 Mae'r cyfyrdd yn sgwmpio'n ffordd o farchfyrdd yn unig, yn unig, a yn unigol, ac yn ddidd, rwy'n credu, yn digwydd ein project eistedd. So rwy'n eitio bod ni'n ffordd. A wrth gwrs, wrth gwrs, yn dweud y ffrindig, eich bod yn cael ei gwybod yn ddeud a chi'n gwybod i'r unigwysig? water. We are going to do things that we want to do, to bring your ideas too. What are those messages, and how do we advocate what we are doing? So we are just going to share some of our successes and failures. I don't know, would you like to introduce who you are? Sure! My name is Radjif Jangiani. I am a psychology professor at Gwantlin Polytechnic University in Vancouver, British Columbia. On ni, ond rydyn ni'n gweithio'r campus i BC, a heddiw'n y project o'r cymdeithas o BPC Open Textbook a'r ysgol yn gyflawn o'r cymdeithas o BPC, sy'n cymdeithas lle i ddech fulfilen 250 campus. Ydy'r cymdeithas, yng Nghymru, eich cyflawn i ei ddifes? Yn gymryd, mae'n bod yn ddiwedddur allwn ni. Ynfe oeddaeth yng ng eggplant, rydyn ni'n edrych gygodloch o'r cymdeithas eich ei ddifes i rydyn ni'n ddifes, So John, efficacy and perceptions, lot of advocacy. Fab. So my background was as part of the UK OER programme, the Hefki Funded programme, 2009 to 2012, sharing health and science OER. Before that I did a couple of years at Nottingham University on their learning object kettles, so again building animations and resources for health and life sciences. So, yes, it's like you sort of more ramped up in recent years trying to influence institutions to adopt open approaches. De Montford University in the UK and now at University of the West of England. So, yeah, what we put together, if we're going to talk about advocacy and innovation in institutions and transforming innovation in institutions, it's good to have a bit of a framework and a starting point. And well, as you know, in the UK, we like going back to the 70s. So here's another paper from 1974 and it talks about education, innovation models and I'm fully aware that there's a whole theoretical background around innovation and lots of different models and frameworks you can attach to it. But I quite like this one. So it made me think, how do we get stuff going in our institutions? Quite often it's the need to solve a problem. Students aren't very employable or they're not attending or engaging. You know, classic problems. It could be via a research route and we're both keen researchers too, aren't we? That's quite a slow trail often to innovation or it could be in response to crisis, whatever that might be in the institution, then it's more of a top-down strategic. We must innovate and implement change. But actually I quite like the left and right, that bottom one over there, more of the social model where, you know, stuff grows organically between students and colleagues and there's kind of a slow creep forward in terms of innovation. So I don't know, Rajiv, if any of those particularly ring true to you in some of the work that you've done, have any of those been a trigger to some of your open education work? Yeah, I think all of it. I mean, it's interesting. It's often the case when you sort of parachute into an institution, one of the first things you need to do is understand the institutional culture because in some cases you're dealing with more than one of these and this can be in a good way or a bad way. It could be historical baggage that sort of sabotages any attempt to innovate in some way, especially in situations where you managed to secure administrative support to release some resources to let's say support faculty who need time to adapt to where you are or you want to run workshops or you want to subscribe to a press books platform or something like that. But securing that support at the same time, if you're dealing with an institutional culture where there has traditionally been tensions between administration and faculty, if there is at all the perception that this is a top-down initiative that's being thrust down people's throat, then you get massive reactants. So I think understanding the institutional cultures quickly as possible and then working with the diversity of faculty. I think one of the things this model really demonstrates is that this is a good thing in a way that there are many ways in which we can begin this conversation, initiate this conversation, and for some people it can be a data-driven conversation if they want to talk about evidence-based practice. For other people it could be social justice. For other people still, perhaps they don't care as passionately about social justice, but they might really be interested in sort of aspirational pedagogy and think about innovating and be inspired by that. So I think there are different approaches. All of this is context is king. But also recognising the diversity across and within the body of faculty, even within the institutional culture, I think it has been key. Yeah, I think what rings true to me is starting from the bottom up with staff then. So I think back to my UK OER projects from 2009 and I still maintain, I think I could count on one hand, one member of staff, one hospital collaborator or one student that really didn't want to engage and get involved with this at all. And I think so many people, someone was saying yesterday, you know, you're pushing at an open door, literally already, aren't you? When you're talking about creating and sharing knowledge, it's such a fundamental reason why we're there within universities. So I've always liked a bottom up approach or to building sort of connections with institutions, finding like-minded people, but finding some of the strategic people, the gate holders, I mean the libraries, of course, I think are so fundamental for this in terms of embedding within infrastructures and content. So I think they've always been very, very quick allies to get on board. I think top down is really important, but I think in my experience, that's where the risk is because you can influence when provoked chance to who buys in and off we go and we might have the learning and teaching strategy with open within it, but then these people tend to sort of turn over at quite a pace. So I remember one institution. There were three provice chances for learning and teaching. I'm on the second one. Maybe there's a sort of theme going on here. I scare them off. But so that's five in a very short period of time. So you have to start those conversations again. And I think I was hearing the experience of the Welsh OER programs this morning where senior executives kind of turned over and then you lose that traction. So have you experienced that at all? And it's, you know, what's the secret? What's the big secret to overcoming the loss of traction sort of a higher level? It's an interesting thing. I mean, I often as an advocate, I feel like a choreographer and I feel like I'm sort of balancing sort of the top down push and while keeping it, having it owned as a bottom up grassroots movement. But yes, I think the provision of resources, aiming that towards building capacity within departments among faculty, among staff. And I think you're right that librarians have traditionally been at the sort of the vanguard of the open head movement for various reasons, but also actively reaching out and two corners of the university that one might think or at least people in the university