 Right, so welcome everybody, welcome to our Open Education Week webinar which is a special preview of OER 18 open to all and we're also looking forward to it. It's looking like being the most exciting OER conference to date, they just get better and better. But I know that we've seen a lot of participants as well who are students and that's something that we in Open Education have been looking for for a little while so it's great to have everybody and probably the people who are the most engaged and involved in education, participating and sharing the importance of open education. So we are absolutely delighted to be able to have our three keynotes with us, Lorna, Mamoru and David, and to tell us a little bit about, just to give us a little bit of an insight into where their thinking is for their keynotes in Bristol in April. And to give us a little teaser of the event, many of us I know will meet there but perhaps not everybody and perhaps not everybody's going to be able to but we're fortunate as well to be having in this year's OER 18 lots of virtual opportunities as well to connect so virtually connecting will be there as well. So good to have lots and lots of people joining us here in the room but even greater as well we can record this and capture it and people who couldn't make it today will be able to watch remotely when they've got a moment. So if you're having difficulties any technical difficulties please feel free to send the moderators a message and do check out the settings wheel so if you open the bottom right hand corner panel that pink button you'll see a little wheel and you can actually check your setup with your camera and microphone if you're having any technical issues so please feel free to explore those and get some help if you're having problems here in us. I'm going to just give a very brief introduction to who we are in terms of the Open Education SIG, Special Interest Group. So and to our main mission so I'm going to share in the chat a link to the community. If you haven't found it already you probably found it for the event today but that is the site, the community site and you can see there you've got the webinar resources there from previous sessions as well to review and we also have a blog area and we have a set of forums as well for people to interact on and our central mission is really to make sure that as many people as possible have as few barriers as possible to education. So we've been looking at all areas of Open and we've had a series of webinars in recent months around the various sort of manifestations of Open, run by people such as Wikipedia, talking about our open values as well with people such as Martin de Giemes from Doodle, from Moodle and we've also looked at some of the great successes in the Open Education movement, so things like Geo for All. So we try to showcase these sorts of activities to inspire each other but also to network and make sure that those people who share our interest and our support for Open Education can connect and increase their impact on their respective communities and in their different countries and contexts and I see we've got a really international group of people here today joining us which is great to see. Thank you, lovely to see you Helen and great to see that Helen Crump actually you did manage to get in in the end. You've overcome those technical problems which is brilliant. Great, well if you didn't know already it is Open Education Week and this is just one of many, many events going on around the world that really give us an opportunity to showcase what we value so we're participating and what we're going to do today as I said is to meet the keynote speakers from OER 18 and to hear from them and to find out a little bit about their contexts and their take on Open Education and I've got to because I'm a huge fan do a quick shout out to Jim Luke who I've just seen turn up. Hello, how exciting. What a great list of people we've got in the room today. So Lorna can I ask you just to pop your webcam on and your mic and we'll check that you're ready. Can you hear me everyone? Yeah we're hearing you fine, that's great. I'll keep an eye on the chat and look forward to hearing from you. Okay great well thank you very much for inviting me to come along and speak to you today and thank you also for the invitation to present a keynote at the conference. It's always a huge privilege to be invited to keynote at any event but I'm hugely delighted to be presenting at the OER conference because I've actually got a long involvement with the OER conferences and one of the things I want to do is to look at how the conference has changed over the years and also how its influences influenced and reflects my own development as an open educational practitioner. So just a very brief introduction. I currently work at the University of Edinburgh with the Open Education Resources services within the information services group but I work from home in Glasgow part of the time as well so I'm actually speaking to you from Glasgow today. I've been involved in education technology since about 1997 and for a lot of that time I have actually been working in the domain of open standards, open technology and laterally open educational resources. And I first I think started working in the domain of open education around about 2009 and at the time I worked for the information system committee GISC's one of their services the Centre for Education Technology and Interoperability Standards or CETAS as it was known. And our role within GISC was to provide the technology strategy for the GISC development programmes and also to represent higher education on a wide range of international standards bodies. Round about 2009 GISC along with the Higher Education Academy launched a hefty funded programme called the UK Open Educational Resources Programme and round about this time was when the OER conference first kicked off. So the first