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Join us for a wide ranging conversation with Tony Bates covering his long and on ongoing span of being active in open and distance education. We start from his being part of the very first days of the Open University through his years based in Canada but working globally being integral to the development of online learning through the web. He has long been publishing open textbooks and sharing his perspectives on his own website. We go right up to present day where Tony is active in exploring the role of artificial intelligence.

We were inspired to have these conversation having seen where Tony has been publishing on his blog his “personal history” now up to it’s 26th installment:

I am writing an autobiography, mainly for my family, but it does cover some key moments in the development of open and online learning. I thought I would share these as there seems to be a growing interest in the history of educational technology.

Note that these posts are NOT meant to be deeply researched historical accounts, but how I saw and encountered developments in my personal life.

Tony Bates blog

In the OEGlobal Voices studio with Tony Bates (left) and Alan Levine (right)Listen in for Tony’s insightful energy, critical perspective, and humor as well as his lived stories of experience through a long era of online and open education. Plus, you will find a surprising bit of extra history on how he might have influenced some other students he knew in primary school who went on to be famous.

Episode 74 TranscriptDownloadListen with Transcriptat Descript.com

In This EpisodeFYI: For the sake of experimentation and the spirit of transparency, this set of show notes alone was generated by AI Actions in the Descript editor we use to produce OEGlobal Voices.

Podcast Show Notes: OE Global Voices Episode 74: Tony Bates

In this enlightening episode of OE Global Voices, host Alan Levine is joined by the remarkable Dr. Tony Bates, an influential figure in the realm of open education.

Episode Highlights:

Introduction to Tony Bates: Discover the journey of a legend in open education, from his beginnings in England to key contributions at the Open University and beyond.
Open Education Insight: Tony discusses the limitations and potential of open education resources today, sharing insights rooted in his extensive experience.
Founding of the Open University: Gain behind-the-scenes knowledge of how the Open University was envisioned and established, expanding access to higher education with innovative methods such as integrating print, radio, and TV.
Role in Online Learning: Learn about Tony’s pioneering role in developing online learning approaches and his transition from traditional educational systems to digital landscapes.
Publishing and Open Resources: Tony candidly shares why he embraced open publishing, emphasizing accessibility and the benefits of keeping educational resources current.
Reflections on Artificial Intelligence: Tony offers a balanced view of AI’s potential and risks, particularly concerning big tech companies’ influence.

About Tony Bates:
Tony Bates has been a transformative presence in education, contributing through teaching, leadership, research, and writing. He’s known for his candid take on the state of education, often sharing personal anecdotes from his storied career.

Get Engaged:
Listen as Tony Bates reflects on a career filled with innovation, humor, and lasting impact. Follow up on our discussions about educational technology and AI.

This episode is accompanied by the musical track “Distance” by Anitek, fittingly chosen to reflect the expansive themes of Tony’s work. Visit OEGlobal Voices for more episodes and join our community discussions at OEG Connect.

Don’t miss this journey through impactful education landscapes with Tony Bates. Subscribe and engage with us for future insights and conversations.

(end of AI generated show notes)

Additional Links and Quotes for Episode 74

What happened was that I actually saw the internet for the first time in Vancouver when I was visiting a friend. I thought this is the best way to use computers in education, not this, programmed learning stuff, which I didn’t really like because it wasn’t in my view, achieving the higher level cognitive skills that you’d want from university students. It’s all about memorization and so on.

So I thought, yes, we can use computers for communication between students and between students and instructors, that’s great. And a colleague, Tony Kay and I we tried this out on a social science second level course called DT 200.

Tony Bates on early vision for online education

Online Learning and Distance Education Resources (Tony Bates blog)
- A personal history of open learning and educational technology: 1. The start of the UK Open University
- A personal history: 2. Researching the BBC/Open University broadcasts
Lord Crowther’s Inaugural Address, launch of the Open University (Open University Digital Archive)
- Geoffery Crowther (Open University Digital Archive)
Walter Perry (Open University Digital Archive)
DT200 Introduction to information technology: Social & Technological issues (Open University Digital Archive)
CoSy System (Wikipedia)

From very interesting things like audio, we found that generally, you know, this is a generalization, doesn’t apply to everybody. But most people that we researched found audio more personal, that they felt they got closer to the lecturer through listening to an audio, a radio broadcaster or an audio cassette. The other thing was that we found that cassettes, actually changed the design principles because students could stop and start. You could build that into the design of a cassette. And then the learning effectiveness went right up.

