead and switch to the next slide tj here's an example of a favorable policy let's call it that or rather this is some legislation that came from our legislature back in 2019 where they wanted to dedicate $50,000 in one time funding to support open educational resource projects that span multiple institutions that targeted specific high impact courses for many of you in the states at least high impact courses are often seen as synonymous with general education courses those large seats multi-section tend to be textbook reliant courses that are taught in the first couple years of college and what's important here and why we emphasize it is a few of the the features as well as some of the barriers that exist in Idaho as it relates to oh we are policy but also education policy more generally uh next slide so uh as tj outlines we have this sort of cunning k20 structure of overlapping governance where the board has quite a bit of influence though it's not exhaustive however because we have a really small education community our fit our full-time enrollment statewide and higher ed is around 56,000 uh it means that folks tend to know one another uh maybe cross paths or collaborate in the past uh many of those collaborations have been sponsored by a shared general education framework that we have we have um on the books 43 general education courses that are common numbered common indexed across our institutions to support transfer as well as curriculum development learning outcomes and ultimately institutions supporting one another in the provisioning of general education also uh we have fairly collaborative faculty and staff i'm a little bit biased because i've i've worked in the education community in Idaho so has tj though and you're hard pressed to find people who are more passionate about what they do especially because as we'll see on the next slide don't always have the resources and so you have to lean on others but importantly uh and this is reflected in that legislation as well there is a persuasive appeal of operating like a system even though we're not an official system of higher education it's it comes down to the shrewd pragmatism of consolidating resources and cutting costs where appropriate but ultimately in order to scale and be well supporting our practices we need to share well and and why next slide so there are some key barriers that we also navigate both with our our policies as well as general academic policies one is because we're not a system participation participation is not always assured a lot of our initiatives a lot of our working collaboratively statewide it really depends on people being committed having a place of safety and security in their work as well as intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to persist and work with us also very important as we've come to realize over the last two years since tj and i have been into this work it's easy for our faculty and staff to be overextended with their obligations and especially when we look at the community colleges where they are not only in a position of shared governance with local boards as well as our state board they often have the fewest resources and need the most support and their faculty and staff tend to wear the most hats have the most responsibilities and a variety of overlapping and sometimes not overlapping areas also generally with any sort of emerging topics or as we found repeatedly in conversations with faculty areas where they might not feel particularly supported by their institution by their colleagues or their peers open education for many of us who do advocacy work in the state the the golden ticket is finding really clear and meaningful relationships with tenure and promotion processes to shore up and show that the work that can be done either in or other emergence teaching and learning trends that it is valuable that it is scholarly that is worth rewarding but those structures seldom exist and as is also I think evidenced by that earlier piece of legislation fifty thousand dollars can go fairly far in a state like Idaho however it was one time funding and it's hard to build a program when you don't know where the next 50k is going to come it's also hard to build a program that can scale when you doubt you're going to be able to get more than 50k to support eight institutions next slide and then there are policies that can emerge from within the house the the threat coming from inside and right before I started with the board office and about four months before TJ started the former chief academic officer had developed a policy around OER and for lack of better phrasing it was developed in the vacuum it was it was a solitary act that worked with the board members who were interested in seeing OER policy come forward they really wanted to see it take off at our institutions but as someone who was coming from one of our institutions and someone who had been really active in the open education conversations in our state I knew that OER had already taken off and that we had a really rich and vibrant culture around open pedagogical approaches practices OER better use of library resources it was a much more vibrant map of options and practices and shared strategies then what ultimately was reflected in in what was labeled word policy 3u and a few of the issues with this policy are common with other early open education policies that we've seen in the states the idea that you need to have some sort of arbitrary metric in this case it was also leveraging again that common general education framework but real but trying to say that the ultimate outcome would be having at least one section of every general education course at every institution be entirely OER based as if there is some unique and scalable inherent value in that but furthermore and and to I guess to the discredit of of those who authored this original policy they knew full well that what this also did was overlook all of the good work that was already happening on the ground and so if you want to switch to the next slide TJ what it failed to consult was what was happening on the ground at our institutions and so it's it's easy to say that kind of fit this three-part model where you have at some place it's starting usually it's not starting with implementation but the board office drafting a policy usually because they were asked to do so by the board to fit some specific goal or priority uh TJ and I came in and assessed the situation pretty pretty quickly and looking at policy three you asked ourselves uh to what end do we have any of these requirements or expectations for our institutions um and that led us to ask questions about well what was the influence on the board where were they getting their information where did they see the specific strategy and need as as omnipresent at least to such a degree that need to be short of important policy and ultimately we need to know those two things in order to help the institutions implement policy however it in the past and this was very much the case with the early release of policy through you what's help with implementation look like was fairly nebulous my position specifically was created in 2019 to better support institutions on the implementation of board policy but effectively what breaks down here is that this whole model is really built on awareness being something that can be cultivated ideally it's that your policy would be so plain spoken that everyone would be aware what it means but without someone actively shepherding that awareness uh it's likely missing from the equation next slide and so we got into a position very early on in our 10 years with the board office of pursuing policy redevelopment around 3U specifically and this model that we developed kind of in flight as a design process has now extended and in ways I'll share with you momentarily to really all academic policy pursuits next slide and we coined or I coined this acronym off of this initial work on policy 3U but TJ you're welcome to disagree with me if you think that this also doesn't scale to some of our other work with academic policies ideally we're focused on four things we're focused on openness in the process how can we make sure that we're engaging with all of those who have a certain degree of affinity or inquiry around the topics that we're building policy around uh and with 3U it was making sure that there were opportunities for folks to get involved in co-authoring and some of that came from staging not only regular office hours with faculty and faculty senates and others but also widespread forums with over a hundred people who are participating to talk about exactly what we already knew but to a much greater degree than we could anticipate of how their frustration with policy 3U is they completely dismissed the really innovative and interesting practices that they were already conducting on campus without any sort of mandate or any sort of reward structure next focusing on pedagogy in academic affairs we have a research priority but at the same time research and practice are inherently interlinked and so making sure that if there are impacts on teaching and learning that we're recognizing what the goals are at the institution level and importantly if we were going to have a policy or maintain a policy around open and I really love that we're following up on the last panel making sure that tools and opportunities are available that they're interoperable as well that they're not going to be shackled