 Well, it's it's my pleasure to welcome you as a host of this session of half an hour and I'm quite happy to do so. I'm Fred Mulder. I'm the chairholder, the UNESCO chairholder at the Churchill University and my colleague Doreen Grilly is the chairholder in the University, it seems to me, is also supporting the whole initiative. And so there's two UNESCO chairs in OBR established this year and we'd like to celebrate this fact by giving you a small feat and I brought you something from our country. It's not a Canadian Dutch treat, it's a Dutch treat, I must say. Dutch treats means more than only giving you a treat, as you know. And this is high quality Dutch chocolate. I would just like to ask you to hand it over to your colleagues in this room, and I would like to enjoy this chocolate during the session and have the feeling of sharing something which you have in common, right? So here it is. As soon as you may start, why not? We'll start back here. So the two chairs started by the beginning of this year and they had the first network meeting of the two networks of the chairs in New York in June, which was a very fruitful meeting and with many partners around the world and we decided in the meeting to to set up four action lines and of the four action lines we were treat three today and the fourth one I mentioned because it's important as well which has to do with there's only two chairs now today There's a chair in two rich countries in the Western world And of course, it's quite clear that UNESCO should also have chairs in Africa and Latin America and in Asia So we're working on that. That's the fourth action line, but the others three are to establish a global overall grade in school, number one I will talk about that as the last part of the session And the second one is to establish a I know we are knowledge cloud I already will talk about that and the third one is to to set up a mapping Activity that will be treated by Susan Dunn today. I don't like to ask Susan to treat that issue Including also a short introduction on the chairs. Susan, please. I hope the chocolate Restores your energy for end of the day I for the purpose of those people who are not so familiar with the work of UNESCO over the past year still I shouldn't have had that chocolate for my own in here I just like to give a little bit of an overview of the context This is a familiar Statement to all of us that comes from the Hewlett Foundation Support has really launched this whole movement and Looking over it one thing struck me in the yellow there the world's knowledge Is for everyone to share and that very much relates to the priorities of UNESCO One that there should be education for all and that relates to basic education By 2015 this will never be met unless we develop more innovative Approaches to making learning opportunities available more widely Can you hear me no I Was it work? Okay Back to education for all one of the primary priorities of UNESCO is that all children should have access to basic education by 2015 and this is clearly an objective that cannot be met by traditional means So innovation like OER is absolutely a necessity and the information for all program reflects the recognition that we have to use new technologies for Sharing information in 2005 I Started the first work at UNESCO by addressing the issue of sharing information Because if you don't know something you can't make use of it and we convened Community of more than 500 people from 90 countries We've talked and talked and talked and talked in small short virtual seminars who collaborated and Who contributed to a website and a wiki? And one of the things they did during their four years together Was to think about what the priorities were for advancing the open educational resources movement? Awareness raising still remain their first priority, but networking was the second one So now as Fred said we are establishing a network of UNESCO chairs in OBR With a group of international partners the You could if you look at the community the community was really a community of interest and it was there for people to have a place to interact For an international space if you will to reflect on the issues What we're moving now to is an international OER network for action and collaboration UNESCO chairs Are quite significant program. There are 715 of them and 69 networks in 131 countries and they function in a network Manor that's their objective, and they act as poles of excellence and innovation I'm nearly done too Thank you very much What's important I think about these chairs is that they are aligned with UNESCO's High-level international objectives. They are intended to strengthen interaction globally in all directions not north so that shouldn't even be first and The poles of excellence at the regional or sub-regional levels can build upon work that's going on As we said there are now two chairs in OER The one at Athabasca, which is a UNESCO Commonwealth of Learning Chair and Rory will talk about that and the chair of Fred Mulder at the Open University of the Netherlands and Together those two chairs have assembled a quite impressive group of partners Where I'm turning my attention as basically the last Activity in the trajectory I started in 2005 with the development of that community is to look at networking and see whether we can actually promoted By developing a collaborative mapping of OER initiatives worldwide We're a decade old now, and it's an incredible journey that has Has gone before us There are so many initiatives now where once we went to open in meetings and we knew everybody Now there's a huge community. There's an enormous number of initiatives And it struck me when I was leaving UNESCO that in my privileged position there As Paris likes to think of itself at the center of the world If not the universe If I didn't know who was doing what Then it had become very large and we would really benefit from a support So this objective is going to be discussed We had a mapping in 2005 through OECD But it's certainly time to look at it again and to think about doing it collaboratively I've been working with the Open University in the UK and colleagues there and OCWC to develop a kind of a sample that we can just put forward for discussion and for ripping into pieces if necessary I'm planning that discussion now, and I would really appreciate input and contact from colleagues who are interested in this idea of seeing whether Collaboratively as a community we could start to map what's going on in OER Just at a very high level and I have a set of questions for discussion So because we're short on time and may not have time to discuss What I'd like to suggest is if you're interested, please give me your card and I'll follow up with you So My UNESCO chair is Is also supported by the Commonwealth of Learning so we're getting support from both sides and I get support also from the Alberta government and we have support from the Hewlett Foundation Here's a list of the other sponsors the OER Foundation and Tech, Kriath and Vasky University, etc And we have partners all over the world and that just gives you an idea of where they are These are all institutions that have committed to work with the chair in support of open education resources and They're