We had a perfect laboratory situation where we had exactly the same program in audio and radio and exactly the same as a recording. Then we could look at what students learn as a result. We could then change the design of the cassettes and see what happened then and look at the results. Because we had such large numbers of students, we got very statistically significant results.

Tony Bates on early research on use of audio for learning

A personal history: 7. Distance education in Canada in 1982 (Tony Bates blog)
Online Learning Agency, British Columbia (Wikipedia)
Celebrating 60 Years of Distance Learning – Part I: The Beginnings of Distance Education at UBC (UBC Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology)
A personal history: 17. Innovation in distance education at UBC and A personal history: 18. Developing the first online programs at UBC – and in Mexico (Tony Bates blog)
Teaching in a Digital Age (3rd edition, BCcampus)
Murray Goldberg (Wikipedia)

My take on it, I’m fairly pessimistic. Mainly because my real concern these days is about the power of the big tech companies. I fear it will be taken over by the big tech companies. We’ll see their share prices and stocks go up and the money will go to the venture capitalists. And we’ll all be worse off as a result.

That’s the negative part about it. Now on the positive side, I think yes, in medical research, in legal affairs, it will be very good. I met a colleague, a good friend of mine actually, who’s trying to do research on whether AI can actually improve on the instructional design process.

Tony Bates on Artificial Intelligence

Blog posts on artificial intelligence (Tony Bates)
- AI comes to my web site – meet Tonybots
- What should universities do about AI for teaching and learning?
- What are the main issues facing digital learning in the future?

We are counting on more blog posts from you, Tony!

Our open licensed music for this episode is a track called Distance by Anitek licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Like most of our podcast music, it was found at the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).

This was another episode we are recording on the web in Squadcast. This is part of the Descript platform for AI enabled transcribing and editing audio in text– this has greatly enhanced our ability to produce our shows. We have been exploring some of the other AI features in Descript, but our posts remain human authored unless indicated otherwise.

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Get to know the influences, insights, and perspectives of two of the current members of the OEGlobal Board of Directors. In this episode we listen to separately recorded conversations with Katsusuke Shigeta, a long time board member from University of Hokkaido in Sapporo, Japan plus hearing from one of our newer board members, Rajiv Jhangiani of Brock University, in Ontario, Canada. This is another episode of our Board Viewpoints series.

Katsu was a guest on our second episode of OEGlobal Voices, published in 2020. And we last had a podcast conversation with Rajiv in 2021 following his recognition of an OE Award for Excellence as an Emerging Leader. Much has changed and evolved for both these open educators who play a key role for Open Education Global.

Each guest shares a bit about the places in the world they grew up, perspectives on school, paths to open education, current interests and projects, plus a little bit about what they enjoy doing outside of work. Listen to the full episode to hear interesting surprises from both Katsu and Rajiv, plus they share a three word description of each other!

Episode 73 TranscriptDownloadListen with Transcriptat Descript.com

In This EpisodeFYI: For the sake of experimentation and the spirit of transparency, this set of show notes alone was generated by AI Actions in the Descript editor we use to produce OEGlobal Voices.

In Episode 73 of OEGlobal Voices, host Alan Levine welcomes two members of the OEGlobal Board of Directors: Katsusuke Shigeta and Rajiv Jhangiani. Katsu discusses the importance of understanding and incorporating open educational practices internationally, and shares updates on his OER initiatives, challenges, and his creative project with Adobe Express. Rajiv reflects on his journey into open education, current initiatives at Brock University, and broader discussions on open science and generative AI. The episode concludes with personal stories and insights from both guests, painting a comprehensive picture of their contributions to open education.

Intro Music and Selected Episode Quotes
Meet Katsu Shigeta
Changes in Education Post-COVID
Challenges and Successes in OER Projects
Creative Learning with Adobe Express
Perceptions of Open Education in Japan
Rajiv Jhangiani Joins the Conversation
Navigating Life as an International Student
A Twist of Fate: From Theater to Psychology
Discovering Open Education
Provincial Research and Institutional Self-Assessment
Current Projects and Initiatives at Brock
The Future of Open Education
Balancing Work and Personal Life
Closing Thoughts and Reflections

Additional Links and Quotes for Episode 73

This is a point, I focus on to have better skills and knowledge [on] how to create digital materials would be nice for students to show their outcomes and what they learn in the class. This kind of skill could be effective after they graduate the higher education institution. So I try to connect the creative learning creative learning aspects, to show the authentic assessment and show the learning outcomes in the university together.