committee or a community might think hostile or antagonistic to open and I'll name the bookstore as one particular example of that. Where there's tremendous collaborations that are possible. So sort of reaching out proactively involving everyone in the conversation, but trying to build capacity through the resource development so that even if the administrators leave as they inevitably will at that point, we've already got a movement. We've already got communities of practice. We already have recognized and celebrated faculty champions. You know, we're already working with the students. So at this point, the new administrators that come in, I mean, bless them. Let them bask in the glory of the press, the positive press that will follow the cost savings and everything else. But they know that they're entering an institution with this kind of momentum and culture. The only other piece I'll say is the tricky thing is also a number of institutions are moving towards embedding openness in institutional policy. And this can sometimes be a big part of a sort of a project that's attached to a particular administrator where you have who's receptive, who gets it in terms of the institutional impact, let's say. But I think so. So that's an example of something that can be derailed. I think if the right person leaves or if the wrong person arrives, if budget priorities shift, for example. But at the same time, even with new administrators, I think there's opportunities. There's a bit of license. There's a bit of goodwill period that's extended to new administrators many times. And so I think having that conversation early, embedding it as much as possible within the academic plan so that incoming administrators understand that the institution they're moving into. So I'm seeing kind of a multi-pronged approach here. So it's bottom-up isn't it? So building relationships with colleagues and getting students on board. We're not hearing much about sort of student leverage. I think at this conference particularly at the moment. But it's top-down as well. But actually then what you're saying is you're embedding open practices within maybe sort of mid-range structures and practices. So within maybe curriculum development, maybe within validation or accreditation processes. So I kind of think about bottom-down top. But I think there's a rich bed of opportunity in the middle as well that we don't hear so much about. I think what's interesting in the US and Canada when you talk about OER now you so strongly refer to open textbooks. Whereas we don't strongly have that culture over here and we have OER in all shapes and sizes. How important do you think has the cost-saving argument been to leveraging some of these now sort of national initiatives and you're forever flying across the States in Canada, aren't you? So has the cost really been the key there to some of this? So, but it's not exclusively that. I think it's been important to focus on the cost. And I'm going to give a talk last month at the Week Global where I talked about this more directly. But there are advantages and benefits. And I think it's important not to ignore the very tangible and very significant impacts of alleviating the cost burden for students, certainly in the United States where tuition is absurdly high. 2.4 million students couldn't complete college in the first decade of this century in the United States just because of the cost. So it's a significant issue. And certainly for politicians on the left, this is something that's easy to grasp. For politicians on the right, I think that the notion of fiscal efficiency is easy to grasp as well. Boards of governors are interested in metrics like program completion rates and retention rates and we can look at the data and the research that supports the positive impact of access, broadening access in that way. But not as someone who doesn't quite subscribe to that new sort of neoliberal model of education. I have to say that there's broader approaches. And I think what I'm seeing more and more is even in North America, the movement is moving, broadening to a focus on practices. Textbooks might be the start of the conversation from some faculty. For faculty who understand what this device is, who perhaps currently bend their courses to map on to the table of contents of a textbook, who do not understand and do not know the cost of the textbooks that they currently assign because we have a principal agent problem over here. But for many other faculty, there's other sort of gateways to open practices and it may not be social justice. But I think textbooks have been important and tangible, but it's certainly, I think now it's only one part of a quickly broadening movement. And as it broadens practices, I think the question of sustainability is answering itself. Lovely, I'm dying to just to hear one or two nuggets from the audience really in terms of where you have successfully advocated or influenced in your institutions and did it map to what we see here or have you tried something very different? I don't know, one or two people. Michelle. Yeah, so I was just going to share a little about students. I really enjoy working with the student population and since that's not being discussed a lot. Last week for our Open Education Week events, we had an event for a student and we had lots of sugar and a big sign that said free textbooks, which draws them in. When you ask students about these things though, they don't just like cost matters a lot, but they also talk about things like I have back issues because I have to lug around pounds and pounds of resources every day. So that also resonates with the student population and the thing that we did at our event was we had my supervisor was stationed at a table with the Open Textbook Library open and we were matching students commercial textbooks with open resources, writing that information down and then sending them back to their faculty members with that content. So that was just last week, but I'm hoping that we see some momentum grow from that experience. Say a couple of things about that. So I think, yeah, and by the way, that's Michelle Reid who works at the University of Texas at Arlington, which is part of the Open Textbook Network. I think working with students is incredibly important and again, helping faculty to understand just how many students are not accessing their required cost materials because of cost. I mean, we all receive those emails at the start of the semester, but may I use an older edition? Do I really need the textbook? But faculty don't really understand the scope of the problem, but I think working with students as advocates within our campuses, whether it's a broader cross-section of a working group is important. So I think students at the same time need to be partners in this. It's easy to derail the movement. It's easy to turn faculty who might come into the movement to turn them off by sort of coming at them with in a way that might be framed as judgmental. Why aren't you adopting Open Textbooks? Why don't you care enough about us? You know, that sort of thing. Why aren't you doing what your colleague is doing? And I think, you know, helping working with students to collect the appropriate data, but framing things in a way that really widens the door and is not tainted with a sense of judgment is incredibly