primarily in the developing world We also have them in the developed countries and There's a better picture better there than than in real life And Susan looks pretty good here too So Susan's doing the OER mapping as part of our chair work and she's explained that But they're part of it we we have to support as part of the chair Responsibilities is to support the development of OER in Africa and as such we're partnered with the African Virtual University UNISA and a number of others the African Association of Universities We have a mandate to support OER in rural and remote communities when we're doing that in the northern Canada and and in Africa The other part of the mandate is to support gender equality and That doesn't mean rights for women in fact in some areas of the developing world. It's the young boys who are Disadvantaged and especially for example in the Caribbean and You to promote OERs to educate youth and We're doing this through networking building unit twin network supporting other chairs around the world and we're working now with with people in Brazil Oceania and Africa for other chairs That will come up chairs and open education resources And that way we're building capacity in those countries for learning and We have a strong mandate to support research into what are the best ways of implementing OERs? How can we use OERs? What pedagogies are the best? Those type of things policies what policies do we need to put in place to support OERs? All of that and as part of that we're building a knowledge cloud Of We're collecting now a huge number of resources of research into and we have about 60 in our cloud now and We will be announcing it Probably in the new year when it's available and we're collecting feet feces of students who've done work on OER About and it's about its research about open education resources and is a growing body of that research and Thankfully most of it is in OER form so we can just copy and put it on to our onto our digital repository and we're taking We've commissioned About 35 authors well known in the OER movement To write it to write papers for the cloud and the best ones are going to be peer-reviewed and put into an open access book that will be produced by a U-Press and Of course a cloud is where you just put it up and anyone can enter it online and Make use of it and it's not necessarily in one place and what we're going to do is make it very easily Easy for anyone to copy all of those resources and put them on their servers anywhere they want So the type of contributions we're looking at we have I mentioned the invited authors We're talking about reports technical documents student theses We're going to have quality review of all the submissions and We're going to make sure they're shared with others We're looking at open OER relevant topics We're going to organize them in themes the theory and practice of open education resources the micro meso and macro Open education resource issues and again reports theses policies, etc. So as we'll have Places on the internet where we can go on the cloud so as anyone can access these resources and it'll be a good way of supporting the What Fred's doing Supporting a an international doctorate in the study of open education resources so the book is the editors is myself and one Jeri Knuth here from Kenya and Stuart Marshall from the West Indies and We're going to put it into the issues in distance education series, which is edited by Terry Anderson It'll be professionally edited in paper e-pop and PDF formats, and it will have a creative Commons attribution license The author the authors themselves will peer review the submissions Only the successful papers will be published in the book, and it'll be out in the summer of 2012 and there's more than 30 researchers Working on papers right now Thank you very much. Okay. Thank you What you just said eat it if you have eaten the chocolate was the logo of the Dutch over the university So it's just that you know you were eating the logo of the Dutch up my question I'm not giving you more details of the background of my chair because I was a type of strange I would like to concentrate on the activity that you are taking that is the global order at school It's an initiative of the two chairs and as I said We had a meeting in June in New York, and there we agreed on a plan of action for the two chairs and Those lines of actions are being laid out here. The first one is this global where I'm right at school Which has priority at the music level? The second one is the Knowledge Cloud And the third one has been explained by Susan the global or a map and the fourth one is to To find a better balance better global balance in the network of the chairs Now there is a need a strong need for more research in OVR as has been said several times today There is of course some research done already But a lot of research questions are not being addressed or not being answered So there's a need for a substantial expansion of OVR research and to develop knowledge in the broad OVR field and the broad OVR field to be interpreted as not only the connections with the technology part but also with the cultural science part with the Computer science part with the law discipline and so on. So it's a broad interpretation of OVR connected to different disciplines We are looking for a solid fundamental introduction of all the art innovations in different countries We'd like to monitor the outcomes of all the initiatives institutional national and international It would like to increase evidence and guidance for the OVR as being applied in practice And that all in an international context Where there's a lot of diversity It matters where you're working in Indonesia or in Canada or in Brazil. There's a big difference between those countries So we have to really be careful with research being interpreted in the right context The goals of the school are to Substantially expand the OVR research base. We would like to do that primarily through good quality PhD trajectories We don't exclude master degrees, but we would like to focus on PhD and We would like to see those PhD trajectories in different universities in a variety of societies and not only the developed countries but also the developing countries in different continents around the world We'd like to connect to researchers and to research through a global learning network and To provide of course free and easy access to all the knowledge that has been generated through papers, conference presentations, dissertations, reports and also publications to a broader audience The school should be characterized by seven Issues. The first one the school should be an umbrella for PhD research on OVR in the global network of universities in a Lightly coordinated fashion We'd like to address fundamental questions, design matters, applications, contextual issues, evaluation aspects, etc Linked to a wide variety of disciplines as I said before and applicable to all kinds of domains The researchers are, the key researchers are, in my view, the PhD candidates and we can both subtract full-time PhD candidates but also part-timers Who may be very interesting because they have a job and have an environment in which they're working and the environment can in many cases