Katsu Shigeta on teaching digital skills

Katsusuke Shigeta (web site)
Center for Open Education Hokkaido University
- Digital Literacy OER (Hokkaido University)
- Adobe Education Exchange
OEG Voices 002: Katsusuke Shigeta (2020)
@Katsu (OEG Connect Profile)
- How Can We Effectively Spread the Reach of Open Education and Hybrid Learning? (Board Viewpoint post)
- Advancing Digital Literacy Education at Hokkaido University (Board Viewpoint post)
- Empowering Educators & Learners: The Launch of Japan’s First OER Cross-Search Service! (Board Viewpoint post)
Open Education Japan

Katsu shared this photo of the `1991 Honda Beat he has restored and enjoys driving around the roads of Hokkaido.

I think that’s part of the joy to interact with folks like that, who again, like Robin [DeRosa], give you the confidence and support that you can experiment, that you can, improvise, and you can do so knowing that it’s all right. If you fall flat, it’s okay. It’s not a big deal.

And that’s part of that vulnerability of openness. And I think modeling that is important, but it’s a special treat to be able to do it, especially in front of people who you adore so much.

Rajiv Jhangiani on OER24 keynote

Rajiv Jhangiani (web site)
Vice-Provost, Teaching & Learning (Brock University)
- Centre for Pedagogical Innovation
- Co-op, Career and Experiential Education
- Professional & Continuing Studies
- OER Adoption Grant Program
Robin DeRosa (web site)
Betwixt fairy tales and dystopian futures: Writing the next chapter in open education (notes from OER24 Conference Keynote)
- Watch keynote
Faculty attitudes towards and experiences with OER & Open Textbooks (presentation at 2015 Open Textbook Summit)
Institutional Self-Assessment Tool for OEP Initiatives (ISAT, 2019-2020)
- How Are We Doing with Open Education Practice Initiatives? Applying an Institutional Self-Assessment Tool in Five Higher Education Institutions (IRRODL, 2021)
- ISAT2 (Inclusive Education Lab, Brock University)
@rjhangiani (OEG Connect)
- Tactics and strategies to build institutional capacity for open educational practices (Board Viewpoint post)
- Advancing open education through open science (Board Viewpoint post)

And I think one concern in general, which has already been an issue is just the, it’s like paving over the etymology of knowledge. a core value of open licensing is attribution.

Losing that is damaging, is dangerous. It’s theft. So that’s damaging. The normalization of that, because this is going to happen anyway. You’re denying progress if you’re not serving students, if you don’t equip them to use. What I think is really missing over here is that critical, generative AI literacy.

….

And every time you’re going to get the same kind of little jingle around it’s here and it’s going to hit you. And you can’t bury your head in the sand. But at the same time, I think what you don’t want to do either is to not just not bury your head in the sand, but not just stand there on the shore with your mouth open wide and just swallow the salt water without thinking.

Rajiv Jhangiani on Artificial Intelligence and values of openness

Rajiv Jhangiani shows that his CC license is real- a carving made by the partner of Rajiv’s colleague Robin DeRosa

Our open licensed music for this episode is a track called The View From The Window by Ian Sutherland licensed under a Creative Commons *Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Like most of our podcast music, it was found at the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).*

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Listen to this episode for a journey through open education history with Martin Weller, who retired in June 2024 from a 30 year career at the Open University. We spoke with Martin in late May to learn more about his educational journey from working class roots to professor of educational technology – starting in 1995 at the OU, in f all things, as a lecturer in artificial intelligence (we honor Martin’s request not to talk much about AI).

You will appreciate Martin’s humble and easy going manner considering also his numerous accomplishments in the field, including an early vision for what the 1990s web could mean for distance education, pioneering one of the earliest large scale open courses before there was an acronym for it, his leadership of the very successful Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN), plus his series of published books, fed by his passion for blogging. And in the episode you might even get a bit about metaphors, dogs, hockey, and sharks.

We were joined in the studio by Martin’s long time colleague, and friend, Clint Lalonde (BCcampus).