important, I think in working with students. But I certainly love what you guys have been doing at UDR Arlington. So just to wrap up. I don't know if anyone else has just got something at the top of their mind that you've used to advocate within your institutions that has been a real success. But I mean, I can certainly think from the UK OER programme there were some really notable projects that students were sort of, you know, the champions of those projects and we had the students as co-producers work at the University of Lincoln, which is just astonishing. And I mean, from my own experience, you know, if you were saying to students, yeah, we're going to create some lab skills resources here, come and video what you're doing in the lab. There's no holding them. You know, they really, really want to get engaged with things outside of their curricula quite often. So I think it's knowing how to leverage that within your institution then to get more buy-in. I'm conscious of time. We've done our 20 minutes. Oh, another five minutes. So even if there's context that I'm sorry, if there's any sort of context that you'd like to share to talk about, even if there's sort of sticky points within your particular educational context that you'd like to raise and we can even talk about that as a community and see what strategies we can maybe collectively bring to bear. Sorry, UBC has just done the mandate for OER education tied to promotion. And I think that my institution I've had feedback from faculty saying they're willing to give away research papers for free to commercial publishers because it's reputation building. But doing OER for free, it seems like that would just be sort of doing OER for free and they're not getting anything back. And that's an issue. So if there was reputation or promotion attached to the creation of OER, I think that that would be a lot more successful at my institution, for instance, of finding the OER champions. I think that's a wonderful idea and I can't think of that many examples in the UK where that has been the case. I think there are certainly universities that have open policies and really, really do support their staff. But in terms of there being a promotional route or a learning and teaching development CPD framework with open within it, I can't quite think of any. So I don't know what it's like at your institution, Rajiv. I think the suggestions, yeah. I think the UBC step was a really big one because this is a large research institution and to formally say we're going to take this into account for tenure and promotion is fantastic. At the very least, at institutions like that, it helps take away sort of one of these misconceptions that faculty might have about will I get into trouble if I work with open resources? Is this something that's going to be disapproved of? And there have been high profile cases where that has happened, of course. But I think there's ways to do this. If one reaches out to professional societies in the field, of course, working with them where they're sort of leveraging a grant to disseminate resources for that discipline, pure reviewing it through that community. Ultimately, what is really the open access citation advantage in open access publishing translates over here as well in terms of the actual impact of your work. I think faculty also who might aspire to write textbooks for commercial publishers will live under a series of misapprehensions about what that life is really like and about how rich they can exactly get on the backs of students across the world. But what is the impact of your work? What is it in terms of a service to your field, to your discipline, to your community? And especially when it gets wrapped up with a professional society and peers who are recognized in the field, even reviewing it openly and transparently. I think there are ways to have that conversation that sort of alleviates some of those concerns. It's actually a challenge to the rest of the room. I keep hearing that, of course, colleges in the UK or even schools aren't textbook driven, so there's not these OER savings. But actually, in my experience, what they're all doing is they manufacture their own handbooks and it's photocopying and all these things. And I think there's a job to be done in the UK of actually looking at the price of, and it's not the textbook replacement, it's the replacement of all these handbooks and all the other things and the photocopying charges. And that's where there's real opportunities for open textbooks and for the open light bulb, I think, to come on in the system. But I don't believe there's any studies or anything been done in this space and everybody just keeps saying the open textbook model doesn't work in UK education because we don't use textbooks. But we do use other stuff. It does cost money. I think that's right. There's a big need for some fundamental work that hopefully there might be projects of that kind coming up shortly to sort of understand what sort of textbook context and usage is. So that would be very exciting. Any last minute comments? I have a question for Rajiv. You mentioned a couple of this morning and just now about the perception by academics that they'll get into trouble. I work as a copyright coordinator in an Australian university. So my major assumption is their fear is of copyright or the institutional IP rigs that they don't understand. And I was wondering if that's part of it or if there's other areas of trouble. Yeah, I think that that can be part of it certainly because even in Canada there's not I think a very good understanding of what fair dealing is under the education provisions. But no, I'm talking about broader than that. Whether we're talking about there is this problem of what I think is a massive problem increasing privatisation of higher education in North America in particular. The intimate links between commercial publishers and higher ed institutions, the amount of access we give them. There have been high profile cases over the last year of where faculty authors of textbooks have had their textbooks assigned by committee to the entire department as the standard textbook. One particular case in California I'm thinking of. There was a faculty member who decided to not go that route and replace it with a free or low cost book and eventually lost his job. So I think there are broader concerns especially at institutions which are not focused on access and sort of the community college model. They don't know whether this is an acceptable practice. They don't know whether the perception whether in their minds or in the minds of their colleagues of lesser quality is something that will be brought to bear on student evaluations and metrics whereby they are judged. So I think most of these are just misconceptions that require education and in some cases reassurance. And even if like I said earlier if we celebrate and recognise if the administrators do that for the faculty ambassadors that helps alleviate some of that. The copyright angle is I think another one which again librarians are in a good position to help with. But thanks for bringing that up. C'est la ffair. Yep. Thank you very much. We'd love to chat more if you can find us afterwards in the hallways. Tweet any additional comments here. Thank you. This is this. This is hello. I'm Joe Wilson from Open