The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> Mrs. Melinda, are you hearing us online?
>> Loud and clear. Am I coming loud and clear?
>> MICHAEL KENMOE: Yes. Thank you very much. I'm also checking on Neil. Neil Butcher, are you hearing us? No? Zeynep? Is Zeynep online? Onsite we have Lisa. Thank you. Dr. Stephen Wyber. Patrick Paul Walsh. Thank you. And Tel Amiel. I am Michel Kenmoe. I am at the UNESCO original office for West Africa. It's a pleasure to have you. We hope our other panelists will be able to join us online and that they can participate in this session. Let me check once again. Do we have Zeynep online?
>> I just rang her. She's coming.
>> MICHAEL KENMOE: Great. Thank you. And Neil Butcher? Neil Butcher is not yet online.
While we're waiting for them to join, why don't we give us two minutes for each of you to introduce yourselves. Let's say one minute.
>> LISA PETRIDES: My name is Lisa Petrides. I run the institute for study of knowledge management and education and we build OER libraries and we do professional development and we do a lot of research around the impact of OER.
>> TEL AMIEL: I am Tel Amiel. I chair the UNESCO chair on education and we had the open education initiative.
>> MICHAEL KENMOE: Thank you. To you.
>> PATRICK PAUL WALSH: My name is Patrick Paul Walsh. I'm a full professor at university college Dublin but to the UN sustainable development union network as vice president of education and director of the SDG academy.
>> STEPHEN WYBER: My name is Stephen Wyber.
>> MICHAEL KENMOE: Thank you very much. We want to wish you a warm welcome to this session on transformative role of Open Educational Resources in digital inclusion. We are going to start the session by listening to our opening remark from Mr. Jelassi who is the assistant director general for information and communication.
>> I am pleased to address you. This year's theme, the Internet we want brings together policymakers, experts, civil society and businesses to tackle the challenges and the opportunities in our evolving digital landscape. UNESCO is committed to fostering dialogue and cooperation for a more inclusive, secure and sustainable Internet for all. We envision digital ecosystem where the Internet serves as a powerful tool for learning and educational resources play a pivotal role to increase access to quality education worldwide.
In 2019 UNESCO adopted the recommendation on OER which is UN normative instrument to increase access to digital platforms. Today we gather in Kyoto to explore the transformative potential of OER in the age of the Internet where educational materials are abundant.
In alignment with the UN secretary general school on outcome and agenda, UNESCO has been advocating for the adoption of licensed digital education tools to be accessible through the Internet. The 2019 OER recommendation guides our efforts towards an open accessible and inclusive education future. It emphasizes international collaboration for content, capacity and infrastructure aligning with the global compact principles for an inclusive open, secure and shared Internet.
Central to our discussion is the recognition of digital public goods, especially OER defined by the UNESCO OER recommendation. The five areas of action, namely capacity building, policy support, inclusive and multilingual quality content, sustainability and international collaboration form the foundation for accessible online learning platforms benefiting both learners and educators.
Digital public goods such as OER drive sustainable models of education, sharing and innovation that's contributing to the sustainable development goals including quality education, access to information and ICT, gender equality and global partners. This session is not only about dialogue. It's a call for action. Digital transformation is rapidly reshaping societies, the platform society is intertwining digital platforms and artificial intelligence. We must navigate the privacy, transparency, and governance intricacies to effectively harness their potential.
We call for all governments, partners, and stakeholders to unite to implement the 2019 OER recommendation and other norms that cultivate open and secure spaces for education. As stakeholders, our collective efforts through the OER Dynamic Coalition are crucial in shaping an inclusive equitable and digitally empowered future via Open Educational Resources. Your contributions will be invaluable in advancing our shared mission.
The participants UNESCO has been actively promoting Open Educational Resources to expand access to quality education worldwide and aligning principles such as openness, accessibility, privacy, and freedom of expression in the digital age. The OER coalition brings together stakeholders driving the development and use of Internet. Let us work together to ensure that the Internet remains a forceful goods advancing human rights and sustainable development. Thank you for your kind attention.
>> MICHAEL KENMOE: Thank you to the assistant director general for communication and information at UNESCO for this opening remark in which the point he had stated that this meeting is about call for action. It's normal to have Zeynep to present the Dynamic Coalition, I don't know if Zeynep is online. Zeynep? So far she's not yet online.
We're going to have a series of sessions during which some of our panelists will share the experiences from the different initiatives in which they are involved throughout the world. I'm going to invite Dr. Melinda ‑‑ which skills to share ‑‑ making accessible. Over to you. She's joining us online.
>> MELINDA BANDALARIA: Thank you very much and good day to everyone. Thank you for having me in this session to share my perspective about OER's important role of teachers in making OER accessible and inclusive. I am participating from the Philippines. I am also full professor and chancellor at the University of the Philippines open university and appointed as ambassador of Open Educational Resources with international council for opening distance education and has an actively involved in the OER Dynamic Coalition of UNESCO. Considering teachers and educators play a critical role in developing, creating, reusing, adopting and sharing OER, so what are the skills and knowledge do teachers need to have so that we can insure that OERs that are being used in their courses are inclusive and accessible?
As we go through the skills and knowledge, it should also guide us in terms of developing training programs, courses, for OER, especially with a participation of our teachers. So first, teachers need to know who are excluded in the teaching and learning ecosystem and why they are excluded. This knowledge would enable the teachers to put in place mechanisms and implement strategies to address the identified bodies. In most cases the barrier has to do with the cost of the learning materials which using OER aims to address.
