 Okay, everybody, welcome to the last event in the plenary room. It's my delight to introduce this last session, as was mentioned this morning, and as I expect you all know, there is fantastic and historical great news coming out of UNESCO around the adoption now, the formal adoption of the OER recommendation. And we have with us today, and it's fantastic they're able to be with us. Thanks so much, Zana, for coming from Paris today. We have three people who are keen to share with you a bit more about the UNESCO OER recommendation, including the kind of process it's taken to get to this particular historical milestone and some sense of what the recommendation says and what will happen next. So we have Micha, Zainab and Gasper, and each of them are going to take a bit of time to share with you some of the developments over time and how we got here. So over to you. Good afternoon. It's a pleasure to be here with you this afternoon. My name is Zainab Varoglu, and I am the program specialist for ICT in education in the communication and information sector of UNESCO and headquarters in Paris. So I'm going to just go through, just open this up, and I'm going to just go through how we got here and some ideas for next steps. So I will start with what is UNESCO? It's this, the headquarters looks like that. It's a traditional 1950s building in the 7th arrondissement of Paris. It's a UN agency responsible for international cooperation in education, science, communication and information, and it was set up right after the First World War, the Second World War, I'm sorry, and it just celebrated a birthday. It has 193 member states, 11 associate member states. These are countries as it's stated on the slide. These are territories which are not responsible for conducting international relations directly, and a network of national commissions which Gasper will introduce in his speech, links to NGOs, non-governmental organizations. It has field offices in over 50 countries covering all world regions, and as you will see, it has offices everywhere except in Antarctica. We do not cover Antarctica. So until we set up that office in Antarctica, this is the way it is, but we do have coverage worldwide. This is where we work, and the basis of what we do in education, science, and education and communication and information at least, is linked to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 19, which was written right after the Second World War, but is still very relevant today, and it states that all persons have rights and fundamental freedoms to receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. This is way before open educational resources was part of any vocabulary. Article 26, of course, is the right to education. UNESCO's constitution echoes these UN commitments, which is the free exchange of ideas and knowledge supporting the sharing of knowledge using technologies. Again, this is from 1945. So the basis was very far sighted at the time, and today these words have still continued to echo. So as you may have heard, on Monday afternoon, the UNESCO Member States adopted the UNESCO Open Educational Resources recommendation. So what is a recommendation? A recommendation is exactly semantically what it means. It's a recommendation. It's an encouragement to member states to undertake a series of actions. In terms of UNESCO's mandate, we're not like the European Commission. We do not have the mandate to give directives. UNESCO does not have the mandate to impose or enforce anything to its member states, but it has levels of standard setting. One of them is a convention, which is the highest level that we have operationally. And the second level is a recommendation. A recommendation is much more fluid, if you like. It's easier to adapt, and it's a bit easier to adopt also. A convention, just as an aside, UNESCO also adopted a very important convention during the last general conference, which means last week, which is a global convention on the recognition of qualifications for students and learners. And that's another topic, but I'm very proud also of this achievement of UNESCO. So just to explain to you a recommendation is a suggestion. As you can see, there's a slide you can't read, and it's on purpose. All those lines represent all the recommendations that UNESCO has adopted since 1989. It's 30 years. There's only about 15 lines on that slide. There's one more line now since Monday, and it's on the OER recommendation. Recommendations are not very common practice, and they're not adopted, and they're not developed very, very often. And just to let you know, there are about two or three of those lines are actually revisions of earlier recommendations. So it is really a very, very historic event. The process to getting to this recommendation has been long, it's been really, really long. It started, the impetus came from Slovenia, and I think my colleagues will speak more to that. They proposed in 2016 that to the UNESCO governing bodies that a recommendation be done. In 2016, there was a study to show if this might perhaps be a good idea. And the response was yes, perhaps it's a good idea. And then there was the Second World OER Congress, which some of you I think were there. And after that, the member states all of them, all 109 at the time, 95 of them, agreed that we could develop a text for a recommendation. So the text that was used for this recommendation is one that many of you have already seen in some form or the other. It's built on the Ljubljana OER Action Plan, which in itself was one of the most consulted documents I have seen in my over 20 year career at UNESCO. It was consulted more than anything I've ever known to be consulted on, and it was consulted even further between last November and today. And we went through a number of different steps, and we had a huge meeting in May, which again some of you were present, and some of you provided inputs to this meeting. And the text was agreed upon by our member states. The member states were all invited to come in their capacity as representatives of their governments. And that is quite something which means that when a member state spoke, they spoke in the name of their country. And so it was a diplomatic conference, and we invited the OER community to come to this event also. We could not invite them as participants, because it was according to the rules and