Scotland doing a quick introduction to Alec who cannot chair and also present at the same time. So I'm just really cheering to introduce Alec. When he's good to go. Are you? Yeah. Yeah. You want a minute or two? Okay. Isn't technology wonderful? I'll just share one other piece of information which might be useful. The group I mentioned earlier the open textbook network that works in the United States has a model that might be easily replicated in different contexts. And one of them is that they hold workshops for faculty. The faculty who attend workshops to learn about OER are invited to review resources that are relevant in their area. And in exchange for reviewing the resources they paid a small honorarium within a period of a couple of months. But the reason why this is interesting is this small incentive together with the official support to do this results in about a 40% adoption rate. So I think that that familiarity with OER and even incentivising it at a low level for reviewing a resource can be a really tangible strategy in some cases. Just want to share that. So thank you. Do you have a microphone? And over to Alex. Just to clarify, we initially submitted this session together with Kamil Ślifoski, my colleague from Creative Commons Poland who is in the back, but in the meantime Kamil focused quite intensively on production of OER instead of polishing them. So I will present this on my own. I would like to talk on the basis of a project we're doing, but I think talking about this project is not very interesting in terms of what we'll be doing and what's our practice. So I want to talk more about the ideas and approaches we have behind this project. And this project is a network that is built mainly and central in Eastern Europe that we also built ties with the rest of Europe and even a bit with places beyond Europe that is to support development of OER policies. And the assumption is that since in Poland, I hope you're aware of this. We've been pretty successful as a society, mainly the government with introducing at least to some extent policies the question became, can we pull sort of support other countries in doing that? We're at the start of our work. We basically began this project this year. So it's a bit too early to say whether we succeeded. But I want to share with you some ideas that we kind of that are guiding us. And basically what I will do is mainly talk about issues related to policies because from my experience this conference, always the policies theme is present. I think it's of interest to many people and hopefully also to you, but it's also sort of, I think a bit of a fringe issue seen sometimes is a bit maybe boring, maybe a bit esoteric or challenging. So I want to just show you a bit how we're thinking about and hope it's interesting. So what we start with is that we believe we need the theory of change. And when I say we, I will now mean our project and I will sort of not be speaking on behalf of the Government. I am more thinking that it's our vision of policies for Poland and also for other countries. And probably the most important point we're making is that this has to go beyond the OER. So just like the title of this conference, the title of our project also seems a bit outdated in relation to our own reality, which is that we still think open licensing of content is a foundation that's our first or zero step, but that we have to build on that and cannot stop just with that. And our theory of change basically is a theory not about making everything openly licensed, but making an educational system that empowers learners. And that is also equitable and engaging. So we started with OERs, but the second step that's crucial is adding digital literacy. And this is not something that fits completely in the definition of open though. I even myself forgot how much of these additional things are present in the Cape Town declaration. And I don't know if you're aware of the declaration, but to have like a little test. Who of you remember that it's a Cape Town declaration on open educational resources? Right. And who thinks it's on open education? And I'm actually to be honest so confused. I don't remember which one it is, but I think it's open education, but you can check. But we had a 50-50 split. Actually, the language speaks about more things than licensing. So I feel we're sort of going back to the roots. So one is digital literacy. The other is a thing we call culture of sharing. This is not something you can introduce by policy. It's going beyond formal rules. But in our work in Poland we understood that some point this is necessary. This is sort of the beating heart of open education. And the third part is technical infrastructure. So we often face a situation where even if there's a licensing requirement and even we're in disadvantage of a situation where it gets actually implemented. Still, if it's just a licensing rule, often the practicality is that it's not available because there's no infrastructure. There's no rule for making it available. So this is sort of a situation where we build this theory of change last year in a situation where we felt the licensing issue is partially solved and we suddenly realize we need to add these extra steps. And this is a model we try to promote. So secondly, I want to speak a bit about policy and explain why this is so important. We're not doing just this project because we someone suggested we work on policies. I really believe policies are important. Of course, I don't think there's like a yes or no, a zero one response is policy important. I know some people are disenchanted by now with policies and then there are some who just love policy work and open education space. You can probably name some of them yourselves. I think it's sort of somewhere in between. One thing I want to note. I think this policy work is a long term game. And for me, I draw inspiration from the open access movement and a group of activists who basically started working on this in the 90s and core group is still the same. Of course, for some people, you know, they change career paths, but some of them are still added and I think at no point they said they're giving up and I try to keep in mind this perspective that, you know, really some things change slowly. It's a bit of a challenge because the reality seems to change very quickly and you're on the risk that these policies will be completely outdated. But to be honest, I got used to it sort of thinking about policies for the last several years where it's a reality where these policies also lost just lag behind, but it's not also a reason to forget about them. And I really like this idea introduced by the designer, strategic designer called Dan Hill, which says that policies are actually the dark matter that shapes society and culture. You might not be aware of them, but like in physics, you know, astrophysicians believe most of the reality is this hidden dark matter. Policies are also hidden, but they shape us. So it's worth paying attention to them. Not everyone should, but at least some of us should be delegated, I think, by the rest of us to play this role. Another point I want to make and this is something Lorna Campbell talked yesterday about. She referenced a presentation done recently at an open science event in Germany where a representative of the OECD said that they did