The other common barriers include physical challenges like impairment, language. Given that most OERs are in English language and other learners may feel excluded because of this regard to cultural diversity. So considering this, the teacher should have knowledge on the following. First is accessibility guidelines like for instance the web content accessibility guideline to make the online platform accessible to various types of learners.
Universal design for learning, the knowledge about it can guide the teachers on how they can integrate even just the basic principles of universal design for learning to the OERs that they will be using especially given the nature of the OERs that they can be reduced, then teachers can integrate the basic features of universal design for learning to this OERs.
Cultural and ‑‑ one of the barriers cited by students through the use of OERs is they're not available in local language, so teachers can translate this OERs that they will be using in their courses and make sure that there is respect to cultural diversity, that there's nothing in the content that would be offensive to a specific culture.
>> MICHAEL KENMOE: Thank you, Dr. Melinda, for your input and for clarifying some of the principles that may actually help teachers to create content that are inclusive.
>> MELINDA BANDALARIA: Thank you.
>> MICHAEL KENMOE: Let me return to Zeynep. Can you make a short presentation of the OER Dynamic Coalition before we move forward?
>> ZEYNEP VAROGLU: Yes. Can you hear me?
>> MICHAEL KENMOE: Yes.
>> ZEYNEP VAROGLU: Can you put up the slide? Is it possible or not? No? If it's not, it's okay.
>> MICHAEL KENMOE: Yes. The slide.
>> ZEYNEP VAROGLU: Otherwise, I'll just go on. It's a great pleasure to be here with you today. I'm very sorry. There's something wrong with the camera and I will try and fix it during the course of the session.
I would just like to present to you very quickly the OER recommendation 2023. I'm sorry, 2019. This recommendation was adopted by all member states by consensus in 2019. And it basically has a very clear definition of OER which is ‑‑ which explains to exactly what OER is and what it is not. And I will read it out to you right now.
The definition is that it's any learning, teaching or research material in any format that resides in the public domain or is under a copyright that has been released under an open license that permit ‑‑ adaptation and redistribution by others and there is a clear also definition of license. I will invite you to go to the website of UNESCO, look up the name of the OER recommendation 2019 to have the full text.
There is five areas of action and we'll be going through each of the areas of action in this presentation. The first one is capacity building. The second is policy. The third one is on quality inclusive multilingual OER and the fourth is on sustainability and the fifth one is on international cooperation. The international cooperation is the basis of this OER recommendation which ‑‑ of this OER Dynamic Coalition which brings together the panel before you.
I would just like to also point out that the stakeholders in this recommendation are the entire knowledge community so we have the education community, we have libraries, museums, and we have also publication. You have on your ‑‑ on the screen in the chat if you're online, you have the text of the recommendation there. We have a very full panel so I will stop here and give the floor back to you, Michel, to continue.
>> MICHAEL KENMOE: Thank you, Zeynep. Can we stop the presentation, please. Yes.
Okay. Thank you. I want to check to know if Mr. Luca is online? Has he joined us? He was to share the experience on how learners can draw from the variant cultural linguistic content. If he is not online, let me check in Ms. Gihan Osman, is he online? If not, can I check to make sure that Mr. Neil Butcher is online? Neil?
>> NEIL BUTCHER: Yes, I am online.
>> MICHAEL KENMOE: Thank you. This gives us the opportunity to move forward with the second part of this presentation where I'm going to invite Lisa Petrides to share her experience on OER repository. Lisa.
>> LISA PETRIDES: Thank you. Will the slide be on the screen? Great. Thank you so much.
So I want to talk about really the sharing of knowledge and what that means in terms of OER libraries and repositories. The repository is really the underlying infrastructure of libraries. They're vast and diverse. They're across the world. They contain often meta data description of how content is created and used and adapted, which is extremely important. It's not enough to have platforms where these content reside, but it's equally as important to know ‑‑ have very good descriptions for both the educator as well as the learner who is going to be using these resources. It's not enough just to have a whole library if we don't really understand what's in it and why we might want to use it.
Just like the librarian in a physical library, that person is probably one of the most important people in terms of their function, in terms of the search and discovery, so similarly, in the online content, we rely on the meta data and often librarians to guide us through that content.
I want to talk about this through the care framework which is something you look at careframework.org. What it is is the care framework is a way to show what is good OER stewardship and how to become OER stewards of OER. And so I thought it might be an interesting way to apply the care framework to platform and tools and how they can be designed in a user centric way.
The first part of care, so it's contribution is the C, attribution, release and empower. Contribution is about advancing the awareness, improvement and distribution of OER and what this means specifically in terms of platforms and meta data is that we really have to focus on portability, interoperability. In terms of attribution, we're talking about conspicuous attribution. What I mean by that is if we don't know the ‑‑ we really lose the ability to describe and build a transparent knowledge base and as you heard Zeynep talk about in the OER recommendation, what we're trying to create is really a commons, the knowledge commons around OER opinion.
The third piece ‑‑ 30 seconds, did you say? Release, making sure that the content can be used beyond the platform in a way that it requires the platform to be interoperable with others. And last is empower and perhaps I think one of the most important attributes today is meeting the needs of all learners, including those who have been traditionally excluded, so this requires content that is culturally relevant, inclusive and accessible to those with disabilities and again, when we think about the meta data that's describing this content for search and discovery, I think that the care framework really helps to illuminate what those factors are. Thank you.
>> MICHAEL KENMOE: Thank you, Lisa, for sharing that on the importance of metadata and also OER repository. Turning now to ask about the importance of collaboration, how to make this possible. Collaboration between educational stakeholders to support OER initiatives.
>> STEPHEN WYBER: Thank you very much and thank you for the invitation to be here today. I think just as an introductory point, there is a lot of talk at the moment about dig tap public infrastructures and digital public goods and OER is such a powerful example of this. It's so often overlooked so it's really important that we're having this session here today.