or something that's going to turn off in the event that we do lose funding and also exploring how we can make things interinstitutional and collaborative so that institutions can support and help scale for one another. Next is a matter of advocacy which is in practical terms it looks to us in terms of reviewing not only other policies from other states but also the literature and relying on mine and TJ's networks around open but then also looking at like policies of the institutions and trying to shore up and find commonality. What we found through our review is and this is probably why this model has scaled so effectively to our other academic affairs policies is that inevitably once we started talking about textbook access and affordability we also started talking about IP and also started talking about academic freedom and also started talking about student academic freedom which faculty academic freedom student academic freedom were in different policies. Course fees began to come up and then all of a sudden just maybe updating or revising one policy became becomes an exercise in philosophically thinking through how we're going to improve all of our policies to to make sure that the goals are met that our institutions have because we're co-authoring with them. And then as I mentioned earlier making sure that faculty and students know that this work is supported that's recognized and that's empowered and formalizing that can make a meaningful difference. And some of the ways that we've seen that is making sure that we are in the position of having stakes in the matter that we are leading with the implementation and we're also creating leaders in the process and that's emerged in not only us saying of faculty fellowships and creating resources and communities of practice among faculty but also extending opportunities as a convening force at the state level to conduct original research and publication opportunities with with our academic community. The the one thing if there was if there was one thing and I think there are many that were missing from that original policy three is that there just wasn't a clear understanding of what our stakes were in the board office to make sure that this work was successfully implemented. Next slide. And so TJ and I we believe that effective policies are effectively social contracts and so we we really wanted to try and think about how concisely we could model our general ethos around policy development. And the first is first part of the new equation is to look around you and to not discount if you're in a position like ours the direct and immediate access you have to really skilled collaborators who are highly educated and also care a lot because naturally this work is going to impact their work and naturally when policy work impacts an individual's work that they really care about whether they've been doing it publicly or in isolation they're if they care they're going to get loud about it and what we'd seen in the past is that when the academic community gets upset or it's seen that they're getting upset that they're just being belligerent and they don't want to change and and our experience could have been any more the opposite. These folks cared and they cared enough to keep coming back as we had sessions to co-develop and revise this this policy and then importantly and this was a practice for us to educate up with our board really condensing them that good policy should adapt over time it should be malleable and that it should be prone to evolve that these are living documents and that's what part of the power as part of the value of having a central board in Idaho and so the one of the earliest changes that was easy to make was even just reflecting the title of our policy where the original policy for 3U title was textbook and instructional material affordability in conversations with our institutions it really became much more about instructional material access and affordability and so even there you can see that the frame broadens a little bit beyond just specifically OER. Next one and here's a snapshot of the new policy in its entirety it's not only about twice the length but just to highlight a few key provisions here one thing that we learned early on before we had even talked about revising previous policy 3U is that in work with our provosts as well some stakeholders they really wanted to see a more empirical snapshot of what Idaho could own across all institutions for what they meant when they said zero cost or very low cost or low cost and it's important to recognize that because we are working at a regional scale we're not always going to get the ideal and so this was an effective means of scaffolding what if we do care about cost what we can do to structure those conversations so that they're more productive instead of just identifying well this is an open class and this is not an open class we wanted to have some more information for students and actually a lot of that that poll came from student leadership at our institutions wanting to have more information at their time of registration. Secondly we build out more of the definitions so that there's some common understanding about terms that we're throwing out there especially some that were more emergent and new like course marking and also automatic charge and and again I'm grateful for following up on that previous session because automatic charge in a policy like this because we're talking about access and because we're talking about wanting institutions to have a plan about how they're going to ensure that students have access to materials that they need to be successful it also behooves them to think about the nature of that access and what security concerns exist so it's not just the automatic billing and the students being able to opt out to meet federal standards but inevitably what are we giving up and what are students giving up when we decide to get into these third party agreements and also notably the the deliverable this time is not some arbitrary standard about impact to each institution with a specific type of course it's instead making sure that we have plans in place at every institution they don't have to be the same plan but plans that meet their cultural needs to support the work that is outlined in this policy as it relates to instructional materials. Next and so to just adapt that earlier graphic I would I would put forward that a key difference here now is that instead of three part structure where there's the board and the board office versus the institutions what we really have here is content itself that's living in this collaborative space that exists between institutions and the board and ultimately it's our responsibility from now on to make sure that we're shepherding awareness of the policy of the practice and implementation that exists on the ground level and the need to adapt that policy it's it's our responsibility to take that urgency to our board and it's also our responsibility to make sure that the institutions are well-equipped and well-resourced to handle change and TJ I'll let you have the last word if you want. Thanks I would just say briefly that you know a lot of this there are a lot of the UNESCO OER recommendation action items that this work fits into the broad work that we we do it in Idaho but obviously action item two around policy development but also action item one is institutions develop plans I think there's a lot of work toward that first action item happening and on the cusp of happening here in Idaho so it's very exciting to to see that fit within that broader context of the of the recommendation so thank you for your time and happy to answer questions in the chat as we move along or later. So thank you so much it was really impressive to listen to to your work about how you could implement with such such a success the policy on openness and pedagogy and advocacy and leadership and the social contract it's very important and also how you managed to move from maybe limitations in about awareness and now you really have built in the culture of openness it's fantastic I hope there will be some questions later on to you so congratulations. So the next speech is about open collaboration toward OER professional development competencies and that is by Matthew Matthew Bloom Deborah Baker and Lisa Young so the floor is yours. Thank you very much we're very excited to be here I'm Matthew Bloom I am English faculty at Scotso Community College which is in the Phoenix Arizona area and I'm also along with Lisa and Debbie a tri-chair of Maricopa Community College's open education project called Open Maricopa. Lisa Debbie do you want to introduce yourselves? Hi I'm Lisa Young I serve as the faculty director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Scottsdale Community College and I also serve OE Global as a member of the board so happy to be here with you all. And I am Debbie Baker I'm an instructional designer for the Maricopa Center for Learning and Innovation which is in the district office for the Maricopa Community Colleges. So what we're going to do is we're going to share with you our experience our long journey actually of three years or so developing a set of professional development competencies that were adapted from work that had been done previously so I think Debbie's going to start us off by talking about the origin and the need for this project. So in my role in the district office for the let me let me start by talking a little