a survey, of course, to uncover all countries with covered some significant amount and 75% of them reported that they have an open education policy. And this is probably the major challenge with policy. They're like these weird animals that hide in the bushes and you can sort of see them, but you are not really sure they exist, but you might as well just tell everyone they exist and give them your own name so that you become famous. And I think this is a bit of what OECD does. OECD does, you know, it looks good to prove things work. It's a very challenging thing to do to say it might be not going that well. And I think this is one of the challenges with policy. I believe there are a lot fewer policies. Obviously the challenge is always how do we define a policy and probably it doesn't make sense to define them extremely strictly, but we need to be aware that still in a lot of places, even using some very, very generous concept of what a policy and what open education means. I think these numbers are too high. And this is a reality we're facing that as I said, it's still early on where a decade after Cape Town five years after UNESCO where we still shouldn't give up. So three more things I want to say about policies. Very pragmatic reason policies are important. They translate into financing, you know, in if I can speak so bluntly about it, maybe it's even almost inelegant. We're seeing this now new amazing work being done in Germany in part because there's a community. There are people who can do this work, but also because finally the government decided to assign budgets to it and out of the budgets come projects and this is some very basic tough reality that we are facing. But I think it's important to keep that in mind. Having said that, I want to make a point that policies on their own and maybe this is obvious and this relates to that 75% number make no sense without implementation. And by this, I mean translating some usually formal rule into everyday lives in this case of educators and learners and this is a bit different from grasswood activities. Not every grasswood activity needs to be an implementation of a policy. Grasswood activities are just things people do even if no one tells them to do that and they're extremely important in this whole equation. So how do we see this regional cooperation? We base our work starting with Poland. This is our point of reference. So this is a good opportunity to give you a very quick update on what's been going on in Poland for the last several years. The sort of benchmark for us was a big open textbooks project which launched formally at the end of 2015 and probably the biggest challenge with it is that it has not been supported by any sort of implementation strategy. So basically it's taken as a given. There's a URL you can type in and it's there and you can hope organic growth will happen. It misses the part that I mentioned earlier for instance about digital literacy training around how teachers can use it. But the good development is that the Polish government is now developing something they call the National Educational Network which starts with broadband architecture but they don't stop there. They want to build a services layer on top of that and there's a very high chance some of these services will be for instance open educational repository. So I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we'll see this continuation of policy continue and it's goes back to this theory of change that infrastructure is important. We've seen in the last year since the development of the textbooks also some new licensing rules mainly for EU structural funds for the European social fund social ESF European social fund. So for those of you who deal with these issues we've been making some effort to promote this approach hoping that maybe other countries can introduce them other countries that also make use of ESF funding and there are quite a few of them in Europe and the third interesting thing happening in Poland is there's a synergy with open data activities which are now very interesting to the government. I also want to remind that I think Poland developed around the textbooks a very nice model we could call a licensing plus model. It says you need a free license but also you should make use open source or open formats for content and care about accessibility in terms of things like WCAG and I think this is an important connection. OK, but but then we have this Polish model and then what do we do next? It's really a big question for us. How do you make policies multiply? You know, you cannot just like it's not something that travels abroad. It's not something you can insert into another government. So we think a lot in terms of what capacity do we need and what capacity is there and I think the most interesting capacity are coalitions and these are usually grassroots coalitions. The ones that we work most closely with for now at the start are the ones in we have one in Poland and there's also one in Czech Republic, Slovakia in Romania, but I want to know there's also an alliance in Germany that's been fundamental as a partner to the government and similar coalitions in Macedonia, Moldova, even beyond Europe and Kyrgyll standards, very interesting work and I think I cannot sort of stress this more that I think this human factor is the most important capacity here. One also interesting development in terms of policy and you've probably heard I assume have you heard are you all aware of developments around open government partnership who has heard about that? Oh a few, not that many. It's a very interesting development that open government partnership is a partnership about things like open data, transparency, public sector information quite far away from education, but through a sort of very nice coincidences but also good effort made by activists. Suddenly open education is present in this partnership and this partnership is important because it's a working global level partnership and the reason why it's important for us in the region is that Slovakia was the first country which sort of alongside United States made some commitments to open education. Currently Romania also has these rules in another places in Europe for instance Spain. The person working a lot on this is Nicole Allen who's here with the young gondol Slovak activist and government expert and this is for us at the policy level sort of a very good connection and probably a unique opportunity although what's interesting there is that the partnership has because it has nothing to do with education it can introduce sort of some formal rules but then the question becomes how do you implement it? There's no really capacity in that network and so in terms of what we think we should be supporting in order for these policies to happen in other countries as I said people are very important so we're thinking about champions both on the side of the activists and also inside governments this is crucial second step is networking so we feel the basic work and this is probably obvious is for people to communicate and be in touch but really and this is something that was sort of became I became a lot aware of this here at this conference looking at how alt works it's a community we really need to reach that phase and again I'm pretty certain that on purpose I didn't have on this