At risk of repeating Lisa's points, but without an attractive acronym to make sense of them so that everyone can take notes, the roles that libraries ten to play often, as you said, supporting with new discovery awareness, and as we know, the fact that something is available on the Internet does not necessarily mean that it's actually accessed or used. There's an awful lot of shouting into the void online. And libraries have proven effective in so many cases and actually them updating their original roles of putting people who need knowledge in touch with knowledge, raising awareness of the possibilities. I think combating some of the assumptions that because OER is free, it's worthless. And there is always this sort of human tendency to believe that unless you've paid for something it's not worth it. Wrong. Overcoming some of the ideas, some of the prejudices that exist about OER's resources. I think Lisa has already covered the point about curation. I think curating in a way that responds to need, actually, again, bridging the materials that are out there, the resources that are out there, working with faculty, working at what's actually there. Again, there is that bridging role in there.
I think once again, working with educational stakeholders to take a critical overview. I'm conscious again that clearly the landscape of OER that's available right now is primarily from some parts of the world. There is an awful lot coming from parts of the world that have produced traditional textbooks and traditional materials. Given the training and given the experience they have in trying to evaluate the whole of knowledge that's available, librarians can have a powerful role working with stakeholders in thinking what's missing, what are we not seeing as opposed to what we are seeing and once again working to make sure that we're coming up with OER that fits. I'm going to jump to the last point, but also in that role of encouraging librarians can have a really powerful role in giving guidance about how to use rights, what are the options, what are the channels for faculty, February education stakeholders to feel sufficient empowerment to produce their own which does require to work with materials that are there, to produce their own materials, to share them, to really actually deepen that knowledge commons.
And then I think the final point, please do count on librarians as allies in producing frame works that are favorable, that have decent educational exceptions in copyright so that you're not unnecessarily held back in using materials for educational purposes. It fits within the recommendation that it's an ongoing fight.
>> MICHAEL KENMOE: Thank you very much, Stephen, for sharing this. I'm going to turn to Patrick. When we are considering stakeholder engagement, I think the private sector can play a key role in this, so Patrick, what are the strategies that we can put in place to engage the private sector?
>> PATRICK PAUL WALSH: Yeah. So the answer, just to say the question I prepared is the broad partnership, which is a partnership between government academic libraries, intergovernmental system and the private sector, so it's the whole comprehensive partnership. So we have signed or we're working with UNESCO STSN on a joint committee to implement UNESCO recommendation and we have a partnership agreement that we're going to run what's called an open education yours overplay platform or repository or journal, whatever way you want to think about it, and basically we want ‑‑ we basically want to have courses submitted to us that we can quality assure and referee, that we can put into archives that are properly meta dated, open license, et cetera, quality assured and they can be used in government for educational training or corporates or schools or academia in their courses.
Of course, the whole reason for demonstrating this on the essay, for example, if we did it with SDG academy courses is to really show a community of practice that how you would actually do this with guidelines and kind of playbooks that people could actually apply this in context.
Just to give a sense of the partners and what's going on, one, people should be able to submit their LMSs or courses and they be refereed and not just refereed from the point of view about the academic and science content but also adherence to, say, UN policy or UN legal framework, so they're quality assured and published. When they went to the repositories, they will follow fair care and principles, so thank you for explaining the care principles, but basically this stuff has to be accessible, reusable, but there has to be what I call good citizenship or Stewartship and good governance. You need a lot of ad technology that you have to use for this type of let's call it a publication in terms of, you know, the open journal systems or the way you would do your copyright or licensing or the way you would manage your indicators and meta data and so on and so forth.
Just to give you a sense, just two seconds, where the partnership comes in, when we're developing the meta data, we have to talk to users and they're government whose have training in the LMS‑o academics and schools who are doing their curriculum and their courses and in a sense you have to have what we call the diamond engagement, so it's not enough to do diamond publication, which is free to publish and free to use, but you actually have to work with the creators and then the users to get the whole system working effectively or it's not going to work.
>> MICHAEL KENMOE: Thank you very much for the three of you for this session during which you have shared your experience to how to achieve the approach into development of OER and also on how to engage the different stake holders in academia, the private sector in the realization of inclusive OER.
I'm going to turn to Zeynep for the next session, the next panel. Zeynep.
>> ZEYNEP VAROGLU: Thank you very much, Michel. We have the pleasure now look at now and forever about sharing resources within a policy framework and within the framework of sustainability. Our first speak ser Neil Butcher who's going to look at issues related to national education policies. Neil, the floor is yours.
>> NEIL BUTCHER: Thank you very much. Greetings, everyone, from Johannesburg in South Africa. As can see here, I'm focusing on national education policies. I think what we've seen in the world of OER is the sustainability really depends on governance developing and implementing sustainable policies. There is a lot of OER policies. Unfortunately, many of those policies exist in paper but are not really being implemented in practice. I think in the context of the discussions on accessibility today, it's important just to recognize that 15% of people around the world have some form of disability, so governments really are the key agency that are going to be responsible for ensuring that the good ideas that we've heard about in the previous presentations are implemented and sustained and financed.
We've spoken about the importance of content accessibility, the application of critical principles, the repositories that are available to support accessibility and so on, and so in the bottom bullets what I've tried to unpack is some of the important things that are critical for national policy. I think that starts with bullet four, which is to develop policies that provide for the understanding and application of open licenses to content and software. This may seem like an obvious point, but if our intellectual property and copyright policies nationally are not providing for and enabling government agencies to use open licenses, then it's unlikely that will actually ever be done.