OER conference took place at the University of Cambridge in 2010 I believe and I think I've been to every single one of the OER conferences since then so I very much see it as my conference. This is where I meet my peers and the people that I learn from the people who have influenced my practice. And it's been really interesting to see how the conference has changed and evolved over the years as our understanding of open education and OER has changed and developed over that time. When the conference first kicked off like I said it was very much associated with the UK OER programme and although that programme wasn't fundamentally about technology the early conferences were in some way focused on how technology could be used to support OER and the dissemination of open educational resources. So there was quite a pronounced technology strand in the conference and from my perspective I was very much focused on technology to support open education and open educational resources at that time. It is quite interesting that there was still a very broad definition or a broad understanding of what constituted open educational resources at that time. We weren't so much concerned about nailing down what was or was not an open educational resource it was more about how we can harness technology to share. Sorry are you losing my connection just now? Can you still hear me okay? Yeah you're fine. You lost a video. I got a band with connection. I'll turn my video off and see if it persists I can just turn it off again. I'll just keep going without video. So this is very much where the conference came from with this focus very much on resources and how communities could support each other to share and develop resources. Now the UK OER programme ran for it was a three-year programme with about a year planning before that and as I said the conference was very much associated with that programme and there was a lot of discussion at the time about whether the open education community in the UK would continue to thrive and develop once the funding for that programme dried up and a lot of people predicted that when the programme came to an end the conference would come to an end as well but that wasn't what happened. The conference continued to thrive for a number of years and it was supported purely by the open education community in the UK and it was interesting to see how ideas of open education changed around that time. The focus of the conference very much shifted away from looking purely at resources and started to expand its remit to draw in open practice, open pedagogy. In 2012 of course we saw the advent of MOOCs and for a while everything was about MOOCs and OER kind of like very much went on the back burner of it and then of course ALT got involved in supporting the conference and I think it's really important to acknowledge the role ALT have played in supporting the conference because I think it's very much down through their efforts that the conference has become just as international and diverse as it is now. UK OER did start off as very much a UK focus conference but it really has expanded its remit and it's also I think one of the things that has been really encouraging about the conference is that it has really embraced this idea of continually critiquing how we understand open education and how we understand open educational resources and certainly I think it was in 2014 OER 2014 the co-chairs actually sought to look at different definitions of what OER might mean and so moving away from the whole idea of resources altogether they actually posed the question well what else could that are in OER stand for if we're no longer concerned about resources and there was some very interesting discussions about that around that time and I really applaud the conference for being willing to always critique and reconceptualise what open education means. I think we do have to be careful that we don't lose sight of some of the fundamentals of open education and I would argue very strongly that one of those fundamentals is that publicly funded educational resources should be freely and openly available and I think there is sometimes a feeling that as we move into exploring what it means to be an open educational practitioner what open pedagogy means all these very nuanced aspects and areas of open education there is sometimes a bit of feeling that open educational resources are done and dusted that we've dealt with them and that we can move on to other things but I would argue very strongly that that's not the case and that we still need to do a lot of work in the area of open educational resources because I think far too few of our publicly funded educational materials are available to the public under open licence and that's something that I think I would very much like to see us refocus on and that's not to say that we shouldn't also be looking at open practice and pedagogy etc because these are all part of the wider open education landscape. So this is very much one of the themes that I want to look at in my keynote and one of the things I think that has been very interesting is that those institutions that have really got behind OER in a sustainable way are institutions and organisations and individuals where the value proposition for OER really meets their personal mission or their institutional vision or indeed their organisational business models and I think we can probably all think of organisations that really have embraced releasing and supporting open educational resources whether it's ALT themselves or the Wikimedia Foundation and the various Wikimedia chapters around the world. Many of our cultural heritage institutions around the world are really supporting the dissemination of open knowledge whether it's the Rijksmuseum or the National Portrait Gallery here in the UK or the National Library of Scotland and some of our educational institutions as well. We're really seeing them supporting