In the OE Global Voices podcast studio with left to right, Martin Weller, Clint Lalonde, and Alan Levine (who apparently did not read the red plaid shirt memo)An hour conversation could barely cover Martin Weller’s many achievements but this should provide a clear sense of his perspective, and as well, what he plans to do in his “post-OU” career.

Episode 72 TranscriptDownloadListen with Transcriptat Descript.com

In This EpisodeFYI: For the sake of experimentation and the spirit of transparency, this set of show notes alone was generated by AI Actions in the Descript editor we use to produce OEGlobal Voices.

In this episode of the OE Global Voices podcast, host Alan Levine is joined by Martin Weller and Clint Lalonde to discuss Martin’s impressive 30-year tenure at the Open University. The conversation covers a wide range of topics from the emergence of web-based learning, Martin’s journey into AI and open education, to the transformative impact of courses like T171. Martin shares insights about the evolution of distance learning, the role of narrative and metaphor in education, and the significance of blogging in his writing process. The trio reflects on the significance of MOOCs, the evolution of social media in education, and the success of the Global OER Graduate Network. This enriching episode encapsulates the milestones in Martin’s career, his contributions to open education, and the meaningful connections formed within the community.

Introduction to the Podcast
Meet the Guests: Martin and Clint
Martin’s Background and Education
Journey into AI and Open University
Pioneering Online Learning
The Success of T171 Course
Innovative Master’s Course Design
The UK eUniversity Platform
Milton Keynes: A Unique Educational Hub
The Power of Narratives and Metaphors
Journey into Book Writing
The Impact of Blogging on Writing
Significant Moments in Ed Tech
The Global OER Graduate Network
Final Reflections and Farewell

Additional Links and Quotes for Episode 72

It got rid of the argument about “Can we do teaching online?” That argument had gone– [it] didn’t mean you couldn’t argue that students don’t want to learn this way, or we can’t teach our model now, there was enough demonstration to say “We can do this.” And students were coming out of that module saying, “Where’s the next fully online course?”

I think it kind of pivoted the OU towards online learning quite significantly, you know, jumped us a few years. So it was quite a surprise to me to discover in 2012 that MOOCs were inventing online learning, you know– there we were .

Martin Weller on T171 “You, your computer and the net” a fully online course launched in 2000 with 15,000 students

Edtechie.net (Martin Weller website)
- Books
  - 25 Years of Ed Tech
    - 25 Years of Ed Tech: Serialized Audio Version (project led by Clint Lalonde)
  - Metaphors of Ed Tech
- Blog
  - Post Open University blog posts
  - Posts about the Open University
  - 25 Years of the OU
From the University of the Air to the university everywhere (Wonkhe, post by Martin)
Aspects of Open: The evolution of the meaning of open education (Open University 50 Years Inaugural Lecture by Martin)
T171 You, your computer and the net (Open University Digital Archive)
John Naughton (The Guardian)
Institute of Educational Technology (Open University)
Masters in Online and Distance Education (MAODE) (Martin blog post)
25 Years of OU: 2001 – UKeU (Martin Weller blog)
BA/BSc (Honours) Open degree (Open University)
Milton Keynes (Wikipedia)
Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN)
MARS playlist (Spotify)

My daughter was in school and I think they were doing IT And the teacher said to them, “Oh, there’s these things called MOOCs you can study.” And she said, “Oh, my dad knows the people who invented MOOCs.” And the teacher went, “I doubt it.” And I was like, “No, I do, I really do. I’ve got to fly Dave and George and everyone else.”

Martin Weller on MOOCs

Artwork by Bryan Mathers commissioned by the OU Open team as tribute to Martin Weller, found on blog post Final Open Programme Role

So we have these annual meetings and bring together usually with OE Global, sometimes with the UK OER conference. We bring together a number of PhD students who are studying OER around the world. It’s interesting, when we first started, it was very much kind of OER, people looking at open textbooks, that kind of stuff, and that’s really shifted much more to kind of open educational practice and social justice, which I think has kind of mirrored the kind of shift in the community, and actually been driven by a lot of the GO-GN people. A lot of those people have gone on to become quite significant in the community.

But it’s such a kind of great project to have, you know, it’s like all these people are brilliant in bringing the students together. It’s really meaningful to them.