regulations. It's the countries that decide on the recommendation, which is related to what they would be asked to do. But the OER community was there, and they did provide inputs, and the text was therefore adopted. At UNESCO, we try not to vote on things. We tried to get things done by consensus, which means that everybody has to agree, everyone, absolutely. And we managed. The text that has been adopted was agreed by consensus, so it means everyone, by member states. And this was presented last week twice to the member states, first in a small commission, which adopted it, and then it was adopted by the entire, all UNESCO member states. So it is official. It's real. It's there. The inside of the recommendation looks like that. I think some of you have seen it. It, again, it takes from the Lugliana OER action plan, and it addresses the five issues that have been recognized as needed in order to mainstream open educational resources into the educational community worldwide. The first one is building capacity to create access, use, adapt, and redistribute OER. The basis here is many people say OER is a great idea. Who can say no, but it's very difficult to have the skills and know how to find it, use it, reuse it, mix, remix, share, et cetera. The next point is about inclusive equitable access to quality OER. We are talking here about inclusive to vulnerable communities, including persons with disabilities and those that are marginalized in society. Equitable, again, is the same principle. And quality, I'm sure there's a lot of people here from the higher education community, so we're talking about the famous words quality assurance and all that comes with it. The fourth one is developing sustainability models, and here I think we have to give a special thank you to Paul Stacey, because much of the Ljubljana OER action plan part on this was built on a work that he did in 2016 on sustainability models, and it's about how you make sure that OER is sustainable. One of the areas that's very loosely said is that everybody thinks it's a wonderful idea, but people need to find a way to be able to do it economically because we live in the real world and things have to be sustainable. The next one is, of course, on supportive policy, which is where should the policy be? Should it be institutional? Should it be national? Should it be part of another policy? How should this work? What is the way forward in this area? And the fifth one is on facilitating international cooperation. How can everyone work together in order to move forward in these areas? This is the only UNESCO standard-setting instrument in the area of ICT and education, the only one. Now, I think some of you knew Indrajit. I'm going to talk about the next steps, which is a dynamic coalition about the implementation of the OER recommendation. Indrajit was the director for the Knowledge Society's division in the communication and information sector. He passed away, unfortunately, in January 2019, and he came up with this idea while he was speaking with our colleagues in Slovenia, with Mitja and Gaspir. And he was, those of you who knew him, no, he was brilliant. And he was very, very far-seeking. He thought of things, and he was very, he was very, what's the word? He had good intentions and intelligent intentions. And I think this dynamic coalition was one of these examples. And therefore, I think it would, and he had this idea in February in 2017. And from there, it was referenced in the ministerial statement of the second World OER Congress, which was held in Ljubljana, the documents available online. And it was also part of the preliminary report of the UNESCO OER recommendation, which was adopted as part of the meeting held with the member states, which I told you of earlier in May 2019. And it supports the 0.5 of the recommendation, which was adopted today, which is on promoting and reinforcing international cooperation. Can you see it? Yes, you can. Okay. So in Ljubljana, we had 14 ministers. That's a lot of ministers to have at an expert meeting, actually, expert level meeting. They were from the countries that are up there. And they had, they had a round table and they made a statement. And they called on educational stakeholders to implement recommendations of the Ljubljana OER Action Plan to increase international collaboration in the area of OER through a dynamic coalition to expand and consolidate commitments to action strategies and legislation in this area. Now, this is relevant because the Ljubljana OER Action Plan is the basis of the recommendation. In this regard, in terms of international cooperation, you have on, from the recommendation, you have the points A to F. So it outlines the areas which the collaboration would take place. It's about consolidating OER commitments to actions, to strategies, to reinforce the different activities. And to have everyone working together and contributing worldwide to the implementation of this document. This gentleman is Mr. Moiz Shakshuk. He's the Assistant Director General for Communication and Information at UNESCO. And when the document was adopted during the general conference, he announced that UNESCO will launch a dynamic coalition to effectively support these expansion of commitments and consolidation of commitments and strategies. The objective is that now that this document is adopted, we look forward to working together with the entire world. And the OER networks throughout this planet in implementing this forward. We are looking forward to having a first meeting during Mobile Learning Week, which takes place the first week of March at UNESCO. And we hope that you will be able to join us and that there will be a huge movement that includes all our stakeholders on all the continents to move forward to implement this recommendation. There has been a lot of work and a lot of commitment to make it happen. And we look forward to even more work and more commitment to making it implemented. Thank you. So now the story is about behind the scenes. So how we saw this. We went through this process. So we started in 2013 thinking about this issue. And we have been involved in anything. So internationally, nationally, personally as well. And it's not about the, now it's time to celebrate, actually. Because it's a, at the beginning, nobody actually believed that we would succeed, that we would come to the end. And there