the release of open educational resources from an institutional perspective and certainly within my institution, the University of Edinburgh, we have an open educational policy within the university and the university really supports the use and the creation and the reuse of open educational resources because we see it as being squarely in line with our civic mission because the University of Edinburgh is a civic university. We believe that we have an important role to play to disseminate knowledge not just within the academic community but out with the academy to the city, to Scotland and to beyond and supporting open educational resources is very much one way that we can do that. And I think one of the things that's important to understand is that the rationale for supporting OER will be very, very different for individual organisations and indeed for individual people and that we need to be able to accommodate and to be able to hear a wide range of voices when we engage in open educational discourse. And I think one of these voices, one of the voices that has quite often not been present in our discourse has been the voice of the student. And that's one of the reasons that I'm really, really encouraged that the theme of the conference this year is for all and the focus is very much on the learner. Now that's not to say that the conference has completely neglected the voice of the student far from it. In fact, we have actually had two keynotes at the OER conference over the years from the National Union of Students. But I think there is a lot more that we can do to encourage students to get involved with open education and to engage with open educational resources. And one of the things I want to do in my keynote is to look at some examples from the University of Edinburgh of how we have done that. Because within our university, open education is very much led by the students or our open education resources policy. The input is from that came from the University of Edinburgh Student Association. And I'm actually going to be joined at the conference this year by the vice, one of the vice presidents of the Student Union. And what I'll be doing is highlighting some of the ways that we engage students in open education at the university. I'll also be accompanied by quite a few of my colleagues from the university who will be doing their own papers and presentations and workshops about initiatives they're engaged in. I don't want to steal their thunder too much. But I will be highlighting some of the things we do around the university to encourage that diversity of voices and to engage students in open education, including looking at our open content curation interns project. So I'm not going to say too much more about that at the moment. You can hear a lot more about that at the conference, if you're able to come along in person. And if you're not, then I hope you'll be able to join us remotely. As Teresa said, and as Viv said, the conference does make huge efforts to ensure that it really is an open conference, and that even if you are unable to come and join us in Bristol, you will be able to participate in the conference remotely. So I hope I'll look forward to seeing you one way or another in Bristol. And I'm going to stop there now. And I'm very happy to take any comments or questions that you might have. That's fabulous, Lorna. As always, to be relied on for the most important and the most crucial discussions, because it's obviously been something that you've been very close to for a long time. And it's just fabulous to see how things are moving on and growing and how people are starting to pay attention to the open agenda. We have a conference chair, Viv, in the room as well. So, Viv, can I invite you to say hi to everybody? Now we've got a room full of people and welcome them and maybe encourage them to come along if they're not already planning to come along to OER 18. Oh, hi. Thanks, Theresa. Yeah, I mean, that was an amazing preview, wasn't it? And I just get a sense of how important it is to keep hold of the history and where we've come from and the work done along the way. So yeah, we are so excited, David and myself, about bringing this to Bristol and equally excited. I think this is a role model conference in terms of how to, as Lorna said, open it up through the use of social media and all of Martin Hawkes' amazing wizardry and the amazing wizardry. That's, I think, an even growing, more exciting element too that other conferences hopefully can learn from. So yeah, thanks to everyone for popping in today. And as you can see, if you follow the conference hashtag, it's an almost year round ongoing discussion of some of the points Lorna raised, which again, I think is just a phenomenon reflecting the passion and the recognised importance of open education in the UK. And if anyone caught Radio 4 today, there were two quite senior people from, I don't know, the Department of Education discussing schools, the need for textbooks, the high cost of textbooks. And I was going to say hello. Yes, just go on to Twitter, just do a Google search. And, you know, so I think there's really exciting work to be done. And hopefully, as a result of the conference and the amazing US conferences and all the work that our keynotes do, you know, we can keep keep pushing that. So thank you so much. I'll shut up now. Thank you. Thank you very much for being ready to pop in and add that. I'm going to see whether your microphone is working. If you could try that for me, just switch your mic on. And maybe we can I'm here. Wonderful, you're here. That's always, that's always very comforting when you're sharing a webinar. I can see your name, but I want to hear you. That's wonderful. So we'd like to turn out turn the next 10 minutes over to you or so and hear more about your ideas for your keynote contribution to where we are 18 and a little bit more perhaps about yourself. So let the floor is