We also then need in our policy to unpack the meaning of digital accessibility and its practical implications for policy and the practical implications are the important part. There is a lot of lip service to the importance of digital accessibility, but the kinds of ideas you've heard about in the previous slides need to be documented in policy and there are implications for content development and other processes that are being funded by governments need to be stated very explicitly, so these explicit requirements about digital accessibility need to be content in the policy and they need to be binding in the sense that when governments are spending money on content development there needs to be an obligation that this is built into what government agencies are expected to procure.
The accessibility plan for existing national and other education initiatives, the kinds of ideas we've heard about in the previous presentations on the repositories, these initiatives are really important, but if government is not committing to sustaining them on an ongoing basis, we're unfortunately not going to see the kind of impact that we're looking for and that's been discussed by my colleagues. So that will bring me to the last point that I consider to be the most important is policies need to be explicitly stating what the accessibility considerations should be for content creation projects for educational projects and how those need to be embedded in the procurement processes.
I think this is the key hurdle at which we tend to stumble is that we have a lot of good principles and ideas often documented in policies or content in guidelines but when we get to the point of procurement and when there's urgency to move ahead with procuring content creation policy for the development of educational materials of national level, unfortunately, the procurement process don't enforce obligations for the service providers to make sure that the content they're creating adheres to accessibility guidelines and making sure that that's a condition of payment for the services being received. Unfortunately, what tends to happen is the contracts are executed and this critical consideration of accessibility is left on the sidelines.
I would say of all the things that we can do that would be most important will lead up to this one. If we don't include some references to the importance of accessibility in making sure that there is accountability of delivering those obligations in the procurement process, all of the other excellent work that we might have done will unfortunately have been for nothing. I think that is some of the critical guidelines at the national level we need to consider. Thank you very much.
>> ZEYNEP VAROGLU: Thank you very much, Neil. It's a very clear presentation on the national policy issues. Colleagues, I'd also now to ask Melinda Bandalaria to come back to the point that was started at the beginning which was on bringing this national policy into the classroom in terms of institutions. The person ‑‑ the colleague who is kindly taking care felt slide, if they could go to the second slide, you'll see the slide for Melinda. Melinda, the floor is yours.
>> MELINDA BANDALARIA: Thank you very much. The skills and knowledge that the teachers should have so that they can make OERs more accessible and inclusive is ‑‑ should guide the policies and also in developing training programs for teachers. So I have mentioned already cultural linguistic diversity and knowledge about licenses are associated with OER. So about the skills that should also be integrated into the training programs for teachers, of course, teachers should know how to convert their Open Educational Resources materials and alternative formats such as Braille or even simplified text for students with different needs. They should also have the skills to provide captioning for hearing impaired learners. And images especially for those who are screen readers. And of course the technological skills will be very handy so they can make sure that the OER platforms and materials that they are using are compatible with assistive technology, that different types of learners will have access to.
And most probably we are not very much conscious about this is determining about the text readability of the materials that they are using and knowing how to determine by using different mechanisms like the index measurement.
At then of the day, it is making use of technology platforms to make this material Open Educational Resources material, so what I'm trying to emphasize here is that our training for teachers should not stop with them developing, sharing, knowing the licenses appropriate for the materials that they are producing, but also acquiring this different knowledge and skills which are essential to make the Open Educational Resources that they are using more accessible and inclusive to the various types of learners. I think that's all from my end. Thank you very much for allowing me to finish my presentation and contribution to this forum. Good day to everyone.
>> ZEYNEP VAROGLU: Thank you very much, Melinda. There is a very concrete response to policy which is put into action at the national level and at the institutional level and with that I'd like to turn the floor now to give the floor now to Michelle. Michelle is a communication information adviser and he will talk about successful example of an OER initiative which can serve. Michel, the floor is yours.
>> MICHAEL KENMOE: Thank you. As part of our initiative for implementing the OER recommendation, it was Africa, we started with different stakeholders for the adoption of OER. We came out with some observation that without middle to top level buy‑in of the OER, it's going to be difficult for most of the country to actually engage in the implementation of the recommendation. So we turnout to decision makers and also all the decision makers within the education sector and ‑‑ to explain to them the importance of OER and how OER can actually contribute to quality education within the country. This led to commitment from many of the countries in West Africa to develop a national strategy for OER. We start with ‑‑ we were successful in developing with the minister of higher education a national OER strategy and that is yet to be validated. You know the country has been into some troubles. And then this has halted progress towards adoption of the OER initiative strategy.
We also succeed in convincing Senegal to participate in collaboration of its own strategy. Today we are working toward the validation of the national strategy. It was a collective effort with multiple stake holders in design of the strategy and it's covered all dimension of the OER. Actually contextualizing with the reality of each country.
We also made the same thing in Togo where the country engaged in the development of the OER strategy, the same thing in Congo. So far we have about five countries that are in the process of adopting the OER national strategy and all the strategy ‑‑ what's interesting is that the very process of the elaborating the OER was quite interesting in raising awareness for the recommendation, because by being involved in the process, many came to have a better knowing under why and on the importance of OER recommendation so that today we are having in many of those countries, there are a team of experts who are becoming advocates for OER within the country.
The challenge that we see so far is the challenge ever funding. We have seen that everywhere the strategy was developed there was this concern about how the government is going to actually fund, how are they going to find the resources to actually support the realization of the strategy? One of the suggestions was that a government can actually ensure that from now on whenever there is a project involving the production of educational resources, government should ensure that at least part of the project support the prediction of Open Educational Resources within the country. So we hope that with that experience we are still in the process of the adoption of the OER strategy, but the strategy in all those countries have already been elaborated, but still to be validated at the national level.