list you know any political issues or formal issues or legislative issues I think from our perspective being successful in supporting policy development is really supporting the humans in this process and the ties between them so I don't know how I'm doing with time whether I'm speaking too quickly or not if I have five minutes that means that I am speaking quite quickly but will have some time for questions or discussion but I just want to end by saying we put all these ideas into an event we called the OER policy forum the name is probably outdated but we're using it because the first one was called that it's a small event just that just focuses on policies and I mention it because I hope that maybe some of you are either interested in it or know someone who could be we're in particular looking for government officials so if you know in your country someone who's maybe already working on open education or seems like someone would be open to learn about it I would be very happy if you got in touch with me also if you're personally interested and if you're doing policy work so thank you very much I understand we have just a bit of time for discussion or questions and I'm very interested to think if I can kind of try to encourage you what's your take on policies you know we don't have time for long statements but maybe some of you want to share how you see the importance of policies or lack of maybe you think they're pointless since you're in the anti-policy phase as Paul described it or questions well I won't force you to respond but I still hope maybe we can have some nice conversations later yes in the black matter it's a very good place to be yes oh there is thank you not so much a question but a comment and I feel that I'm in a position of low power I've changed institutions a lot I've worked in like various contract positions and I heard Rajiv earlier on talking about you know how to influence institutional culture you need to go into a new place and find out what's going on and then work with the people on their needs and their problems and their issues if you want to bring in if you have this OER agenda and so my comment is it's I don't really where do we start where do I start as a new person yes I can listen try and understand institutional culture and I guess that's a journey that I need to go on and how to how to listen how to understand and how to then be an influencer how to be a change maker is there a formula to that mentioning this because it reminds me I as you notice and maybe I should have sort of clarified this when I speak about policies and governments and countries I'm mainly focusing on national level policies and I kind of left aside the issue of institutional policies now there's a reason for that in at least half of the situations we're dealing with because for me half of the situations is in higher education and half is in primary and secondary and in primary and secondary you're facing a school system where the institution a school has not that much to say in our experience the principle of course has some leeway and the most ambitious principle sometimes do things like school strategies there's also some fascinating work in New Zealand on school strategies but in general it doesn't work and but in higher education I know the institutional level is very important so I should have made this distinction but my answer would be look for others in your institution you know there are examples of situations where the institutions themselves are pretty conservative but there's a group of change makers that got together and I think they're doing a lot better on their own and not on their own sorry together you know so maybe try doing some kind like don't feel you need to immediately address the high level but maybe build the capacity so for instance move from being a single champion having a little network a good thing to do is try to make some I need to finish oh sorry I thought this is like finished do a small event you know do like a little meetup and talk about it and the most important thing it doesn't need to be extremely professional and focused I think you know ideas are more important than the detailed rules that these can come later have a look at open Scotland declaration get there for organizing have something that you can take to government get empowered go to government and say this is what we want because they can't think it you need to think it and you need to take it to government to get them to to implement policy that's what you need to do yeah but that's I can you know I having I agree with that but also if you that's a pretty high how do you say stakes right then a bit of a challenge and some groups I think like I really willing to jump high when they support each other and and I really like what's been happening in Scotland and I think it's very inspiring but I can understand that and we have this experience that there are people who are even interested but don't know how to make that jump so my responses you don't need to do it immediately yeah thank you very much thank you very much thank you very much thank you very much thank you very much thank you very much next up is Janesh have you got your presentation oh you're ready are you good to go yeah I'll just give you a minute to get get set up and we're going to hear about massive open online courses in India and China Janesh just give me a second I'll just pull myself a glass of water all right thank you so much for staying around so late I'm going to be talking about massive open online courses in India and China I'm myself a PhD student at the open university I'm in my final year my thesis is looking at MOOC learners specifically in India but today I'll be talking about the developments in MOOCs in India and China I'm not necessarily trying to equate the two because there are two very different contexts and there are very different stages of their economic development however I think there are some interesting commonalities and how MOOCs are being used and hopefully out of this session I might try and share something that you might not know about what's going on in these two countries and it might change your view about what the potential is of MOOCs in these different contexts so really quick I'll talk a bit about the sort of the hype that went on early on about the potential of MOOCs in the west to help the developing world and talk about the reality of what we have found so far in the research in the last four years and then I will talk about really quickly because I can't in this time frame really talk about in detail the developments that have happened in China and India and then have some few reflections about the positives and some of the challenges in these two contexts and so I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with some of the discourse that surrounded MOOCs especially early on in 2012 and 13 when you had all these sort of major claims being made about how MOOCs are going to benefit the developing world is going to democratise education it's going to help serve those who are currently lacking access to higher education these are just a few of the quotes I'm sure if you just take a minute to read them you would see how they are sort of representative of the hype that you saw at the peak in 2012 and 13 and you also had these anecdotal accounts these MOOC