yours. Okay, greetings, everyone. From Leicester. Thank you very much. There is for the invitation to Veef and also the whole team who put this thing together. A bit about myself. So I like to see myself as a like a scholar activist. I teach mainly on the social work, youth and community development programs here at the Monfort University in Leicester. But I'm also involved a lot in a group or an organization that I set up called Global Hands, which is a charity in the in Gambia and also a social enterprise. This is social enterprise in the UK here. So what we do a lot of is is is is building capacity, but I'll tell you a little bit more about that. I think I'm quite interested in linking in terms of this my talk, starting from Kant's categorical imperative, and literally what actually motivates me kind of like to do what I do. Education as a tool, you know, only in terms of generating knowledge, but for me, in terms of solving some of the problems that affects me due to my positionality, due to my situativeness. So I am part of where I come from. I'm a collection of my experiences that and that imbues who I am and what I get up to. So education for me is a tool for for social transformation. And I do not apologize for that. In terms of this particular talk, there are things that I would like to bring up. For example, growing up, I read one of the classic books from Walter Rotney, which actually was about how Europe underdeveloped Africa. And I think something that was key from that book was about functional education versus literate education. Having the education that allows you to read and write, but not to be able to transform the problems of our society. So for me, developing that functional education is something that is very, very key. That's why in my work, there's a lot of focus which are aligned, a lot of focus on functionality, on access, on relevance, which are aligned to OER objectives. And I guess that's why I was asked to share my thinking. So I think that's very, very important to contextualize where I'm coming from. Because, like I said, my situatedness, my positionality impacts on what I do. Now, in terms of global, I mean, so I teach, I've been teaching in DMU for the past 13 years. And that's my job. And I think teaching is my job, is my passion. But my greater passion is working with global hands. And I think we set it up me and some of some students and ex students of the Monfort University set up global hands to look at how we can contribute to public good and in building a better world. So in global hands, we've got three main objectives. One is that we look at international development. In January, I came back with 35, no 45 students from three universities, Manchester Med, University of East London and the Monfort University. And we were in the Gambia for about 12 days. And we went there and we learned about globalization using an experiential approach. We learned about development, we learned about cultural competence. We learned about a lot of things. But also, the students were not there only as for cultural tourism. They were there to contribute to share knowledge. So whether it's about running joint workshops, taking part in a seminar, taking part in a run for Africa, taking part in a book launch. So that's part of it's a reciprocal mutual kind of like engagement that we're interested in because a lot of the young people, a lot of the students and the staff from the UK universities, we're sharing their knowledge and their expertise. We had a student who has, who was there, or actually two students who were doing one and masters the other one, a PhD student, and they were looking at how they could actually develop the upgrade kind of like power station that we've got there, which is linked to an electric vehicle project that we're doing that I'll talk about later. So that's one of the things that we do on the international development. So we work with a lot of universities, both in the UK and in the Gambia to do this to exchange knowledge, actually over consciousness and also to decolonize the curriculum in a practical way, because we're not only talking about people learning with their, with their heads, but also with their hearts. And sometimes that is very, very difficult to conceptualize until and unless you're in the space that actually kind of like allows that to happen. So international development, we've built the second biggest library in the Gambia. And that was done by students mainly from the university from the design of the building, working with the community to the introduction of compressed outbreaks. If you use a normal bag of cement, you can get possibly about 35 bricks from it. If you actually, and we got the students to recite this and to develop this, if you use the compressed, compressed brick, which is more sustainable, instead of using seven wheelbarrow of sand, you only use one wheelbarrow of sand, and you possibly get about 10, 12 wheelbarrow of mud and a bag of cement is cheaper, is environmentally friendly. And this is the technology that our students here and our staff have been able to teach local young people in the village of Manduwa to be able to build a hop that we've set up called the Manduwa Development Hop. So there's a lot of exchange of knowledge of experience and getting our students to use their knowledge actually to create some of those things in a practical way. But we could talk about so we build the second biggest library, we got our students, we got our staff as well from the library here to go in there. And we were thinking about how do we get, how do we source a system that doesn't require paying money? And I think they ended up with Ubuntu and installing it in all the computers and setting up other systems that are based mainly on the OER approach. So it is quite interesting how we do that. The other bit that we do is education and public engagement. So I mean, some of you might know about the the