This is what I can share regarding the experience that we have in West Africa. Thank you.
>> ZEYNEP VAROGLU: Thank you very much, Michel, and thank you for sharing this experience in West Africa which is more strategic. I'd like to give the floor now to Dr. Amiel who will talk about sustainability models. Tel, the floor is yours.
>> TEL AMIEL: Thank you. One of the things that we have to worry about based on a couple presentations that came before is what does it mean to be sustainable for OER? Of course the first thing is the issue of money, right? Whenever we're funding these kinds of things, just like when we talk about free software, we know that development of free software and development and sustaining of these projects takes money. There are many ways and I want to highlight three. One of them is related to what Michel just mentioned. One is open procurement. Many governments around the world, the ideas that we push the most is the idea that if you are using public funds, you should have public assets. Open procurement models are very popular, but I think they fluctuate quite a bit. In some countries it's easy to push the yesterday of complete open procurement, everything that you produce with public funds should be open. In other countries it might not work as we expect. We to be more strict on your licenses. Not all resources will be open.
I like to think of open procurement as a transition. Especially if you're going from an all rights reserved model, you have to try different ways of making this work until it maybe eventually you'll get complete open procurement. There are other ways to do this. Just like with software, we have models for open with added value. You might provide the resources for free which is a keystone of OER. Resources must be free but services like training and all these kinds of other things can be by cost.
And then also something that doesn't last forever, but is good to get things started, particularly in new projects, whether it's in a government or institution, is partnerships and donations from foundations. I think people are very keen on funding these kinds of things for open openness.
The financial aspect is one. For OER there are two others. Neil mentioned policy. It's object just about putting policies on paper. We have plenty of those. One that works well is having working groups. You've heard a lot about multi stakeholders. Doing things together and monitoring these policies, that works really well in many countries it has worked very, very well. And groups that can evolve. So OER sent something that stands over in time and is one solid thing. The entry of generative AI has changed quite a bit. We have to have people think being this from the perspective of teachers and legal issues and so forth. These are working groups.
And finally OER is an educational endeavor. That's the core. The practice around OER is what matters. If you don't have community engagement, if you don't have people that are buying into this at all levels, it makes absolutely no sense. It's just legislation. It's just money. It's just resources. We have to have people that have incentives and have recommendation for doing these kinds of things and raise awareness about where we are at that moment.
>> ZEYNEP VAROGLU: Thank you very much, Tel. And right now we've been very efficient with our time, so I'd just like to take this opportunity to actually do a meta discussion, because in fact in front of you today on the screen a majority of these colleagues are actually on the advisory board of the OER Dynamic Coalition. This is the first OER Dynamic Coalition event at the IGF and we're all very honored to be here before you. We have in the OER Dynamic Coalition, it was started in 2020. The principle of the Dynamic Coalition was started in 2020 and we became an official IGF Dynamic Coalition in March, 2023. But the spirit of Dynamic Coalition was in the body of this text from the beginning of the discussions and in the background document to the text of the recommendation which is presented before the member states and before you and in many of the presentations we have had in the ‑‑ Melinda, who is the advisory board chair for capacity building. Also lease so, who is for policy and Tel who is for sustainability, and Neil for communication and, I'm sorry, I'm going through the list. You have different members of the advisory board and these ‑‑ the OER Dynamic Coalition has brought together ‑‑ brings together up to now 500 stakeholders from the different stakeholder groups that were presented at the beginning of the session, the knowledge community, education, culture, and also publications, and we bring together stakeholders from government institutions. And it focuses on knowledge sharing and collaboration in the implementation of the recommendation.
This has turned into a useful way of maintaining dialogue and maintaining discussions and making the issue of the implementation of the OER Dynamic Coalition a priority for governments and institutions to date and it's a great pleasure to be here before you.
We have some time ahead of us, so I would like to maybe ask the panel two questions that were in the discussion but unfortunately we haven't had time to look at it. But I will just perhaps put it to the panel for the moment. The first one is how OER can be tailored to diversity of learners in terms of cultural, linguistic and socioeconomic back grounds fostering inclusive learning. This goes to the area of the recommendation which deals with quality, multilingual inclusive OER. Could I ask perhaps if there are anybody of ‑‑ I don't want to put anyone on the spot, but I will nonetheless do so. I hope you don't mine. Could I perhaps give the floor to Lisa to start with? Would that be okay with you, Lisa?
>> LISA PETRIDES: Absolutely. Of course.
>> ZEYNEP VAROGLU: You're to the left of Tel, I think.
>> LISA PETRIDES: For those of you who don't know Zeynep, when she asks us to do something, we do it. Thank you, Zeynep. I think the issue ‑‑ let me start by saying OER as many of us I think on this panel here see it is a public good. Just like air or water, you know, education should be accessible to everybody who wants it, who needs it. And so I think what's been really important in OER is to think of this practice of open education as something that brings education opportunities to not only the mainstream of education but for those who have been excluded, for those who have been left and we want them toe come back, to those who are simply have been in some cases somewhat not a part or even in the worst cases invisible to the processes of education. And we think about places where there is no school systems that are operating because of war or other situations like this.
So when we think about diversity of learners, I think the idea that the use of Open Educational Resources as a knowledge transfer, as a knowledge building, is quite transformational. We're not just talking about what already happens in our education systems. We're talking about inclusive voices, so in some cases that's where students themselves are involved in it is content creation, where faculty in higher education or teachers and primary schools are using their own cultural context and localization to actually adapt OER. And this is where we're seeing some of the biggest transformational changes in the use of OER and that is all around the world. I can speak for the U.S., but for many other parts of the world as well.