bit about the Maricopa Community Colleges so we are 10 independently accredited community colleges in the Phoenix Arizona metropolitan area so we have a wide variety of professional development needs across those 10 colleges and my role in the district office is to provide support for professional development for these district-wide initiatives such as around Open Maricopa. We were in the process of developing a district-wide recognition program or district-wide badging program for these types of initiatives and so the Open Maricopa project was absolutely one that we wanted to focus on developing that badging process for and to get started with that process we did some quick Google searching and we found an existing set of OER competencies which we'll talk about a little bit in a little bit as well but and we had a set of competencies that we were currently using within Open Maricopa but what we were really looking for was something that would be more widely recognized and so we really wanted to build a framework that would allow our faculty work in OER to be recognized in that that current state but also any future work in OER we wanted that recognition to be flexible and to allow for accountability so what we had at that moment really relied on a handful of people to provide the professional development we were looking for competencies that would allow us to open up no pun intended the ability for others to provide professional development that aligned back to these very specific set of competencies so Matthew's going to talk a little bit about the process and I went backwards there we go so yeah I mean if you take a look at this really excellent timeline here I have to small on my screen but so there we go it's bigger now the first thing is that the original set of competencies was actually developed from like a symposium or a gathering that of which OER Global at the time it was the Open Education Consortium was involved in it it was the organization LaFronta Panini I think got together and like developed this set of OER competencies and we discovered it it was translated into English by the time we got it and so we looked at it we found it you know was going to be a really interesting kind of baseline for us maybe to build on and adapt and try to make it work for for our specific needs so the first thing we did was we brought it to our OER steering committee which is a representative body across the 10 colleges of Maricopa we have faculty administrators we have instructional designers we have you know e-learning directors things like that so we brought it to that group and did some collaborative work sessions over the course of the semester where we basically were trying to you know get get feedback like what is it in you know what's missing what do we like what would we want to change or reword or try to you know again try to localize it for our needs we went through that process and then we decided that it would actually be more valuable potentially to those outside of Maricopa if we involved some stakeholders from across the region and so we used the opportunity in February of 2020 we have had for a few years now we've had an annual Arizona regional OER conference and attendees to that conference are not just from across Arizona but we usually have people from Oklahoma and Nevada Colorado and other states in that in kind of the southwest there and so what we did when we had a leadership summit on the second day of that conference where it was a pretty small event I mean maybe I think there were like 24 people involved all the major state universities you know we had University of Arizona Arizona State University and Northern Arizona University all represented along with Maricopa Community Colleges and Yavapai College and Pima Community College I'm trying to remember who all was there but off the top of my head it was a lot of different people from different places across the region and what we did was we actually have there's a picture on the next slide you'll see it but what we did was we asked questions we printed out like the competencies as they were and we asked people to in kind of groups to do kind of the speed dating thing where they go you know from table to table in a short period of time and like make comments and write the comments down all around the paper or on the whiteboard and then we captured all of that feedback and then began this long problem that was the COVID delay I guess whatever but then there was this long process that was that involved actually some of our steering committee subcommittee members who were helping out to kind of synthesize that feedback because you know we had basically at that point it was a huge mess I mean but it was a lot of really really great ideas about how we felt the framework could be improved or at least with respect to our needs and so what we did eventually compile all that feedback synthesize it into a draft set of competencies that we then iterated through the steering committee one last time to get kind of overall feedback and then we took the opportunity in February just this last February at our regional conference to basically have a couple of public forums where we were giving people the opportunity to kind of look through those things and have some discussions and so from that we collected yet another round of feedback and I'm happy to say that finally there is a draft 2.0 version of it that that we published and that we are happy to share with you all today and these are the pictures like I was talking I mean this is the kind of thing there were like I don't know eight or nine of these pictures plus comments on documents and Google Docs and also it was a really messy feedback process but it's kind of always like that so it was kind of a lot of fun also challenging and kind of painstaking to go through and like sift out all of the little nuggets there that and also trying to work out contradictions because sometimes we would have people saying opposite things and so it would be very interesting it was interesting to bring those discussions kind of elevate them and bring those questions back to the steering committee and then and kind of have those and and eventually you know over the course of this you know almost through your process most of the questions we felt got worked out but one of the things that we are hoping to do with you here today is is you know ask you and we'll get to this in a minute here but kind of ask you what how you might be able to use this but also if you have feedback about things that you think we're missing and stuff like that then we would love to hear about it so that we could further improve it. So the competencies that we ended up with are developed across six different groups of information with two to three categories per group and two to six competencies per category so we ended up with if I did my math correctly 57 total competencies so group A is very is all about becoming familiar with OER and then you see the these are the categories here which I'm not going to read to you but just kind of broadly this group A is really about just developing a basic understanding of OER group B is all about searching for and evaluating OER so this the the categories here really hone in on finding appropriate OER as well as and being able to use those search tools group C is all about using OER legally and ethically and and so each of these two while there's two categories here there are several competencies behind each category and we'll get to the document just a second group D is all about creating and adapting OER and group E is about sharing OER and really groups A through E a lot of that information we were able to really start from the original set of competencies that we had found but then we got to group F this was an addition we felt about applying open to pedagogy and really digging into providing some competencies around open pedagogy so I'm going to share the I'm going to open up the document itself and we'll provide the link to the slides and the link to the competencies in the chat in just a second but these are the competencies themselves and Matthew did you want to kind of walk through the document I don't want to I certainly don't want to read the document to everybody but what I what I was interested in in adding you noted that the first five categories were are very similar and the ultimately the competencies themselves have been considerably rewritten from the original framework that we discovered which was openly licensed by the way I mean it was it was an open education you know initiative but um or project but uh so so the individual competencies competencies are are considerably different now but the the grouping was was pretty much the same two things that we did Debbie mentioned we did expand it by one category to really try to involve open pedagogy and the idea of renewable assignments and and you know the kinds of things that the benefits that are associated with that and practices but one of the other things that we did throughout as well was we tried to put more um we tried to kind of expand the the contextualization of open education um so that it was because it was very practical the the framework at the beginning was very practical and and and that was actually a very good thing but we wanted to kind of weave in some of the philosophy behind open education and some of the other um you know kind of related pedagogies and theoretical approaches that aren't necessarily um like