are two persons that cannot celebrate with us today. The ones who actually have been very strongly involved. One was the one of the first OER chair, Fred Mulder, professor from the Netherlands, Open University Netherlands. And Indrajit, and so now what should I say is that minute of silence and all these things and, but these are not the people that would like that. So what about that we have a minute of applause to them? What do you think? Thank you. So that was one slide I took because there is Rory. There's another, the original UNESCO OER chair sitting there. And it's about that UNESCO had quite a lot of work already before we started to work on the recommendation in 2012. And then this is what you've seen, this is what you've heard. I will pass this through. And here I will start with. So we had just, it was before this was named Open Education Consortium. It was named Open Coursware Consortium. That was the conference in Bali that actually everything started because Rory came across, sorry, Fred Mulder came across saying that look, but since you are so progressive in Slovenia, why don't we think about something which would be a global impact for our country? And we said, hey, why don't we just try it? And we were, in that time, we were young already. And then we said, okay, let's make the next conference in Gubliana. And we sat down like this and we discussed about what would that actually mean? And we haven't had an idea. So this is what then UNESCO sent us. And she said, well, you know, this is a timeline. If you wanted to go for this, this is a timeline. This is what we, those are the obstacles. We have to jump through all these obstacles to come to the end, which is 2019. And we said, well, that would be fun. Let's try it, let's try it. We will learn quite a lot. We will see what will happen out of it. And then we started. So first a lot of studies. We did a lot of studies. What's there, what's the status, what is needed, what should be the structure, whatever, then quite a lot of lobbying. And here, usually when you start to work with this, then you end up with several ministries, we end up with several entities inside UNESCO that usually don't really collaborate to each other. But here, somehow they feel that that should be something to work on. So Slovenian government did quite an excellent work on that. So the Ministry of Education from Gaspard and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. There was quite a lot of structured, well-organized lobbying. And the meetings and everything. And you find out there is Asha from Commitment of Learning as well. And then we had the Liban Action Plan set up and before that six regional consultations so we can see how many countries have been involved, how many participants have been involved in discussing about what are the needs of all particular countries across the globe. And the outcome was a study, guidelines, tech steps. And this is how it looks like. So people came from all these countries talk about and start to talk about what they really need, what countries really need and how the OER can actually help them to stay in whatever they do. And there's another one, and there's another one, and there's another one. So a lot of people involved already even before we get to the point that there will be a recommendation. And then we had the OER World Congress, an excellent event. We actually sat down at the plant and then wrote down the action plan. This was the crowd, the ministers, decision makers from countries across the globe. 102 countries were there present. And then we started to develop the main, so based on the main strategic development lines. We developed the OER action plan, the mysterious statement you've seen. The statement about the dynamic coalition, global infrastructure for OER. And of course, the VNL Open Educational Resources case. And this is how the drafting was done. In the evening, late in the evening, people sitting behind the same table and drafting the text. And lobbying, quite a lot of lobbying again. So outside, inside UNESCO as well, because you have two entities which are involved. And then we had this proposal to executive board saying that maybe now, because we know that there is a need, maybe there is an interest for the community to set up the something which would be a recommendation. So what happened was that when Gashberg came into the executive board of 25 52 members, 33 of those signed officially the draft document in advance. So we officially know in advance that 32 countries, after those were 12 EU states as well, actually said, yeah, yeah, yeah, we are signing, we go for it, we want to do that. So we said, okay, so that makes sense. Let's be a little bit more courageous, let's go, let's see what will happen. And we prepared the first OER recommendation draft. And then I will show you later on how this looks like. So first expert meeting, so we sit down, we went through, we schedule, we schedule completely everything. We had a second draft to open presentation and then you see how many entities, inputs we've got on the first draft. And then, so I did the editing all the time. The third draft with the expert group, and then we had the fourth draft and the second expert meeting, and we had replies from 31 countries. And you have the names there and EU commission as well. And then there was a lot of lobbying again. And then we had the first draft for the expert group and you see how many comments you have. And then you have to somehow find out what this guy was actually answering to another guy about the text which is there crossed. So yeah, it's an interesting work. And then in that time I was starting to think, what the hell we are doing with AI and all this development and using that for that kind of services. And then the last mile, so the sixth draft came out. And then there was this shift of the definition, the OER formal definition. And I will show you later on what happened. So we submitted this to the executive board in April 2019. And then there was intergovernmental special committee meeting where some of you have been present, which was for me the first time I've seen, I was part of the Slovenian delegation. And then you have this Slovenian tablet. And then if you put it like this, then you can speak. So it's like this old 70s hippie style of whatever communication. And then, so we went through, and