Zeynep, who do you want to have this next?
>> ZEYNEP VAROGLU: Does anyone else in the room want to say something? Tel, I see you smiling all the way from here in Paris. This is nice. Would you like to add anything?
>> TEL AMIEL: I was waiting for you to give me the order. I think that one of the things that we talk about here and especially in this context of IGF is this presence of many different cultural groups and many different needs and we understate the power of OER for doing this. It we talk about public good it means including everybody. One of the greatest trends is adaptability and remix and reshare and reuse which is quite unique and we don't explore that enough, especially in this multilateral, multistakeholder process of having people really engage with these kinds of resources is something that pedagogically makes a lot of sense and makes it really a public good.
>> ZEYNEP VAROGLU: Thank you very much. I'm kind of handicapped here, because I can only see what the screen shows me, so I can only see you up to Michel. Michel, perhaps you can see see better than I can.
>> PATRICK PAUL WALSH: What I think is congratulations to everyone who was part of the putting together the OER recommendation. It really is a wonderful instrument. Just to answer your question, though, I think what's in the recommendation, which is really important, is that this kind of freedom to create and to contribute the knowledge, global knowledge, that's so important. We have to even think about people with disabilities. So people in any part of the world should be able to freely and easily contribute to the content. That's one freedom. The other freedom obviously is accessibility and I really like the previous speak where talked about the content has to be like the PowerPoint slides and videos, et cetera, has to be compliant to people with visual impairment, et cetera, that's very important.
The key point is that when you use it you can repurpose it, translate it, put it into your local context, put it back into the local knowledge coms again. It's really so important to keep it decentralized and then decentralize with repository so all that can happen. That's why I think the recommendation is so wonderful, because you might just think yeah, free education resources, but it's not about that. It's actually about how they're created, how they're accessed, how they're repurposed. Stephen would like to contribute if that's okay.
>> ZEYNEP VAROGLU: Thank you.
>> STEPHEN WYBER: At risk of reemphasizing a couple of points so far, I want to talk first on what Paul was saying about the knowledge commons and this is ‑‑ it's an idea that was very strongly brought out in the futures of education report a couple of years ago about this idea of trying to move away from sort of a single direction model of you shall learn this body of knowledge and that is what you shall learn to a much more sort of recurring circular approach where you learn, you explore, you contribute, you improve. That's quite a radical thing it feels like, but actually making that clear that that's the model that we're going for is a significant one because it does create agency and it creates responsibility.
The other thing I want to pick up on something that Paul said about diamond engagement, and this idea that it's not just at the producer side, but also it's important to have people there for on the ground whose responsibility is not just to make sure that the stuff gets on the Internet in the first place, but then that the stuff is taken down and used and of course that's logically a role that I've seen teachers have but librarians in particular have. We can't just assume if we shout to the Internet someone will actually make use of the stuff and it will actually work. We can't have a supply side only approach here. We need to have a demand side approach.
>> ZEYNEP VAROGLU: Thank you very much. I don't know if there are any other inputs. Neil has raised their hand. Neil, please go ahead.
>> NEIL BUTCHER: Thank you very much. Maybe to build on what previous colleagues have said. One of the things I could emphasize probably is just the importance of making sure that we don't necessarily think that more is better. And that we focus collectively on ensuring that the way in which we invest resources has a very strong focus on producing high quality teaching and learning resources and OER for accessibility purposes. I think very often we have a very technical way of thinking about that when we do engage in accessibility, so we just take materials and make them accessible at the technical level, but we're not actually considering whether or not the quality of the teaching and learning materials justify making them accessible in the first place. The Internet is flooded with content and the more flood today becomes, the more I think carefully curated collections of resources that we can feel confident are encapsulating high quality teaching and learning experiences of the kind that we just heard about, Stephen gave some really good examples of how that might look in practice. We just need to make sure we take the time to invest properly in what we're doing and not just rush the process of taking a whole lot of content and making it accessible. I think that's doing a disservice to learners rather than helping them in the long run.
>> ZEYNEP VAROGLU: Thank you very much. Melinda?
>> MELINDA BANDALARIA: I would like to support the points raised by Neil and saying in that we have to make sure that what we are using are quality OERs. So it is very important that we have this quality assurance framework which we can integrate in evaluating the Open Educational Resources that ‑‑ especially the teachers are using for their courses. That's one point.
And the important role of the teachers, the important role of the universities in making sure that the OERs, that what's being circulated in the web, in the Internet are quality materials that are being reused, remixed, translated into local languages and shared alike by the teachers, by the universities. And of course the more important thing is putting in place the policies that will support or provide the conducive environment for the OERs, the use, the development and sharing of OERs. So if it is not possible for a national policy to be there immediately, then probably institutional policies can start the work and can do the work and make sure that we have this thing or the five action areas on the OER recommendations can be undertaken.
Roll of universities and policies, even at the institutional level, and then the national level policies. Thank you.
>> ZEYNEP VAROGLU: Thank you very much. Thank you.
We have from the participants in the room and online, would anybody like to add anything? It's a very funny thing to have moderation online and in the room, because you can only see so many ‑‑ I see now only Melinda's face, but I'm sure there is a lot of people behind Melinda, but I can't see them. In that case, if we have some time left and I would just like to ‑‑ yes?
>> MICHAEL KENMOE: We have one person in the room.
>> My question was about the experience with decentralized repositories. I would be interested if there are any best practices that some of you could share about this? Maybe also specific kind like open technologies for this. Thank you.