that that are in the influence of open uh open education in some way or another so you can see in here um you know global factors that emerge it's not just about you know pre-culture and creative commons but there's also this potential relationship that we see through uh with open education connected to critical pedagogy black feminist pedagogy social justice theory that kind of stuff so trying to you know expand the picture here and and and just see how gift faculty and anyone else using this through the workshops that we're going to present you know this gives us the framework that we're going to need to um really try to ensure that anyone that we're giving that certification to you know the badging or any of the workshops that we that we offer are actually serving a purpose according to you know the the framework that we've developed that's pretty much it i mean like i think that the slides did a really good job um this is this document is um anyone can comment on this document so i definitely encourage if you're interested um you can also it's openly licensed so if you just want to take it and make your own adaptations or whatever then that's fine too but if you want to comment on the document we would love um to hear your thoughts and so one of the things that we'd like to do is we would like to get your feedback on the professional competencies that we've shared we we gave a very broad overview and you see the document that you'll be able to explore but we wanted to gather some of your feedback live today um on what are some ways you might use these professional competencies at your institution or in your situation and so we're using a tool called mentimeter and um you can either open a browser on your phone or another browser on your computer and you go to www.menti that's m-e-n-t-i dot com and you use the code four two nine one four three two two and i'll repeat that several times for you um you go to www.menti that's m-e-n-t-i dot com and the code is four two nine one four three two two and we did put that code in the chat but i'll i'll i'll share with you one more time i see people are already responding the code is four two nine one four three two two and i'm going to go ahead and share my screen so i can show you the results that are coming in so um we're we're getting a few responses again that's menti m-e-n-t-i dot com and the code is four two nine one four three two two and um someone mentioned that they could use it for assessing the open ed competencies of all of their educators um use it in training with oer with your librarians your instructional designers but also when introducing people to the concept of oer we're seeing um sending the framework to their colleagues that know i run ontario extend professional development program fantastic um looking at hiring oer support staff they could be part of a job description i love that idea we're going to give you a few more minutes to give us some responses because um you know as as these competencies are developed we really wanted to use it for the professional development but i really like that idea of identifying the job description that's fantastic um expanding expanding awareness for open pedagogy and lisa can i add just that with respect to the training training others in helping with oer um there was actually somebody who joined us at the forum this last year um who was like super excited that we were you know that he was being part that he was part of it but that you know that we were doing this because he actually said you know i wish that this had been available two years ago when we started our open education initiative at the university because um it was one of those kinds of things where if for us maybe america millions has been around for so long and and and we already had these competencies and we kind of like had some organization but for an organization it's just starting an initiative right it can be very helpful to kind of get a sense of like well what are all the potential complexities what are all the things that need to be teased out as you're as you're moving forward so i think that that um in terms of you know the training aspect is really good too definitely definitely and um we're seeing a few more responses assessing where people are and oh we are knowledge for training and for advocacy um as well as formalizing the disciplinary foundations of a open education in evaluating the scholarly work of faculty and that could even be used towards tenure and things like that absolutely loving it thank you so much for those of you who have um responded we have one more open-ended question for you and that is what's missing so we shared and i know that we shared them fairly quickly but from what you've heard or seen in these competencies do you think there's anything missing um are we like oh wow they didn't cover this um we'd love to get that feedback and we do understand like lisa said that you're you haven't been able to read through the entire thing at this point so you know just in general maybe like uh based on our descriptions i guess that might be the best response definitely yeah thanks back to you it's been through a number of iterations so um we we think it's pretty comprehensive but we just value um the oe global community and if you see anything missing we'd love to include it um i also was really um happy like that we included the unesco sustainability goals and such i think that um that was a great piece for us to include in our competencies we were i was really pleased to see that when we were developing them and as we're waiting for responses to come in i i would also add that i could speak personally to this uh that like the process of going through this whole thing revealed you know revealed to me where the gaps in my understanding was you know like where where where where is it that i'm like you know do i have blind spots is there's something that i'm completely you know ignoring that i shouldn't be ignoring when when because i did a lot of professional development um like i ran a lot of professional development workshops for maricopa i've done that for years now and um and so this really put me through a growth process as well and i think that that was very meaningful well we're not getting any feedback on that and that's totally fine we did cover those quite quickly and um but we we appreciate um all of your involvement in our presentation and hope that you can use these resources at your institutions yeah absolutely feel free to use oeg connect also like i said that document is you can make comments right in that google doc so that would also be um that's kind of ideal because i mean as great as oeg connect is for for for having ongoing discussions um at least if we capture it in the document then it's something that we'll be able to you know address that's something and i think that's just about it thank you all so much thank you thank you uh thank you so much for this inspiration i think follow the chat there is a lot of uh discussions going on there as well so i think it was really inspiring and as you were saying it is important to build the the culture of the pedagogy within these competencies uh so it is per default and as you were saying now in the end as well it is while you're going to this process it's also some kind of a self-evolution and benchmarking process so i'm sure there will be more questions and as i said there's a lot of discussions going on on all the sessions i would say it's really very interesting so thank you but very much for that so we are moving to um the last presentation in this session and that is by philippe anaya providing equity to universal access so the floor is yours and the please continue the great conversation in the chat as well yes thank you i know it's getting uh close to midnight where you're at right good evening uh good afternoon i'm in texas uh in the united states and uh good morning to those of you all over in the far east um first time presenting for uh a week global and uh thank you for the privilege and your attention and uh if we go to the next slide i want to go and start and jump in i'll probably start by stating we're going to follow along uh the lines of uh jt and jim's presentation with the overall state and regional policy and jump into what it looks like at an institution i mean again i'm in san antonio texas in the united states uh and i am uh at the district level of a organization that is comprised of five independently accredited institutions similar to maricopa um that has its own unique challenges um but i've been lucky enough to be part of this institution that has a very forward thinking board and uh vision and i've named a couple of policies here that that we that we've taken to heart and the first one is the alamo way which is our mantra which is always inspire always improve i it's something that i've um taken in my six years at alamo working with this this program i am the digital know we are coordinator for the district and work with all five colleges and it's something that gives you the right to be that squeaky wheel uh which you sometimes need to be in these in these programs no matter where you are if it's well established or new um we're here for the success of our students and that bottom line there is actually from our policy as well as the success of alamo colleges will be measured by the success of the students um i welcome you ought to take that and steal it if you'd like you can substitute any name in there uh institution