They make really meaningful connections, and … powerful for them to allow them to finish and then we produce these really good outcomes from it as well.

Martin Weller on GO-GN

Our open licensed music for this episode is a track called A Journey In To The Great Unknown by Squire Tuck licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Like most of our podcast music, it was found at the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).

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While nominations for the 2024 Open Education Awards for Excellence are in the committee review process, we continue to highlight last years winners. In this episode, we travel to Toowoomba, Australia for a conversation with Nikki Andersen from the University of Southern Queensland (UniSQ), editor of Enhancing Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility (IDEA) in Open Educational Resources (OER).

An OER about diversity, equity, and inclusion in OER, this work was recognized in 2023 with the Special Award in the DEI category.

https://usq.pressbooks.pub/diversityandinclusionforoer/We get to learn from Nikki about her background, her route into becoming a librarian with a focus on OER, as well her current role as Manager of Digital Experience at UniSQ. Nikki shared how a session at an OEGlobal conference that included Openstax framework for DEI inspired her to develop this resource with an Australian context. She also elaborates on the importance of addressing accessibility and the process she used to edit this important work.

And also this is timely as her university is the host of the November 13-15, 2024 OEGlobal conference hosted in Brisbane. Nikki shared her excitement for the event and as a “local” even some suggestions for places to see.

In the OEGlobal Voices studio with guest Nikki Andersen, left, and host Alan Levine, right. Plus bookshelves!Episode 71 TranscriptDownloadListen with Transcriptat Descript.com

In This EpisodeFYI: For the sake of experimentation and the spirit of transparency, this set of show notes alone was generated by AI Actions in the Descript editor we use to produce OEGlobal Voices

Episode 71: Nikki Andersen on OE Award for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion In this episode of OE Global Voices, host Alan Levine chats with Nikki Andersen, the recipient of the OE Award for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Nikki shares insights into her journey, including the crucial peer review process, her personal and professional stakes in accessibility, and the impact of her work on open education in Australia. The conversation also highlights Nikki’s contributions to the OpenStax framework and her vision for the future of open education.

Intro music and Episode Quote
Welcome to OE Global Voices
Catching Up with OE Award Winners
Introducing Nikki Andersen
Nikki’s Background and Early Life
Career Journey and Roles
Challenges and Advocacy in Open Education
The Importance of Accessibility
Creating the OpenStax Framework
Impact and Future of the Framework

Additional Links and Quotes for Episode 71

I also want to look into reducing some of the heavy textbooks and replacing them with OER. That’s still in my space with the digital experience as well.

And removing limited user licensed books which cause massive access issues here in Australia when there’s not enough licenses for students. OER is definitely still on the agenda as part of my new role. I think it’s, you know, “everyone’s business”, which is the theme of the upcoming conference.

No matter what role you’re in, you don’t have to be in an open education role, to support the open education movement.

Nikki Andersen on her role now as Manager of Digital Experience

2023 OE Award for Excellence Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Award (OE Global)
Enhancing Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility (IDEA) in Open Educational Resources (OER) – Australia Edition
Improving Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Course Materials (OpenStax)
Open Textbooks and Social Justice: a National Scoping Study (Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success)
Open at the Margins: Critical Perspectives in Open Education (Rebus Community)

I’m actually doing a project now where we are turning the book into an audit tool. We’re going to use that to audit our learning management systems for a few courses in the School of Education. Just converting that kind of framework into an audit tool has made me realize all the things that I’ve forgotten.

I’ve kind of overlooked the cultural aspect, I’ve kind of overlooked some of the refugee aspects. The group of academics and I are going to review that, and hopefully improve it, but also kind of research how it actually works in practice when academics are using it in learning and teaching.

So I’ll be really interested to see the outcome of that research and be involved in that.

Nikki Andersen on next steps for IDEA framework

We hope you have enjoyed listening to the voice behind an OE Award recognized effort in supporting Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (and Accessibility) in OER. Stay tuned for the August 30 anniouncement of the shortlist of semi-finalists for the 2024 OEAwards, and the live webcast of the winners that takes place September 18, 2024. Learn more about the awards, get inspired to share a nomination for 2025, and explore the current collection of 229 awardees at https://awards.oeglobal.org/.

Our open licensed music for this episode is a track called Equity by Toussaint Morrison licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. Like most of our podcast music, it was found at the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).