>> PATRICK PAUL WALSH: The basic idea, ironically, I think a lot of universities who are engaged in getting up the rankings on commercial or brand of journals, they want citations. That's part of impact factors. It's part of the whole reason why you get ranked as a university. Ironically, the way to gain citations is to make sure that on your research portal or your profile that actually you link a preprint or an open paper in some way to the actual citation, because that will actually ‑‑ if you put it in the repository, the local repository in your local library, it's more findable. You put in a key word and people come to you. They don't have to go to the brand of journal. They come to you through the search engines. If your metadata is really good, they'll find you easily. They read your preprint but they'll cite your actual publication. Seeing the dividend across different disciplines is enormous. There is quite a bit of work on let's call these learning objects like PDFs to put into repositories. So what I'm talking about here, though, is that I know particularly during COVID that on our LMSs we all have kind of folders of digital objects. Like videos and homeworks and so on and so forth. The idea is that if you standardize how that LMS is structured and that also can be archived in a local repository that you're able to, again, through platforms to actually point. So for example, E‑life do it for biology. It's an overlay of the policy and researchers and they publish their papers. The idea of our platform would be actually to highlight LMS folders that you can just click, go to a repository and then you can pull it up into your own LMS. It's a network of learning objects, multimedia learning objects. The real benefit to doing a decentralized, and it's actually because of the signs and things, I think that the libraries for interlibrary loans ‑‑ the repositories are so interoperable. If they're actually building it for doing all this work of hosting and archiving for the commercial entities, so the academics create the work and sign over the property right and then they sell that back to the libraries and then the libraries do all the work in archiving. We have to try to get rid of the middle person.
What was the point I was trying to make was ‑‑ I've lost the point. The decentralized system. Oh, yeah. The key thing is you can update your course locally. You can repurpose it locally. Others can take a translator and put it back into the system again. So rather than just giving away your property right, giving away a PDF you can't edit, that's nonsense as well. We should be able to update what's in our repository. So my course and might change 10% every five years. You see the idea that you would update it and that becomes kind of a realtime repository rather than something like 2005 publication in nature.
>> MICHAEL KENMOE: Thank you very much. Any other questions from the room or online? Any comment, contribution?
I just want to following just what was said about the open government procurement, what we have learned from the context of West Africa, and this was a good surprise for us, is that with this COVID act, many of the countries within we were working, they have no budget for educational resources production. No budget. So the idea of open procurement doesn't fit in that context. So we had to, as part of the OER strategy to raise awareness on the importance of the government to actually engage in the production of educational resources, adaptation and remixing, supporting initiative related to this.
So we should not take for granted that countries already are committed to produce educational resources. This is not the case. We have this ‑‑ and I'm saying all the five countries with whom we were working, they have no budget, no budget line to produce educational resources. I'm not talking about open education, but educational resources. They have no budget line. This is a key challenge in such context on the importance of raising awareness of the importance of a country to actually engage in the projection of educational resources.
>> LISA PETRIDES: If we think ‑‑ over time we have developed a system that there are experts out there all the way to the textbook publishing company and this whole industry has started and this is where the money and procurement happens, but in fact the native knowledge is around the educator and it's also around the learner who is living, breathing, working in a community with a lot of knowledge and understanding. We found early on when we were going to certain places to talk about OER people were seeing what we had done in our library OER commons and they would say that's nice. But we have oral histories here or we have other native or Indigenous languages here. The knowledge is there and if we think about having ‑‑ it's sort of rethinking what teaching means and who teachers are and how teachers are trained, but we've gotten so far away from the idea where the educator is actually the expert in their knowledge. And that might be some kind of perspective, you know, that is brought there as well.
>> MICHAEL KENMOE: Thank you. This was very insightful change. At the beginning they invited us to use the discussion to layout key action and advance the agenda of OER recommendation. I'm going to turn to each of you, let's say two minutes. Okay, three minutes, and what is the takeaway and what are action that we need to consider for the future of the implementation of OER? I'll start with Amiel.
>> TEL AMIEL: I think based on the experience we've had in Brazil for 10 years developing policy on this is give people serious responsibilities for OER. Make it a serious element and give them the responsibility to do it and expect things to happen from people, so create the policies. Get people involved and give them serious responsibilities for taking care that it's going to be implemented. Without that I think that if we don't have people actually involved in this and around this with the incentives to stay, it becomes another piece of legislation that doesn't move forward. An agenda item that people talk about but nothing ever happening around it. That would be I think the biggest takeaway from me.
>> MICHAEL KENMOE: Thank you.
>> STEPHEN WYBER: This is probably sort of a takeaway recommendation for the sector I represent. The importance of making it ‑‑ trying to get ourselves to the same stage with OERs as we are with open access. And a point I would have made to the colleague from DW academy is there is a loss of really good work of how do you get into interoperability between OA repositories through organizations like COAR in Canada. Can we apply that same logic to OER repositories and come back to the question you were asking me now. How do we mainstream, how do we do an end runaround the development process here and make sure that librarians are seeing in the same way they provide materials that they really feel confident and they feel responsible for helping their faculty, for helping students make the most of OER so that they feel agency in order to help other people feel agency.
>> MICHAEL KENMOE: Melinda online.
>> MELINDA BANDALARIA: Yes. Thank you very much. My key takeaway, I am very much focused on capability building as one of the action areas in the OER recommendation. So initially we were so much focus on just raising awareness, ability to use and develop and share OERs, but this discussion really brought us back to the essentials of making OERs more inclusive and accessible. We have to go beyond in this capability building initiatives. Of course, I just would like to go back to what was also contained in the OER recommendation and if you'll also bring us to that discussion on the lack of resources to produce OERs. Part of the OER recommendation is invoking the public funds can be used to produce OERs. If we use the public funds to produce this educational resources, then we are morally obliged to make them open access materials. I guess this is something that we should be doing, our advocacy, our commitment to making OERs more popular in terms of use and development and the incentive system, especially for universities, that's the sector I am representing, incentive system for the faculty members, for the teachers, when they open and share educational resources for the community. These are my key takeaways from this. Thank you.