you'd like uh but it speaks volumes to you to the vision and and the the practice of alamo colleges and the work of its faculty next slide i don't need to preach the choir but students are not buying their materials and it's still prevalent this is a pre-pandemic 2018-2019 um national survey by vital source um that highlights the issue students face i'm not going to read them to you we can see it's a large percentage are not buying their materials uh for alamo next slide we took that and actually took this course survey for spring of 20 just when the pandemic was hitting and we sent out just under 140,000 got back 6000 um that's a duplicated count its course count versus actual students wanting to try and get them as many times as we could uh so the 6100 is closer to 10 percent of our fte uh respond responding to these questions and the two i'm going to highlight next slide please actually reflect the same questions we showed over half we're not buying all of the required materials because of cost and that's in san Antonio intercolleges um pre-pandemic nearly 40 of them stated that that decision impacted their performance or weren't sure so you know going back to our board policy it was something that spoke volumes um it wasn't one thing we did it was a number of things i want to go over and show you in the next next slide outline our timeline here and our goal was to make our students go obtainable that i'm pretty sure if we were to send this out over the last decade the numbers would probably be the same and i'm pretty sure now they'd be a little higher just because of the post-pandemic uh way we're having um for our students locally um but it's still an issue so i'm going to highlight our our journey uh that we've had over the last decade uh i've been at the reins for over six years here at alamo um but it wasn't one thing we did it's a number of things we did and continue to doing uh and looking to do in the future to make our students goal obtainable next slide please uh before i get into phase one our exploratory phase i want to start by stating this journey is not mine i am a one-man shop at alamo colleges uh but this is truly collaborative effort um it's not one faculty staff librarian administrator this is signed to be a coordinator or director of oer an institution it's a truly collaborative effort it's the work of the faculty um it's the work from student success our finance department our information technology uh in our academic success that truly build this program and it's one of the few programs across higher ed that it's truly community effort to get off the ground and make it truly successful so i want to stress that uh but nearly 10 years um ago faculty and students presented to the board of trustees their concern about the cost of materials and i believe a faculty member actually presented after attending a conference introducing oer back in 2012 the board took steps to help with this and actually created guidelines to help with this cost uh struggle with the publishers constantly creating custom editions and we know all the stories that go along with that but they started there with implementing some policies for instruction material guidelines to help with selection of materials to help with that cost he had some adoption guidelines that you're going to keep it for three years and so forth that started following that in 2014 we had a formal introduction of oer by Palo Alto College to our board after attending one of the uh conferences that was held um regionally and that fostered a pilot at that college with several humanity courses following that with an inclusive access pilot in our math courses from San Antonio College and uh St. Phillips College we truly got the wheels turning with the board of trustees looking at this at with serious lenses and actually implementing a chancellor's charge to formally look at this and actually report out of what's going on nationally regionally and within our colleges at that time we created a task force and actually revised the instruction to our guidelines to actually formalize oer as a qualifying adoption for courses and then we started collaborating nationally and regionally with becoming a member of the ccc oer community we're part of the dream oer grant and also um participate in the open stacks institutional partnership which is hugely beneficial next slide following the success of those those two programs the the achieving the dream and the open stacks we realized that we needed heavy faculty development uh both with our administrators and our faculty as well with our student development to help them understand what this was um we were kind of modeling ourselves after california with a true no-cost initiative for um open educational uh movement we named it alamo open um we separated these two because there was a strong oer for cost movement happening in the united states uh which was an inclusive access program but was focused on oer materials so we created a separate entity with iam direct which is our inclusive access initiative where we negotiated and had uh per course fees not a flat fee across so we negotiated the lowest price and that's what we we charge uh students into a course fee um both were searchable that was part of state policy that came down um both echo day one availability and access for students um and both have been highly successful i'll get that too uh shortly next slide please with phase two with both programs rolling fairly fairly strongly we brought in an outside consultant to do an independent system wide analysis across what we were doing uh we tend to get bogged down with with uh foggy lenses so to speak with with our work um when we're working so closely to with it uh we felt the independent consultant could give us a better sense of where we are compared nationally and regionally and also identify our best practices and what we could improve on um as well as uh conducted independent stakeholder interviews uh individually with with key stakeholders and then collectively with faculty across all five colleges that consultant actually brought back reports um and actually sparked a few key movements within our organization one was um the alamo colleges had a strategic planning retreat and this was outlined as one of the big three ideas for funding free and during the pandemic um it also spawned the creation of the universal access work group which is kind of where we're letting led led us to where we are now in developing strategies to expand both programs under one um under one universal access next slide please this group that um led to the space three was actually comprised of faculty and librarians was charged with developing universal access program implementation timeline identifying universal access program components and strategies developing an implementation process and supporting the campuses and colleges implementation of these strategies the work of the work group um has spawned a proof of concept and is looking to go to scale for this next year um fall 22 um and our goal is to actually implement this with all students in some capacity um I know in the chat you all have uh heard about hospital 1027 it was the transparency law that was signed in um the state law in Texas this past legislative session it's basically outlining the inclusive access programs with fee based programs and how that can better be transparent for students uh we're trying to build a program that is within that those guidelines to truly impact the students of the alamo colleges and be ready day one next slide please uh before I get into the success of our programs and where we're headed I want to go over our methodology because it's something that that is um varies across institutions uh within the state and within the united states um but we follow the department of educations um pricing on how much a course material cost uh this was adopted by open stacks uh pre 2016 it was modified in 2018 so according to the center for educational statistics in may of 2018 the average cost of integrates spent on instructional materials was five hundred and fifty five dollars and sixty cent uh sixty cents dividing that over the average number of courses of seven the number we come up with is 79 37 we use that number from may from basically fall 2018 to now previously that number was actually um 98 57 with the same calculations on the other side our weighted average savings is 55 with our inclusive access program uh we went with a weighted average based off of our majority of course were offerings that was offered with our math and sciences that widely used the IM directs or inclusive programs um and it kind of threw off our average when the course were and all the maintenance it went with it were saving students hundreds of dollars the weighted average kind of balanced out fairly well taking inspiration our spanish program which was typically 150 was now right at 40 bucks so the weighted average worked out well as we calculate that savings across the board um for the next slide course offerings um at the Alamo colleges again this is starting from 2014 to now with a fall to fall comparison here you can see the growth as we've moved forward um from having one course in our that was actually searchable by students in our in our syllabi one course of OER to where we're offering over 2,500 courses course sections in fall of 20 that number is a little higher now we're still calculating fall of 21 but you can see that growth rate as we've moved