some of you have been present, we went through world by world. So today's 100 people sitting in the room. And there was a text and editing. And then we came to the end. There were several issues in between, of course, because one country wanted to have something else than the others. So how it works in UNESCO is that you will suggest them. So don't interfere with the meeting. Just you two go outside in this special room and come back with some, you know, proposal. Or, you know, we finished meeting now because there is a dinner afterwards. So let's have a special, small special group and discuss this issue. Because we are hungry. And then we got this text. And this text went then to the final cleaning with UNESCO. And that was then proposed to the final conference. So at the final conference, and this is the only recording that's exist in the globe, since there is a rule in UNESCO. So the seating order. I haven't know that, so the Dutch folks explained to me. So they always vote a letter. And in that particular moment, S was voted as the first letter. So that would mean that Slovenia was sitting in the first row. So I was actually sitting in the first row, having a telephone and recording this. And before everything is started, it was discussion about Indigenous people document as well. So this Indian was actually praying that they, for the West, East, North, South, gods to help us to be wise, to accept the two documents. Now, this is actually a recording. So the word, you know, it's on the headphones. But you see two DGs, two A-DGs. The president's saying right now, so are there any other objections? And these two were a little bit worried still. Because, you know, it might happen that somewhere there, some country will say, I have an objection. And now, that's it. So we worked for six years to get to this point. Some numbers. So more than 1,000 individuals being involved throughout the process. More than 1,000. Four years of work, which goes now into the yesterday's talk, Economic, Cultural, Political. This is my email box. And I was not really answering all the emails. So more than 101 meetings from member states, organized by Slovenia, you have here many UNESCO internal coordination meetings. I haven't asked Zeynep how many are there. So to set up internal UNESCO issues, 122 member states comment and participate in the inputs. So if you are the UNESCO representative, then you get, you cannot just as UNESCO representative for National Commission just express your own ideas. You have to translate something that government is telling you to tell at the meeting. So this is governments telling, governments giving input to the document. And then all 194 member states confirmed the document. What was interesting was that before this clap was done, officially how it looks like inside UNESCO is that this guy, the president of the chairman was actually reading the document, reading just the input into the document. And then the question is, are there any comments? And then the countries are putting their flags like this. And then it was quite a lot of countries putting flags like this. So we said to God, Jesus. Now then unopened, I have a beautiful prepared Excel sheet which says country X said this and God is out. Everything prepared and Zeynep was prepared and everybody behind was prepared. Everybody were really prepared about now we have to fight. And then it started. And there were all countries except one who didn't really understand what he's talking about. All countries were expressing, really, they were expressing their gratitude, their interest and the willingness to really follow the document. So there is an interest and need for countries to do something on this idea. And we were sitting there waiting and then there was this final question and clap and that was it, more or less. So what now? Ah, this is what I wanted to show you. So this was a proposal of an OER definition that we as an experts proposed in the process. The other thing there came from the two entities which are quite influential. So if you read those two documents and if you put that to all the member states in the globe I was afraid about the definition. And in that particular time we did this trick about you guys go outside, talk, come back with something which would be a new definition of OER. So there is no other way. Otherwise it will be dead in this particular moment. Further steps? So we need to, we as a community now and Gaspard as a representative for national commissions and Zaneb as a lady who is now very influential inside UNESCO. We need to take care that this would not be just another document. So let's use this document. Let's try to change things really globally. You've heard about the dynamic coalition. You've heard about it, we are talking about how we can create something which would be a supportive mechanism for this dynamic coalition. And there are many regional initiatives. So there is one from Kohl, there is another one from the Ministry of Slovenia. So there are many regional initiatives as well for regional collaboration. And what these people need is actually, they need the support of experts, the need of support of the community which we are. And we have three layers. So what we find out is that if you use the mechanisms that we set up in this process, which is if there is a, for example, if there is a problem in country X and you minister will not listen to you with your ideas, you can always come to Slovenia or to other countries as well and we can, you know, talk to our minister that he will talk to your minister and that is completely different story then. This is how you open the doors. Because otherwise you end up in some ceiling and that's it. So let's try to use these three layers of mechanisms. So our energy, our know-how, expertise, community that we have, we know everything about sharing. We do things, we share things, we want to be open, transparent. And then you have the national commissions and they are, you know, they are friendly people. They work to each other already. For years they know each other. They go to drink beer together afterwards. So this is what they do, only drink beer. So why? Because they need something to work on. So let's use this layer because if they propose something to UNESCO as a new program, as a new line, as a new activity, UNESCO will consider that as an important input. And