pathway where young people mainly from South Africa are coming kind of like to Libya and trying to get to Europe via the Mediterranean. And a lot of them actually die on the way. Some are sold into slavery for about $200. Some are actually organ harvested. So it's some start tragic stories. So we need a big massive public engagement campaign where we work with students. I mean, we don't have experts working with us in the traditional sense. We work with students and ordinary people and develop the skills exchange knowledge and set up a massive public education campaign about pathway solutions and kindle of hope, including songs, documentaries, and run for Africa to develop raise money to do these projects. So that's only one part of what we do in terms of education and public engagement. We do seminars, we do conferences, you know, we do projects that allow us to one promote consciousness and to support action. And then the third thing that we do is promote certain perspectives. So we've got we've set up a journal of critical science studies. And that is an open access journal, which actually, to be quite honest, over the last year or two, has slowed down a little bit. And we've got plans to revive it. But this is about promoting critical silent voices. This is a talks about some ways not being visible and credible to our way of thinking. And I think our journal does that. And we've also published about 12 books, some of them being used in the University of the Gambia as cortex. Until I actually kind of when I was going to high school, I didn't have access to national history, I could tell you about Columbus and Vascoda Gamma, and I can tell you about the planted genets and Hawkins, and all of these things. But I couldn't tell you my history as a young person growing up in the Gambia. And I think they say the art of literature and material that allows that to happen. So we use one day journal, not only in the Gambia, but for a lot of certain countries, to actually to challenge dominant configurations of ways of knowing and being. But also, we kind of like, I've made some of those books available to the University of the Gambia, which is being used as core textbook for some of these things as well. So I think that was quite important in what we do. But also, a lot of the work is done by us, myself, staff and students without expectation of this enumeration, just to make sure that we share this kind of perspective. So I will be sharing a lot more of these. And we've got some really interesting projects going on right now in terms of sharing technology. For example, we're working with a key, one of the leading car manufacturers in Europe. And we are trying to set up the first solar powered taxi service in Africa. And we're trying to, we're in the presence of setting up a living lab so that we will look at how we can develop tractors that use solar power with local materials, local people in collaboration with international organizations in Europe and staff. Last week, we just sent the money. This compressed art technology I was talking about earlier, to buy the machine is about $4,000, which actually places out of the reach of a lot of people who should be benefiting from it. So I've been working over the last six months with two young Gambian engineers, one is civil, the other one is mechanical engineering. And they've designed this machine for $250, which actually the prototype should be finished by next week. So by the time I come to the conference, I might be able to share it. And the idea is that we can find ways of reproducing that because that will have a massive impact because there's a lot of environmental degradation, soil erosion. And because due to mainly mining of the sun, because there's been a boom since the last president who's been there for 22 years as a dictator left, there's been booming and interest in the country. So I mean, we're hoping that this will make a big difference. We're also working on food processing, a significant percentage of mangoes actually left because they don't have any packaging. And I've been working with some students and some people from here to transfer the technology so that we can mango drying and processing some of the other food as well for storage. So in the conference, what am I going to do? I'm going to look at one, the sustainability of these projects because it comes at a cost and the production comes at a cost. So how do you keep a model that is affordable, that is open access at the same time that is sustaining? Because otherwise you'll have to go to people every month or every year, cap in hand asking for money. So how do we develop these things? The other thing is like, you know, there's a question for moral philosophy. I mean, Kerry, one of the youth work writers says that youth work and to an extent community development is an exercise in moral philosophy. And it's about, I mean, we're supposed to generate the spaces where we ask essential question of self, who are we, what's our purpose? So I mean, how do we do that? And how do we generate spaces in which people can be best versions of themselves? So that will be something that I want to talk about. But I also see OER as the pedagogy of disruption, you know, against structural violence and towards social justice. You know, that's what I'm about. I said that earlier about my situatedness, about my personality. And these are my stories from my experience. And I want people to disagree with me. In fact, I'll be disappointed if they don't disagree with me and share counter narratives. And we can have this dialogue. So I'm hoping that I will I'll be positioning OER as a pedagogy of disruption. But I think the other key bit I want to share as well is about students, staff, and scope producers in the whole process. We started Global Hands Without a Penny. And we haven't received any major funding from anybody. We've been able to generate our own funding, do a little bit of the