across next slide please as we look at duplicated headcount you can see that one course the 24 students to now we're we're just over 55 thousand students impacted um by these two programs again this is duplicated because they can take more than one course um ensures the the growth and impact that we've had on our students our next slide will show actual cost savings from fall to fall and you can see in fall of 20 we save an estimated 3.3 million dollars close to 3.4 in fall 20 alone that's that's where we're at we're hoping our goal is to actually maintain our blue there at the bottom you can see that we're just on the edge of breaking one million saved in true no cost savings utilizing the department of education numbers we mentioned earlier um we can see right now the growth is is steady moving to the next slide you can see a total impact of course offerings these are course sections offered from 2014 to now it's just over 20 000 and our next slide will show you our estimated total impact from from spring of 2014 and it's actually this is actually to spring 2021 um of just over 28 million dollars estimated savings to students our goal moving forward is to actually impact all of our students here in a hybrid of both of these we feel it is important that we both focus on our OER initiative and grow that um next slide please Liz um and actually work both because we do we still have faculty that utilize the fee based OER programs we have great relationship with certain publishers that we that we use to build um but our OER is truly impactful because it's zero cost um and is the model we want to focus on as we move into our inclusive access um sorry wrong choice of words our universal access model that has all students books ready for day one we're saving the students time money and frustration as as many of them resort to several ways to obtain their books and they're prepared for class and they have a higher sense of success and in completion um as as evident with with our OER program and several our inclusive access courses um I look forward to coming back next year to show the success and what we've come up with with this universal access model um and open the Florida questions thank you for having me so thank you very much for your presentation it was very much to think about for universal access thanks a lot um so um we have um come to the end of this um of all the presentations so we started off with um Rory McQueen with the blockchain and OER and um his argument was about that the blockchain is good for OER and OER is good for blockchain uh then we had a tell on this team about civilians capitalist and open education a large scale data from Latin America and your argument was mainly about um we need to focus on technology and the openness of technology and how we deal with that um the open education dimensions and for OER then we had um Bliss uh T. E. Bliss and Jonathan Lashley about look around you and the very successful model you have implemented for open education policy um at your institutions and then we had um Matthew and Deborah and Lisa would talk to us too about the open collaboration towards OER professional development competences and there was a very lively discussion about that in the shop and then now finally we had um Philip about providing equity to universal access for me I think it is for you as well it has really been more than overwhelming I would say so thank you all so very much for your insights and sharing so freely your experiences and what you have what you're working with and where you are um it is really a lot it is really really a lot and it's really really impressive I have seen in the chat that there's a lot of networking going on already and people have started to come together and they will continue to work together and learn from each other at different levels not least about how to implement um the model for developing of open education policy and always uh agreements I would say and also about how to deal with the professional development of of um competences and the model you showed us with Matthew and Deborah and Lisa so um with that I will see if I have some questions there were first a lot of questions to you Rory about about um the blockchain and OER and also are there any good because I think that was maybe some kind of new dimensions for many of us how we can look at that and there were questions about um are there any good examples how this is a community reality well at at present with OER no the main the main implementations now have to do with certification using them with micro credentials and uh alternate credentialing forms and that seems to be the way things are going but it occurred to me that uh OER should and could and should play a significant role in the development of uh of blockchain and education and uh vice versa I thought that OER could benefit from blockchain but do I know this no I think I'm just putting putting the idea forward and we'll have to investigate it further to see uh what exactly the benefits and problems are and there was some questions about the costs uh who are going to pay for it and uh the cost from from the certification point of view if you're using blockchain for certification um there seems to be some major cost savings possible by getting out of that whole the bureaucracy of it so there it is if if they can um uh overcome the problems with the high cost of electricity with using them and there are some uh promising developments on that from using them with OER I think uh we'll have to have a look start doing it and see see what happens uh as far as the cost I'm I'm not 100 convinced by any means but I think it's definitely worth looking into and there was a question I think about I think it was about sustainability and how to develop um technology to in a in a greener way through blockchain I share that I share that concern because the way blockchain is configured with POW it's very it is a huge eater of energy and we have to find other ways and there are some promising new uh developments that lower that uh exponentially those costs so I'm optimistic about that but it certainly is a reason for concern excuse me I know there are a lot of more questions in in the chat but I will stop here and I will come back to you to each of you later on on some common questions but I will move to you tell um about um so thank you very much Rory so far um so for you tell um I think there were questions about how to um let me see my notes I mean you you you when talk to us too about the importance of looking at the technology side as well and the openness and what we really are working with and the um also about the costs about that and also about the value propositions about different kind of technologies so um how can how can we belt on your augmentation to move this um your argument further on so to say I think that was more or less like the questions from the audience sure um I think that that's uh you're focused on three main main issues about reducing choices and platforms and um privacy yeah um so I think that one of the one of the big concerns that people have is is this seems like uh an insurmountable uh problem right there's there's nothing we can do about it one of the things that we've uh we've emphasized is there are a lot of things that teachers can do at the level of dealing with others you know with their own students in in terms of what platforms and what systems they adopt uh so creating a group on on a on a far chat where you use something like a whatsapp you can have find you know a dozen other alternatives where that can happen using a video conference system that's not a proprietary and commercial is very easy to do so there are very small things that teachers can do generally to do this but also we're working with administrators to get them aware of these problems and you know we we're able to get people to understand that this is a problem especially now that what happened uh what was expected to happen so you know google for example offered free services to a very large degree that were unlimited and now suddenly they're charging the universities and these universities move terabytes and petabytes of data to their servers and now they they have nothing that they can do you know they're stuck with google and they have to pay for the service and that was very predictable uh and that's going to change now where people are going to see that the other alternatives and other ways that have to to coexist with this because we're going to be slaves to these these uh platforms if we don't find all their alternatives and there are countries that are doing this uh well so i think we have places to look at and do you have any examples of countries sorry can you say that again um do you have any examples of countries doing that or there's already yeah so sure one of course i'll mention brazil is you know we have a very large uh consortium of of universities um through the it's called ahinipia the national research institute that has its own videoconferencing system that's nationwide um uh you can look at henna ter in france for example as an example you could look at surf nl in netherlands as where they offer you know in different modes they offer services that are based on free and open source software at a consortium-based level which i think are really interesting to explore and there are different models out there um that can easily as a consortium you know higher institutions or government can offer alternatives and