platforms love to share and boast about of how a learner on their MOOC platforms somehow they took a course and found a job but there wasn't really a lot of research that actually looked at the actual benefit that these courses were having so what is the reality? well we know the completion rates and MOOCs are poor that has been sort of stated over and over again however interestingly international learners are more likely to complete courses we found in terms of demographics I think this goes back to Mahaz key note yesterday MOOC learners are tend to be on average highly educated male and western and when you look at sort of countries the developing world in this study that I quote here looked specifically at the BRICS countries there's a greater gender disparity there so you have a lot more males taking courses in the Indian context specifically it's about 80% male and we're also looking at this sort of shift study shift away from openness in MOOCs and so I think that's a topic that really has not been covered in a lot of detail like we sort of take it for granted that MOOCs are part of open education but we're seeing with these big platforms they're slowly eroding the sort of free aspects or the open aspects of their courses and so the question is how does this then cascade down to those who may not be able to afford the $50 certification fee for their courses and really what sparked my interest in this area and my desire to do research is we're lacking in our understanding of MOOCs from the sort of global south so less than 10% of MOOC research is from Asia and at least in the Indian context it's less than 1% yep and so speaking about China so China recently you've seen tremendous growth in the higher education industry and you're trying to see a lot of these major universities trying to pivot themselves to sort of be recognized on a global scale and you're seeing this as well in their sort of investment in MOOCs and so we see there are 12 universities in China currently that offer MOOCs on both edex and Coursera in English and there are about 140 courses and so in this paper they try to see why are these universities offering these courses and so it's largely to improve the reputation to be noticed by a world audience that okay we have high class institutions in our country and we're doing world class research and at the same time it's also about it's very strongly tried to promote Chinese culture history and art and we've also seen so in China unfortunately the Chinese learners do not make a large proportion of MOOC participants in Western MOOCs because of the language barrier so most Chinese learners do not speak English and so they're automatically barred from sort of taking a MOOC and so therefore you've seen a significant investment in China into creating indigenous MOOC platforms and so this is just a few that I've mentioned here but interestingly to point out it's a combination both of university-led as well as public and private-sector-led initiatives. The one that I want to focus on for this talk is the Zhwetang X platform it is the largest and the first MOOC platform in China it's from the Tsinghua University which is one of the the most highly renowned universities in China. How many of you have heard of this platform just out of curiosity? Three people but if you were to look at the second figure there I mean it has more than five million unique learners which would make it technically the third largest MOOC platform in the world. It has over 400 courses and it has I think about 40 plus partners within China and so these are all Chinese MOOCs. An interesting innovation that they're using with their MOOCs is so partner universities can use this content that is on the platform to deliver courses at their institutions in a blended format and we've also seen because of the problem with language we've seen that a lot of Chinese platforms are actually licensing courses from Coursera and edX. So they're interested in the content from the Harvard and the MIT brand and so they were translated all into Chinese and have a local instructor deliver it on their platform. So that's a level of that's another revenue model for the Western platforms but again it goes back to what Maher was saying yesterday. It's about reproducing the Western knowledge rather than creating your own. Talking about India now we've seen that because language is not a problem in India English is the language spoken in higher education so most people who have a higher education degree speak English and so we see that they are a really large part of the Western participants. So after the US they are the largest group of learners about 10 to 15% of total enrollments but and interestingly again when you think of the Indian learner you you may not think that they may be more educated but the research has shown that they are over 80% of them have post post secondary degrees and they are younger and more educated than Western learners on new platforms. How am I doing for time? Sorry. So I'll quickly talk about two MOO platforms in India. The first one is NPTEL which is the National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning. It started off as the sort of Indian version of MIT OpenCourseWare and they created a whole bunch of OERs largely focused on engineering and technology from the Indian Institute of Technology. This is the sort of most well-renowned the highest ranked university in India and so they would get almost 922 courses are released like on a creative commons license on this website. So the total course work videos assessment everything is available on this website and they've recently started creating MOOCs as well as of about two and a half three years ago and they've currently converted 922 courses. They've converted 225 of them into MOOCs which they can then assess. But the problem with NPTEL is of course it's biased towards engineering and technology and it's usually only one institution that's creating most of these courses. So we're not really getting that diversity of courses. And so this new platform called Swayam is launched in just last year where all public universities in India can contribute to this course so this platform so it's not an elite club of sort of privileged universities who can create courses on this platform. The government actually provides incentive for university partners around the country who may not have the funding to create MOOCs of their own and they create courses on a range of subjects all disciplines right from high school up to postgraduate level and test prep is a major industry in India and they have courses on test preparation for the common entrance exams for the different disciplines as well. So now I'll just quickly talk about a few reflections that I've had in my own research looking at MOOCs in India but also sort of comparing it to what's going on in China. So we're seeing that as Martin was talking about in his lightning talk MOOCs and many of these other initiatives are positioned as sort of this outside disruption to former higher education. However, what we're seeing in these in these two contexts of India and China it's not the outsider coming in and trying to disrupt higher education but rather it is from within higher education trying to improve the quality of the existing system. We're seeing that in both India and China where