then we use UNESCO because UNESCO can, you know, certainly show a little bit completely different view on international collaboration. So, and yeah, so we had a discussion already about the OER Observatory which will show then with metrics and indicators, not just what is happening across the globe on OER implementation, but also where you as a country is actually staying right now, how you do against your neighbouring. So we know that this shame and fame principle works pretty much pretty well, you know, if there will be, for example, in Slovenia, and for Slovenia there will be Italian government better than Slovenian government, or Croatian, then all the neighbours, we want to be better than our neighbours and our neighbours want to be better than us. So, you know, we can use these principles a little bit because then when these guys will appear and report to the UNESCO what they did on OER recommendation and there will be a minister saying, hmm, we didn't done anything. And then the neighbouring can say, we did this and this and that, we implemented blah blah blah policies. Then this will work. But they cannot do it by themselves. If you are a politician today, you don't know who actually is doing anything on the operational level. So, this is why we need to be, we need to be proactive, we need to come to talk to them, we need to start talking in the sense of look, we are here to help you. Not because of you, but because we need to do things, we need to change things. So, the end, it was fun, it's still fun and now it became a real chance to do things differently. That's it. So, thank you Zainab, thank you Mitya. I will be brief, I have no presentation to make but I am standing here. Mitya took over one of my two points that I would like to bring to you, to your attention now. First of all, I would like to remind of another person, important person in this overall process, not only because I'm coming from Slovenia, but on the photo from before, we have seen the former Slovenian minister of education, science and sport. And she was one of the really leading and forcing politicians in this process because she confirmed that Slovenia will host the second world OER Congress. She was attending an expert meeting in Paris itself, what is not usual for politicians. She was also attending one of the regional consultations for the Congress. So, she cannot celebrate, but she celebrates because she knows, of course, about the decision last Monday and she is happy to. Not only because of this achievement by her and by us, of course, but she was named and confirmed as one of 12 people, 12, they call it wise people, who are now members of a so-called high-level reflection group to the director general of UNESCO, who will personally advise her and the team at the secretariat how to transform and how to modernize the organization of UNESCO itself. So, that's my first point. The second point, Mitya has already taken it over, but I'm representing the Slovenian National Commission for UNESCO and I said from the beginning when we started to collaborate, when I get to know Mitya and his colleagues with the overall process, but then with the establishment of the OER chair and the overall process during the next four years then and I see many faces, of course, from Rory, Nicole, Christian, Igor, Paul, of course, many of you were practically and actively involved in this process and from the beginning when I was, for example, approached by representatives of the OER community or OE community because then I got somehow a focal point for the organization of the Congress and they were asking how can I contact, for example, my government or do we have in my country also a commission for UNESCO? And I said, yes, most of the member states are usually it's really like this that every member states after the statute of UNESCO has to have a national commission for UNESCO, but it's always different, of course. It depends always what kind of structure the government has, how much funds they are available for that, et cetera, et cetera. In 90% of the cases, national commissions are part of the government itself, so they are being seated in one of the ministries of the government, like in Slovenia, for example, but in stronger countries, national commissions are also independent bodies when the funds are available, okay, usually also given by the government itself, but they are playing an independent role, like in Canada, for example, or Germany or Korea, South Korea. But it always depends, so I was approached, for example, by a colleague from Brazil, how can I talk to my national commission? And as Mitya said, we are a network of national commissions, of course, I do not know every national commission in this world, but throughout the years that I'm working for our national commissions, of course, we have contacts all over the globe, and I said, look, okay, I will write to them, I will connect you, and in Slovenia, it's easy. We are a small country, we can knock at the door of my minister at his office, or I can call the foreign minister, for example. That's not possible in a country like Italy, for example, or Canada, but it's probably easier for the colleagues from the national commission. There's a lack of coalition of member states or a coalition of bodies in the field that will take care of the implementation of the recommendation. There will be given structures that can be used, but there are already existing structures, like, for example, national commissions or other bodies that are in charge and that can be contacted by each of you to make this process somehow rolling. So I'm just, I can confirm what ZANEP and Meteor have already presented. It was a tough process, but it was especially much fun, and in the end, it was a big success because I can also compare this recommendation to other recommendation texts, and although I'm not an expert, but this text is good and it has really points that could be now the action plan for the further steps. So I thank you for your attention. Some of the people at the regional consultations they know because they said always this is the OER phase because always when I was concluding my little speeches at the regional consultations I said, remember this phase because you will see it again. So I think you will see it also again. Thank you very much. So Paul, we conclude or we conclude? Or? Thank you. Thank you.