>> MICHAEL KENMOE: Thank you, Melinda. Lisa?
>> LISA PETRIDES: Thank you. I have three quick things. One would be to resist this urge for strategies where one size fits all. I think the comment about decentralization was key and we have to really keep working on that and what that really means to have localized control of knowledge yet in a decentralized model it filters up in a way where we really do build this knowledge commons.
The second piece is to not be seduced by the commercial private partnerships that are becoming much in Vogue today. They're rought with a lot of internal problems, not to mention there are so many privacy concerns in terms of how data is used, who uses it and data for whom.
The third one is a real positive recommendation or takeaway which is we really need to build bridges across open. That's Open Educational Resources, open pedagogy, open data, open science, open access, open publishing. Did I miss any of the opens? I think we're been operating in silos for too long and we really need to start connecting those for real.
>> MICHAEL KENMOE: Thank you. Patrick?
>> PATRICK PAUL WALSH: So I fully endorse what Lisa said. To come back, my big thing, and of course I'm going to implement this overlay or journal of courses, but I guess the thing that keeps me awake at night is behavioral issues as I call them. In other words, just to take an example of one of the stakeholders is the government, right? You have to change the mindset. So what's the problem there? Jeffrey Sax was describing transforming education. I think he said something very important. He said the reality here is that there is a bit of a sunk cost to set this up. I'm an economist. There's some cost and marginal cost. Think of putting in electricity or digital infrastructure. To set up the PowerPoints, to put in the railway tracks, no individual can really do that. That has to be done by government. There is a bit of a sum cost to get this up and running.
The beauty of it, though, is that the marginal costs are very low. In fact, once it's open, as Tel Amiel was saying, there is possibilities to add value or commercialization which would actually pay into the resource. I could put sums together for the government say figure you put up so much money and put it into your policies and procurement, I can guarantee you within five or six years, the costs to librarians, do academics, everything is going to be way reduced, and in fact, if any of these global issues are commercialized in any way, your property right will accrue value added. The problem with that is if you're saying to the government you put money up now and change your policies, then later you're going to get a return and that doesn't sit well with government, because too many times have they given money for a return in the future and they've never got the return in the future.
I could go on, what are the incentives for academics and so on. So this kind of ‑‑ to me the problem is mindset. And coherence. Cooperation. And it's not necessarily financial or technical or anything like that. It's a real what I call behavioral mindset issue that you have to address.
>> MICHAEL KENMOE: Thank you. Neil?
>> NEIL BUTCHER: Thank you, Michel. The two key takeaways that I'd like to reemphasize is first of all, to recognize notwithstanding the conversation about how we should support the private sector in monetizing this space. I'm not sure I agree with a lot of that. I think we have to recognize that the responsibility sits squarely with government to make sure the public education systems are accessible for all. And that involves proper investment in creating learning environments that actually support real accessibility. And the second takeaway for me related to that is that the investment strategy for that has to ensure the quality of the teaching and learning experience for everyone. I think if OER as a public good is simply expanding access to poor quality learning experiences for people at the margins, it's doing the world a disservice and we need to make sure that the emphasize is strongly on improving the quality of the learning experiences.
I would just add one last and possibly obvious point. Which is that the only way in which we can ensure that this happens successfully is to make sure that the process by which this all takes place are actually led by representatives from the target communities of learners that we are aiming at. And I think if we look around at the panelists certainly at this stage, I think it's clear that we have a lot of work to do to make sure that we bring in the voices of the people who we hope will benefit from these conversations. I think that's another critical challenge that we face as we move forward.
>> PATRICK PAUL WALSH: Hopefully we're on the same page. I'm not saying you should commercialize the infrastructure. This is a point about value added. For example, if a private school takes the material, puts a letter or book on it and, you know, adds things and then sell its out there, they should really, if they're bringing in income, there should be some rent sharing on a public resource. Or if a commercial company takes it and actually is doing kind of upskilling and training and again is charging money to do that, there should be kind of rent sharing. It's commercialization on the margin if you like, but it's not on the infrastructure or the open education resource at all. It has to be publicly owned or stakeholder owned as they say. I hope that's okay. You might not like the idea of the value added either, but just to be clear that it's not commercialization of the platform or the actual resource.
>> MICHAEL KENMOE: Thank you. Zeynep, do you have one last comment? Zeynep? She actually is on mute. Zeynep? She's online. I see that she's online. Zeynep? I don't know what technical issue. I want to express our warm thanks to all the panelists and all the participants of this session. Those who joined us online and those that are present here in Kyoto. Can we give a round of applause to all our panelists and participants, please. [ Applause ]
>> MICHAEL KENMOE: Thank you very much. Yes, Zeynep?
>> ZEYNEP VAROGLU: It works. It's been a bad, bad technology morning. Thank you so much. I was saying that it takes a village to raise a child they say but it takes a whole world to make learning possible. And it's through Open Educational Resources that I knowledge can really be shared. The point of this recommendation and the point of this panel, the point of this discussion is about sharing knowledge openly. And I'd also like to thank very much all the panelists here and on line. Just to let you know, the colleagues that are joining us online are coming from three different continents right now into your room. And it's a great pleasure to be here. We would all very much like to be there in person, but unfortunately, it hasn't been possible, but thank you very much to all of you.
>> MICHAEL KENMOE: Thank you, Zeynep. Have a great day to all of us. Thanks.