fundraising to make happen. Because with OER without the help of others, we want to kind of like, promote a better world, you know. So that's, I mean, that's just a tease of what kind of like, kind of like, what I'm thinking about during the conference. And I really hope that I will see most of you there. And then we will actually continue during the, during the formal sessions and during the breaks as well to have these conversations and to prosperity life and to to share better ways of doing things. That's brilliant. Thank you so much. And it's great to hear. And you clearly in a room where there are other people behind you, but you carried on. We've been able to hear you very well. And people are expressing their gratitude in the chat here. There's so much to unpack in what you've teased us with there that we're really desperate now to come along and engage with you in the OER 18 conference. Thank you. Thank you very much. Lovely to hear from you. And so David, who was up at silly o'clock this morning in order to participate. Thank you very much for that. We've had, we have three keynote speakers with us who are probably some of the busiest people ever. So, you know, I'm really grateful that you've managed to squeeze us in and do this preview. David, could you just switch your mic on and we'll see that we've got your audio? Yes, good. Well, it's good morning here. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Indeed. Good morning, afternoon or evening, wherever you are. And can we turn the floor over to you really keen to hear? I've been a very eager devourer of your blog for quite some time and I'm very keen to hear what you're going to be talking to us about at OER 18. So I'm going to turn the floor over to you. Well, thank you. And thank you for the invitation. I I have to admit I really was floored and surprised when the invitation came through and so I'm grateful for the opportunity to come and and participate at the conference with you. You know, just in terms of a little personal introduction. I was a was a full time faculty member for about a dozen years teaching in educational technology programs. And over that time, you know, really moved from being a full time scholar to slowly becoming a full time scholar, but really a part time activist and kind of outside the institution, working on the ground with folks on issues related to open education. And about five years ago, finally made the the decision to flip that over and become more full time in my kind of practitioner activism kind of work and more part time in my scholarly role. And so now I find myself in a full time role at Lumen Learning, where we essentially are focused in the United States on community colleges and other institutions that have open enrollment policies, the kinds of institutions here that serve students are academically at risk or underprepared and whose faculty are also the least well supported in their use of technology and have the least support and help in trying to adopt new approaches. I'm doing that full time, but still being part time at Brigham Young University, where I was most recently full time and tenured. And also, you know, a good chunk of my time now is spent in my role at Creative Commons as the education fellow there. I'm currently teaching the the two beta sections of the CC certification, which has been over a year in development and is out in beta right now should be open and available to the public this coming April. So that's that's been really exciting to work on as well. I think I want to say I want to say two things. First, I want to share I want to share a little personal story about my path into this work and then and then maybe get on to giving a preview of what I might talk about in the keynote at the conference. In the in the mid nineties, I was working as the University Webmaster at my alma mater, which is Marshall University in West Virginia here in the U.S. I was working as Webmaster. I was teaching as an adjunct in the computer science department there, teaching a class on configuring, maintaining, running web servers and teaching a class on on what we called e business at the time at the local community college. And, you know, I can I had a I had an experience while I was working in that role as Webmaster that really changed my life and set me on this path to doing this work and in open education. I was I remember it very clearly. I was sitting at my desk and working on developing a JavaScript based calculator, a calculator that was going to go into a web page. And it seemed like such an innovative thing at the time. But, you know, as I was working on developing that calculator, I had this realization and it wasn't I certainly wasn't the first person to understand this. I think probably millions of people had understood this before I did. But it was just a thought that came to me with a particular kind of force and power, which was that when when you take something like a calculator and you put it online, you change its nature in a really important way. So I thought, you know, thought back to the elementary school that I had attended in West Virginia when I was growing up and, you know, things like there being a limited number of calculators and kind of waiting your turn for those to work their way around the rooms. You might have the opportunity to use them. But when you take a calculator and you put it online, you change its nature in a way that while the physical calculator can only be used by one person at a time and you have to wait your turn or kind of compete for access to it. When that calculator goes online, it suddenly becomes usable by everyone, at least by everyone who has access to a device and an internet connection. And that difference between the physical and the digital really just kind of hit me like, like the clouds parting and a beam of sunlight kind of coming down and shining on me and you know, it was very vogue at that time to to