be very useful for the research Then there should be joint supervision by three OVR experts that will be the promoter at a degree award in university Which is in many cases the most university but not in all cases for example As universities in the developing world who don't have the PhD degree awarding power So then in that case you have a hosting university Where there will be an associate promoter, as we call it, and the promoter should be should be delivered by a colleague university around the world But it is an essential thing to have joint supervision by three People, the promoters, the main leading supervisor and two co-promoters and part universities around the world in other countries We should rely on the QA system, the quality assurance system of the university and the country where the promoter is working But that doesn't mean that that's all so we have to add a shared basic quality framework of the school for example, we have to be sure that we have the same entry and exit procedure for PhD candidates We have to be sure that we should recognize the promoters and co-promoters in the same way So there's a couple of things that we should recognize among the school The knowledge dissemination of the school that should be done by CC by We can of course use the OVR notice cloud as a special channel, but also Other channels can be used and we'd like to include also Proliferation reports of the research and proper audience publications as well We do need the board for the graduate school for a couple of decisions and a couple of Seems that you have to agree on for example if to agree on the goals and and the quality assurance Regulations we have to review the annual change forms of the school if they decide on membership Financial regulations and have to decide on the recognition of the promoters and co-promoters In many countries around the world, there's a lot of things going on to modernize and to upgrade PhD research. I'm just giving one example here from the European Commission very recently they made a couple of recommendations for PhD research as you call it your doctoral training and It's been summarized here. The portfolio we should have a certain critical mass Should include transferable skills training not only skills for research, but also skills that you can use in normal worlds Perspective principles of a chart and code. That's a European thing which has to do with Human resource management aspects We'd like to get doctoral candidates to challenge disciplinary orders not only to do research in their own discipline but also to connect to other disciplines and We'd like to encourage them to spend some research time abroad And also to encourage them to spend some research time in industry. Now those two leather aspects We don't want to have PhD candidates moving around the world taking the airplane and to the university. So the main way we would like to work there is to do that online and We can do that very well and The last issue on this slide says that you should have research time in the street And that has to do with the part-time PhD students, PhD candidates who indeed can connect to industry in a very nice way So we would like to use the school also to to to introduce some innovations into the PhD programs What the benefits here are for the PhD candidates and for the promoters and for the institution as follows. The first benefit of course is the Researches network that you are creating a Significance worldwide network of different disciplines in it and that's that's a benefit for the PhD candidates for promoters and for the institution. The second benefit is the reputation that you are building to be based on the increasing excellence by an approach in which you are accumulating research over different institutions by which you create maths and also to focus on a specific theme. That is also the benefit of the three three categories of PhD candidates for the institution. The joint supervision is to the benefit of all and The global learning network that we are offering with online facilities and virtual activities which suits the target group of course is also a great benefit for the PhD candidate and for the promoter There is a strong training component to be designed from a catalog of courses that you can choose from Those courses should be delivered by the memory universities Again, that is the benefit for the PhD candidate and for the institution We are offering a rich conference in similar environments. For example, PhD candidates can come to the open ed conference and we can maybe connect at the specific center for the school or they can go to the WSE global conference and that is to the benefit of the PhD candidates The knowledge cloud is an appropriate knowledge distribution channel is to the benefit of the PhD candidate and to the promoters the QA system based on the school's reference documents is to the benefit of all and Then there's interesting opportunities to run work and top related research projects as I've told before for the part-time resuméing and There's better conditions to acquire relevant research projects for each of the partners because you are working together And also there's better opportunities to receive funding from funding agencies because you show to the funding agencies that you are working together by which you increase your chances The membership We distinguish two types of membership They can be full members for universities who have the Re-awarding power and associate members for universities who are lacking this power The conversions are pretty simple. You have to at least one The candidate and one intendant promoter or associate promoter who is prepared to also become engaged in Being a promoter and another PhD directorate from a lot of universities without being paid for them That's the first one issue. The second one is you can do us across the school's goals and its QA system And the third one is you should contribute to the specific activities of the school Membership is open. Not only to the different partners that we already know but also to other universities that want to become a partner and Underline the conditions Now the finances are very simple. One minute left to me. The finances is the one minute issue then It's a simple model in which members have to pay very low fee for the coordination of the school and that we can possibly waive in the first Few years if you can get some external funding for that and You have to pay for a specific service for example You can it's taking courses To pay for that or to go to a conference and these paid service And their position of the funding for the PhD research themselves of course is Responsibility of the universities are that are a member of the graduate school and finally we would like to set up a fellowship and grants program Especially for developing countries that could be funded externally That is the final slide. I guess yes, okay This is an attractive proposal. Please contact me. I'm interested to become involved. You can contact me That is almost close to four to five. So we have two minutes left one minute left for a question And you can also find us, of course around the conference. So please contact Rory or Susan or myself To to talk about that seems that we're doing