we could put these these other platforms in the correct place which is a commercial platform they can adopt in certain scenarios but not where they become hegemonic and take over our our technological systems uh thank you and then um we had a look around you by um tg and jonathan and um the discussions were really lively here and you're more or less for a formed a consortium about how to move further on and how to learn from from and by and to each other um you presented to us the very successful model you have developed um to collaboration to awareness ways seeing you with with sustainability um for uh uh open education policy at the at regional level and the model you have described built mainly on um openness pedagogy um advocacy and leadership and with a social contract which was really interesting um there were a lot of questions but i think you you're more or less solved them in between you be and how you could collaborate and how to learn by and to and from each other so um we leave that by now and then we had the presentation by Matthew and Deborah and Lisa about the professional development competencies and um what you focused on it was very much about not just to talk about i mean the we are as such but also to build them um the pedagogy aspects and about ethical aspects and uh also what is um and how how the process is going on and how you can learn from each other to that and also doing doing that and going through the process you can also see the the missing points and i appreciated that you also took opportunity to learn from the audience here what what they were thinking about it and i hope it was benefiting your your further work and also the the audience of course and then we had um finally um Philip or about the universal access and you showed us a very interesting presentation about how about cost saving and also about enrollment and the really a lot of facts and figures um how you can move further on with the universal access um and now i have missed uh for sure many of the questions in the chat the chat will be saved and it will be i think it will be uploaded to together with this session because there's also a lot of interesting links and all the discussions you have i have had in the networking you have done throughout the the the session um but finally um i would like to ask each of you um to present it i mean each of the groups presented as this um session was is about the building capacity and developing supportive policy um so how can we move further on learning from what you have presented and discuss with us uh tonight i'm saying tonight because it is from my perspective maybe in the morning for you but what we have been discussing for the last couple of hours um how how can we from your perspective what you have presented to us develop support develop um and also monitoring uh because that is also an issue for the overall recommendation monitoring and elaboration develop the supportive policies within the areas you have discussed and presented for us and how can we by that learn from each other to move forward and to to what i have to say to have those good examples and to scale it up in other parts of the world in other institutions in other regions so maybe i start from the the last percent now so you will have to start always worry so i would start with you Philip um i i know i was talking offline with uh one of the presenters i i'd probably start with policy to to build on faculty and throw in staff development and meet faculty where they are i think america presentation um was impactful because it's showing that we're just going into those competencies um for alamo we're we're in the middle still still in the whiteboard phase of building uh tracks that are scaffold just to meet faculty where they are because i like most institutions our faculty have the 10 percent that are early adopters that are well versed in OER um maybe may be creating some and then we have 80 percent that could could go either way so trying to trying to build policy and programs whether it be incentivized and or count towards tenure whatever it is at your institution to build policy around that growth and advocacy to meet them where they are would be very impactful i think that is very very true because it is i mean it is of course nice to have those overall policies or strategies or whatever but it's really really true you you have to to get people with you you need to meet them where they are and in their context and they are with their language and with their culture etc because uh change is made by people not by policies well stated yes so thank you very much uh so um matthew and debora and lisa from your perspective so i'll i'll jump in here um i would say that for us these professional competencies were a really important first step it for us in furthering the conversation about OER with the faculty um and and even you know staff and administration that aren't as familiar with OER right we we've got those early adopters on board and really excited and now we really need to be able to communicate to others kind of what else there is and what they can do um and still recognize all the amazing work that those early adopters have done within maricopa so like that that's really where we're at i think you're also saying that do we have to meet the the staff and the people where they are absolutely absolutely we need to educate uh folks as well right okay thank you i'm sorry i was just going to add to that it was it's also valuable for us to we tried to do two things at the same time which was which was adapt the the competencies to meet our specific needs but then also create something that would be valuable for those outside of our institution so um and part of the reason for that is um that at least across arizona we do have kind of an emerging network of institutions who are kind of informally collaborating on OER work just through the regional conference and things like that and so we figured that it would be good to have a framework that we could potentially all use so that we could align some of our initiatives you know according to kind of a set of standards that we thought were most appropriate yeah so i think that is also very true i mean of course you need to um to start with the people you have around you but it's also good if you can maybe scale up with us you were sharing with us today for example that we can use this the model if we like we can adapt it and we can share it and we can work further on it so that is also very important to sometimes see outside the institution as well but i would also just add that i think that one of the capacity building pieces of this also is that we didn't start this this was started in france and i think that the international efforts that we can all work together to do really meaningful work is really important for us not to to lose yeah that that's important thank you and i will continue but i will just say thanks to you who i see that some people are leaving because it's this different kind of appointments and dinners or whatever so thank you very much for those of you who have have to leave um but we will continue for a while uh so um let me see uh then we come to um to uh tg and jonathan i think um the same question for you how can we um build further on your work uh for other institutions for other regions for other countries when it comes to implement policies i think however this discussion has been ongoing in the in the chat that you already have started to you to have plans how to do but maybe we can have some words from you as well sure jonathan are you joining on here you come uh you know my you know my first thought well we've shared we can start by sharing those resources right and then jonathan i aren't thinking about potentially writing something up that can describe the process in a little more detail but i mean every context is different i think that the general model reframing policy as a social contract uh thinking about implementation not just you know getting a policy and you know that's hard i mean i was involved in in the oer the unesco oer recommendation from some of the initial conversations and it's it seems like a huge thing to get something like that on the books it's much bigger to implement it as we are all you know experiencing and this conference is designed around that so the more that we can think about implementation from the beginning and and including stakeholders those who are impacted in that policy development as much as possible the better off uh we're going to be in the long run because otherwise it's just it's just an edict no matter what policy it is no matter how good it is there it's just words if people aren't bought into it if they don't understand it if they don't feel like it's part if they don't feel like they've signed the social contract as well now there'll be a number of people who will abide but you're not gonna you're not gonna have people who are willing participants uh if they if they don't feel like they're part of that that contract i really i really kind of more than i agree with you because i mean to have a policy is not a goal as such absolutely not but your way building awareness working together and having working with this social social contract and build in sustainability within the your process as well is very very important because it is very much about um um culture uh creation and culture creation and and again um changes that are not made by policies it's made by people and