be really critical of Microsoft. And I remember thinking, you know, this is how this is how you get Bill Gates kind of money. You you you work and produce and develop piece of software that, you know, that takes a lot of time and effort to build. But once it's built, then you can essentially make free copies of that and sell them to people for, you know, one hundred and ten, one hundred twenty, one hundred and fifty dollars or more. It's kind of like printing money. That's that's how you really get rich is, you know, I can see the pathway to doing that in this kind of new emerging world of the Internet. But at the same time, you know, the other thought that occurred to me was, you know, the other direction that this can go is that if we can figure out how to fund the development of things like educational materials one time, once they're funded, they can be used by anyone and everyone. There's no, you know, kind of additional cost of people coming in and accessing those. And that seemed that realization that if we could get educational materials online, they could be then made available for free to everyone who could get to a device and get to a connection seemed like something that was really important and something that was worth spending a career working on. And it was after I had that realization that I decided to go back to graduate school and got on the path that I'm on right now. So I've been chasing this dream for, I don't know, 20, 21, 22 years. Now, it's been a while, but I just shared a little bit of that background to, to it may be in response to to the remarks of the other speakers today have met have made to acknowledge that I really do, I fundamentally come at this from a resource perspective. I think about it in those terms and I think about how technology makes those resources more broadly available and creates and opens opportunities for folks. So in terms of kind of giving a preview of what I might say at the conference, I'm in what in some ways is a really enviable position. The conference organizers have asked me to come and and not be the not be the typical kind of upbeat David that you might have heard before, but to be not quite contrary David, but certainly to spend some time saying things that might not be super popular, that might be controversial, but that that might be beneficial for for folks in the field to hear and think about and have some conversations about. I am kind of sensitive to to the fact that doing that online could could be harder than it will be to do face to face. So I want to take something that I hope is maybe slightly controversial, but not too far out on a limb, not too far away from the trunk and talk about continuous improvement for just a moment. I think some of the most exciting work for me that that I'm involved in right now is work around continuous improvement. And and what I mean by that is, you know, one of the amazing things about open educational resources, I think regardless of whose definition you kind of decide you like, is that those resources grant us permission to engage in a set of activities that were generally not allowed to engage in. And among those activities are revising, altering, adapting, improving, updating, and remixing, creating mashups and pulling things together, combining resources from across, you know, from different sources into something new. So that's that's quite powerful that OER gives you permission to do those things. But while it grants you those permissions, it doesn't actually give you any clue about where to go to exercise them, where to focus in, and where to spend your time and where to spend your effort, you know, you can change anything. But what should you change? I think I think when you add to open educational resources, the idea of learning analytics, I think there's something very, very powerful here. And I don't mean I don't mean the kind of typical learning analytics that when I say learning analytics, your mind may jump to predictive models that are intended to identify students who are struggling in a class while there's still time to reach out to them and and support them and give them some additional help in ways that will help them be successful. I mean, more of a more of a content facing and assessment facing analytics, the kind of analytics that you can look at when your assessments and activities that you have students to engage in and even all the way down to the individual assessment items that you might use on an exam are aligned with with some kind of goal statements or learning outcomes or competency statements. And all of the OER that you're using in support of preparing students to be successful in achieving mastery in your course are also aligned to learning outcomes when and when you create that very fine grained alignment from OER through to the different kinds of activities and assessments that you ask students to engage in. It gives you the opportunity to say with some specificity here I can see students falling down as they try to demonstrate mastery here in these specific outcomes and I can trace back from that failure, you know their inability to demonstrate mastery. I can trace back to the content to the resources that we're supposed to be preparing them for that. And that kind of analytics that works to give you information about how successful your course design and your course resources are in supporting student learning can match up very nicely with OER in order to enable continuous improvement. On the one hand what while OER give us permission to make changes but don't tell us where we might go to to look for those. Learning analytics tells us exact can tell us exactly where to go to look for places in our courses where students are struggling but doesn't grant us the permissions we might need. If we've adopted some traditionally copyrighted material to make those changes that we can see need to be made. So putting these two together having learning