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Three languages spoken in one podcast! ¡Tres idiomas hablados en un podcast! Trois langues parlées dans un seul podcast !

Guests in the podcast studio were separate visits with María Soledad Ramírez Montoya (left) and Perrine de Coëtlogon right)Welcome to another episode of our Board Viewpoints series, where we share conversations with and insights from two OE Global Board Members. Listen in as the studio travels first to Monterrey, Mexico to speak with María Soledad Ramírez Montoya (Marisol) and then cross the ocean to go to Lille, France to hear from our current board president, Perrine de Coëtlogon.

As we ought to as a global organization, this podcast episode is a bit of an experiment in multiple languages. I asked my questions in English to Marisol and she responded in Spanish. While most of the conversation with Perrine was in English, she provided a special request of OEG Francophone community spoken in French. We put our Descript editing tools to task to transcribe all three languages in the main transcript, and then used Google Translate to generate full transcripts and selections here, in all three languages. The translations are far from perfect!

Acerca de este episodio(traducción con Google)

Bienvenido a otro episodio de nuestra serie Board Viewpoints, donde compartimos conversaciones y opiniones de dos miembros de la Junta Global de OE. Escuche mientras el estudio viaja primero a Monterrey, México para hablar con María Soledad Ramírez Montoya (Marisol) y luego cruza el océano para ir a Lille, Francia, para escuchar a nuestra actual presidenta de la junta directiva, Perrine de Coëtlogon.

Como deberíamos ser como organización global, este episodio de podcast es una especie de experimento en varios idiomas. Le hice mis preguntas en inglés a Marisol y ella respondió en español. Si bien la mayor parte de la conversación con Perrine fue en inglés, ella proporcionó una solicitud especial de la comunidad francófona de OEG que hablaba en francés. Ponemos a prueba nuestras herramientas de edición de Descript para transcribir los tres idiomas en la transcripción principal, y luego usé Google Translate para generar transcripciones completas y selecciones aquí, en los tres idiomas. ¡Las traducciones están lejos de ser perfectas!

À propos de cet épisode(traduction avec Google)

Bienvenue dans un autre épisode de notre série Board Viewpoints, dans lequel nous partageons des conversations et les idées de deux membres du conseil d’administration mondial d’OE. Écoutez le studio se rendre d’abord à Monterrey, au Mexique, pour parler avec María Soledad Ramírez Montoya (Marisol), puis traverser l’océan pour se rendre à Lille, en France, pour entendre notre présidente actuelle du conseil d’administration, Perrine de Coëtlogon.

Comme nous devrions le faire en tant qu’organisation mondiale, cet épisode de podcast est en quelque sorte une expérience en plusieurs langues. J’ai posé mes questions en anglais à Marisol et elle a répondu en espagnol. Même si la majeure partie de la conversation avec Perrine s’est déroulée en anglais, elle a fourni une demande particulière de la communauté francophone de l’OEG parlant en français. Nous mettons nos outils d’édition de Descript à contribution pour transcrire les trois langues dans la transcription principale, , puis a utilisé Google Translate pour générer ici des transcriptions et des sélections complètes, dans les trois langues. Les traductions sont loin d’être parfaites !

This Episode / Este episodio / Cet épisodeFYI: This section of show notes alone was generated by AI Actions in the Descript editor we use to produce OEG Voices. / Para su información: Esta sección de notas del programa fue generada únicamente por AI Actions en el editor de Descript que utilizamos para producir voces OEG. / Pour information: cette section de notes d’émission à elle seule a été générée par AI Actions dans l’éditeur Descript que nous utilisons pour produire des voix OEG.

In this episode of OE Global Voices, hosted by Alan Levine, two OE Global board members, María Soledad Ramírez Montoya from Mexico and Perrine de Coëtlogon from France, discuss their work and passion in open education. The episode features multilingual conversations, with Montoya answering in Spanish and de Coëtlogon sharing insights in both English and French. Topics include the importance of open educational resources (OER), the role of artificial intelligence, recognition in education, and the significance of global collaboration. The episode also highlights various educational initiatives and upcoming events.