people need to be involved and to have the ownership and power power meant so to encourage people i think you have shown very very very good examples how how you could manage to to build empowerment and to engage people within your model so thank you very much for that yeah i'll just add um briefly that and i think this has a lot to do with change management and just sort of how things aligned for us successfully we're both tj and i were coming into new roles with um relative political capital to expend and i don't think any of us like upsetting people um or like making time for people who are upset but it's it's so critical to this work again as i mentioned in the slides people who are upset they care about something and if you can get to the bottom of what they care about they can also be your fiercest allies in in your collective work and i think so often policy development before tj and i came into our board office it was mired in individuals issues with the process and at what point they were included at what point they were excluded and there was uh this this legacy um that that ultimately pitted three different groups against each other it was board staff versus our board versus those people on campus that were impacted by board policy and being able to you know it's it's cheeky but being able to take a break pause look around you and assess that this may not have worked in the past but also what were the differences in those factors who was who was consulted when were they consulted how were they consulted and specifically on a topic like open education awareness is perpetually growing and so recognizing that even if we had a stale conversation with someone around open education six months ago restarting that conversation now is going to be different as it might yield different outcomes and so just being willing to take that risk and make time and listen to people um it's it's been it's been really key because it actually had to exist on the board level as well and that we had board members that we had to recalibrate their expectations and and basically convince them that oh we are wasn't a silver bullet that everything they had been led to believe that it was going to change education all these meaningful ways that at scale there were already far superior models on ground at our campuses that was our burden and it was really helpful to see when the board did pass this policy earlier this year that some of the members who were most supportive of oh we are out of a cost framing perspective being from a business community they were one of them was actually cycling off our board and he was thrilled to see where the policy had gone and how much additional value we were able to put into it by consulting those on the ground stakeholders as i think you had on your timeline and one one part to listen to people but uh i suppose you had some people who maybe were maybe not the gays but then maybe not so much positive or some you know there's always people who are difficult so to say so how do you do you deal with that we and it might just be part of the special makeup of idaho's education community uh we have a coalition of willing contributors and collaborators that it's not fully representative it's not every faculty member or every instructional technologist or instructional designer or librarian but those that are interested we have common affinities and common goals and we recognize that there's multiple multiple pathways to reaching those outcomes and i think the best way to win over some of the skeptics is to get the work done and yield some results you know i another thing that jonathan has taught me this you know as we face the occasional usually faculty member who is aggravated or you know maybe complaining about something or um being difficult if you will in rhetoric um jonathan and i agree we'll take that faculty member over the unengaged any day because we trust that their aggravation or negative feelings come from a place of deep love for what they do in education that they're they're not complaining because they want to complain they're they're they're expressing their opinion because they care so we start with that uh and recognize their motivation and say well you know we'll we'll listen and hear that because that's you you care if you care then your opinion really matters if you're willing to to share it and obviously we try to elicit opinions from those who are unengaged but that's much harder than than the faculty who's who's yelling at you yeah to emphasize tj's points um i was a faculty member who liked to complain a lot and so i have to believe that people have the same motives i do but again listen to people because i mean for one another reason people think or say what i mean there is a we always a reason behind it and when you discuss with people and we will listen to them it's easier to understand at least sorry really quickly just a constant refrain that we got from listening to faculty was just how offended they were from the original policy because again it dismissed their really thoughtful efforts to improve access and opportunity for their students run course materials as inferior as as not desirable as as not ideal and again hearing that it was our responsibility to to show that it was in many cases more impactful and more sustainable thank you so much i think we have um tell has left i think he wrote that in the chat is it right you're not here tell any longer okay so um last rory i have the same question for you how to implement your arguments into policies and again maybe not just two policies as a document but as um we have heard from um from tg and jonathan how to to get the implementation and to get the things devoted to the people with you but in this policy well i fully agree that awareness is key and getting the support from faculty and in my experience and from what i believe the experience of most of us in the movement is your best move is to go with the people who want to go and that's how you build a movement is you create the awareness the aware people some of them will be gung-ho for oar and some won't go with the people who are enthusiastic and just do it and as far as policy is concerned and maybe some of the canadian participants may disagree with me but in canada we don't have any policies and we we've implemented quite a bit around the country there's an incredible amount of activity and real world implementations of oar uh going on and i don't see any policies and so i don't think that uh uh either one is needed in in fact some people the ideas you create a policy and then you don't have to do anything we have a few open access policies that i know of and some of them are just not being implemented at all they're they're just there for for show so i think the key is to move things forward and create awareness now in albert i haven't heard of it in too many other places but the big impetus for oar has been coming from students and we have student groups in a student national provincial committee that has been pushing oar and lobbying the government uh about oar and lobbying within their universities and with individual teachers to promote open educational resources and i think that's been a very powerful mover of oar in our province so i'll i'll leave it at that yes i'm extremely skeptical of policy and people spending a huge amount of time on policy when implementation is called for and if you can implement and create your policy together i think you will have a robust policy and a great implementation yes i think that was very very nice final words for this session because again um policies is not the goal as such it is you have to go with the movement movement and those people who are are in the are forward and then maybe policies are coming alongside because again change is made by people not by documents or policies or so get the people with you and i think all the sessions actually have been very much showing that to very very high extent how important that is about awareness racing about listen to people about see see the benefits and your last words worry here as well it's very important show people that it that it works and then it will come i'm wondering is are there any urgent question to some of the presenters we have still some minutes left we have a very very rich conversation in the chat as you know you can copy the chat by those three dots in the right corner so you can save the conversation and the and the links and everything and i'm sure it will be also probably uploaded in in in a or a global connect and i think also the conversation and dialogues that will follow in the in the or a connect area so please take opportunity to network interact and to discuss with each other both during this week but also even after the conference and then build your network and that is also very important for for advocacy and for moving moving things forward so i would like to if you still are there and if you like i would like to take a photo of of you all of us so if it's possible to turn your camera on if you like i would like to have a photo so smile thank you so by that it was a wonderful session it was wonderful to meet all of you and to listen to your insights and your fantastic wonderful initiatives so keep going and we can all make the word to a better word for education and learning for all so thank you very very much and then you are the west of your conference and to take care and stay safe to wherever you are and i hope we keep in contact