analytics tell us where we should go to target course improvements and having OER give us permission to actually make those improvements and re you know put those back out in the field in terms of being new and updated OER and run through that cycle again where additional students use it data flows back through and we're able to improve the OER again on sometimes in very short cycles. The idea that we can be very empirical about the improvements that we make to OER and that OER can be better semester after semester each time someone uses OER to support their learning. There's an opportunity for that OER to support their learning better than it was able to support learning for students in the previous semester. And I think that idea of being very empirically minded and getting better and better and being able to help students be more and more successful every term is really quite exciting. Though I acknowledge that it might be a little controversial because of because of issues around data. I don't know the degree to which our work at Lumen is known in the UK and elsewhere but to give you a sense of scale we supported we directly supported a little over 170,000 students last year. Saved them about $15 million collectively and had another 13 some million unique visitors kind of on the website using the OER that we curate and publish there. But it really is a really interesting opportunity to watch data flow across a larger kind of national group of students all using the same OER and a common set of assessments and be able to drive improvement of those OER and honestly drive improvement of the assessments as well as those data flow back through so that as more and more people get involved in the OER movement and pick up and start using this OER they're able to better support their students over time. So I think that's that's all that I'll say in terms of preview I see we've got fewer than 10 minutes left for some discussion but thank you again for the invitation to participate in this webinar and for the invitation to be with you at the conference. A big thank you David as well for fitting us in at a funny time of the day as well. So thank you very much for that. Lovely to have a pragmatic and practitioner based focus as well because I think often when we think about open practice we haven't quite really done enough to engage with what that really means and I think that's going to be an area that I hope we will continue to explore through OER 18 as well. So my goodness the time has rushed and I've seen lots and lots of conversations going on through Twitter and I know that this webinar will really just be a provocation. It gets people thinking and talking and I know that people will who haven't been able to join us in the room today will also visit the webinar and contribute to the discussion so I want to make it really clear where those discussions can take place and can and do take place. There is a just mail list for the open ed SIG that is open for anybody to join on Twitter the open ed SIG as well as the OER 18 hashtag is being used so please do continue those conversations and we have an open ed SIG community space and I'll just pop the link for that into the chat as well where the conversations do indeed continue. When we put the focus on to OER 18 and the conference coming in a very short while now getting closer all the time there has been a fabulous innovation that's happened on the OER 18 website and this was again community driven which all the best things are the suggestion that we should crowdsource images to use to promote OER 18 and that's actually on the website. This is a lovely way to actually have our images shared and to repurpose and reuse them to spread the word so do have take the time to explore that OER website and to upload your themes of if the the kind of the colour scheme that we've looked at for OER 18 is correct me if I'm wrong here it is black and white and gold. So yeah, your images are very gratefully received there and they're looking good upon the OER 18 website. And obviously we couldn't have organised this webinar today without the support and help the support and help of ALT and the fact that they provide us very helpfully with this online room to capture the webinar. Yes, Anna, we have a colour scheme. Just, you know, when you're picking out your clothes to come you just have to think this through. And so big thanks to ALT and to moderators from ALT and to Moran and Martin and Tom who are here in the room for all their support. And yes, virtual flyers are welcome. That's Martin's wizardry that's put together the OER 18 photo sharing sites. So yeah, please, please do take advantage of it and your images. There's been a great one added just recently, I think, based on a Banksy, which is perfect for a Bristol conference. Many thanks to all of you for coming. I do hope you will continuing to engage with the OpenEd SIG and take a look at some of the past webinars as well where we've got lots of information about other activities that are going on in the world of Open to familiarise yourself with. So please come and explore those and contact us using the channels that have already outlined. But thank you all very much and a big thank you to all our keynotes and I think we'll be able to find an applause. There we go. We've got an applause emoticon in the chat there that we can send along. Big thanks to Lorna and to Mamoru and to David for your contributions really looking forward to April and to the conference. I have been checking the chat for questions but I haven't actually seen any. So if you've got a burning question, do use those channels that we've mentioned before and we'll make sure that we connect you with relevant people. Thank you all very much for coming. We will have to sign off now. I have to go and teach and I'm sure other people have other things to do too. But thank you all very much for coming. I'll switch the recording off.