professors are using blended MOOCs where they take the content from these courses online and deliver them to learners in the second and third tier colleges which are traditionally underrepresented and underfunded and so they have access to some of the the sort of top content whatever that might mean. Credentialing is a really important part especially when you're a learner in India and China you want if you're taking a course you want to know that it has some sort of of value for a benefit for your career and so in the west we have seen all the major MOOC platforms attempt to create some sort of formal credential or nano degrees as a subun platform calls it but it's still not really widely accepted in industry and they're having problems getting learners to sign on to these formal credentialing credentialing plans that they've created however so in China for example any partner university on the Jwetanghex platform there are about 42 courses that can be taken for formal credit for university and so currently as of 2016 almost 25,000 learners have actually taken formal credit from a MOOC on this Jwetanghex platform similarly on the Swayam platform that I just spoke about the Indian government has recently announced that of 20% of all the credit of a learner for their degrees can come from MOOCs however this is very very recent and the actual benefit and the scale of how how much is being adopted is yet to be seen and then I'm going back to what Maha was talking about yesterday I realize there's a lot of them in Tilapia but there's a notion that these MOOCs are just regenerating the western ideas and the western perceptions of what higher education should be and we've seen this in the OER movement as well where this notion of high quality originates from the western university and is sort of passed down to the global south as a form of neocolonialism however I think it's a bit more complicated than that as outback quotes he calls it the neocolonialism of the willing that these professors who are involved in MOOCs are not necessarily doing so as a form of overt neocolonialism but rather it's a bit more of a complex relationship but it's an interesting point to keep in mind when you're thinking of localized and recontextualized MOOCs in these two different contexts versus the sort of western platform and then we also have a lot of research that says who are the successful learners in MOOCs who do MOOCs really benefit we know the demographics but we also know that they are learners who tend to need to have a high level of self-regulation and I think this is something that we take for granted but if you look at most of the research you find out that the learners tend to be highly self-regulated and they need to have a large set of digital literacy capabilities and behaviors to be successful in MOOCs and so how does this translate into these two contexts I think is worth exploring it's something that my research and my PhD I try to look at to what extent do Indian learners exhibit these qualities that we consider as being of a successful MOOC learner so really quick and so there's so we've seen in the west that there's been a steady decline in the interest in MOOCs I think we noticed here even in this conference really we're not really talking about MOOCs to that great of an extent we're questioning whether they're actually part of open education at all but if you look at what's going on in India and China there MOOCs are really becoming a bigger part of the higher education landscape and it's not coming from a sort of venture capitalist-backed private entity it's coming from within the government government-funded public domain sort of open platforms that goal whose goal is really to improve the state of higher education we're seeing as I mentioned sparks which are small private open courses or blended MOOCs gaining in popularity and of course the provision of formal credit is really something that's unique in these two contexts and it's really something that hasn't caught on in the west so far but at the same time I think we have to remember that the learners who take these courses are not necessarily the underprivileged or those who are sort of at the lowest stratum of society these are still learners who have access to a high-speed internet connection or a technology that can enable them to take a MOOC so we need to be mindful of the fact that yes MOOCs are being benefited to learners in India and China but it's to more of the middle class it's not to it's to the educated already the people who have access to education it's not necessarily to those who could really benefit or who could get a sort of a real tangible result from taking these courses and so there's a need for more innovative frugal solutions to create content that is contextually beneficial for these lower socio-economic groups in these two countries so these are a list of references if you are interested in the slides are on slideshare but yeah, thank you Sure, sure Hi Janet, that was really fascinating thank you very much I'm just interested particularly in China I have to say my background in Indian education doesn't allow me to ask the question about India China has a very interesting history in terms of distance learning in terms of it has a network of what used to be called radio and television universities that didn't teach radio and television but they used radio and television as the mechanism of delivery for a wide number of distance learners I just wondered if you could see any way in which that was influencing or coming through in the way in which some of these newer models are being developed or whether or not it's more the case that the actual model is being adapted or imported from some of the western platforms I think you're right that these sort of distance education models have been developed over time in China and it's a sort of evolution of that that has come through in the MOOCs in fact those one paper that I read where in China right now again I've not been to China so I can't attest to this but the term MOOC has come to sort of envelop everything and anything to do with online learning because when we think of MOOC the sort of most important factor for most people at least is the M, massive but when you think in the Chinese context and the scale of China anything you do with online learning has to be massive and so the term MOOC has essentially enveloped everything to do with online learning and so yes so definitely a lot of the existing knowledge that they must have gained through these previous dealings with online learning would have, distance learning would have influenced and developed these platforms I'm sure. Thanks very much for that presentation I just wanted to ask you you mentioned about MOOCs being less interesting in western context or not growing as much I just wanted what indicators you're using for that. So okay so that indicator was it was actually in the US context so I should clarify there it's the interest in MOOCs specifically the disruptive potential of MOOCs or the benefit of MOOCs within the formal sector in the US has definitely dwindled over time there is a paper that has looked at sort of the number of media articles over time and it has shown that as time has gone on while the research has increased public interest in MOOCs has definitely dwindled. Yes, yes. Thank you.