Introduction to Open Education and Board Members
Maria Soledad Ramirez-Montoya’s Journey in Open Education
Perrine de Coëtlogon’s Path to Open Education Activism
OE Global’s Multilingual and Multicultural Impact

En este episodio de OE Global Voices, presentado por Alan Levine, dos miembros de la junta directiva de OE Global, María Soledad Ramírez Montoya de México y Perrine de Coëtlogon de Francia, hablan sobre su trabajo y pasión en la educación abierta. El episodio presenta conversaciones multilingües, con Montoya respondiendo en español y de Coëtlogon compartiendo ideas tanto en inglés como en francés. Los temas incluyen la importancia de los recursos educativos abiertos (REA), el papel de la inteligencia artificial, el reconocimiento en la educación y la importancia de la colaboración global. El episodio también destaca varias iniciativas educativas y próximos eventos.

Introducción a la educación abierta y miembros de la junta directiva
El viaje de María Soledad Ramírez-Montoya hacia la educación abierta
El camino de Perrine de Coëtlogon hacia el activismo por la educación abierta
El impacto multilingüe y multicultural de OE Global Dans cet épisode d’OE Global Voices, animé par Alan Levine, deux membres du conseil d’administration d’OE Global, María Soledad Ramírez Montoya du Mexique et Perrine de Coëtlogon de France, discutent de leur travail et de leur passion pour l’éducation ouverte. L’épisode présente des conversations multilingues, avec Montoya répondant en espagnol et de Coëtlogon partageant ses idées en anglais et en français. Les sujets incluent l’importance des ressources éducatives ouvertes (REL), le rôle de l’intelligence artificielle, la reconnaissance dans l’éducation et l’importance de la collaboration mondiale. L’épisode met également en lumière diverses initiatives éducatives et événements à venir.
Introduction à l’éducation ouverte et aux membres du conseil d’administration
Le parcours de Maria Soledad Ramirez-Montoya dans l’éducation ouverte
Le parcours de Perrine de Coëtlogon vers un activisme pour l’éducation ouverte
L’impact multilingue et multiculturel d’OE Global Episode 68 Transcript in original languagesDownloadEpisodio 68 Transcripción en españolDownloadEpisode 68 Transcript in EnglishDownloadListen with Transcriptat Descript.com

Transcription de l’épisode 68 en françaisDownloadQuotes and Links for Episode 68 / Citas y enlaces para el episodio 68 / Citations et liens pour l’épisode 68

Por un lado, tenemos la gran tarea de desarrollar las capacidades, desarrollar todo esta cuestión de creación, acceso reutilización de las posibilidades de la educación abierta por otro ámbito. Tenemos también la gran tarea de las políticas de apoyo para la educación abierta, tanto en las instituciones como en los gobiernos y a nivel global que nos hagan impulsar las actividades y las estrategias de la educación abierta.

Luego tenemos otro ámbito muy amplio y donde es muy retador también, para hacer más inclusivo el acceso más equitativo de esta educación abierta con miras a que lleguen a las diversas poblaciones y atención a los grupos vulnerables. Tenemos también un área es yo creo que de las más retadoras, eh, qué es los modelos de sostenibilidad para esta educación abierta?

Porque en esos modelos es donde está como toda la infraestructura que nos permita seguir creciendo, seguir planificando y seguir realizando más actividades en el ámbito de este tópico. Y sin duda, sin duda, algo muy importante en en el tema de la educación abierta es la cooperación nacional é internacional que establezcamos con redes con diversas instituciones, trabajando juntos de la mano para que se haga posible ese crecimiento de las instancias de educación abierta.

María Soledad Ramírez Montoya sobre las cinco áreas de acción de la Recomendación de la UNESCO sobre REA

On the one hand, we have the great task of developing capabilities, developing this whole question of creation, access and reuse of the possibilities of open education in another area. We also have the great task of supporting policies for open education, both in institutions and in governments and at a global level that make us promote it, the activities and strategies of open education.

Then we have another very broad area and where it is also very challenging, to make more inclusive the more equitable access to this open education with a view to reaching the diverse populations and attention to vulnerable groups. We also have an area that I think is one of the most challenging, what are the sustainability models for this open education?

Because in those models, is where the entire infrastructure is that allows us to continue growing, continue planning and continue carrying out more activities in the field of this topic. And without a doubt, without a doubt, something very important in the issue of open education is the national and international cooperation that we establish with networks with various institutions, working together hand in hand to make the growth of open education instances possible.

D’une part, nous avons la grande tâche de développer les capacités, de développer toute cette question de création, d’accès et de réutilisation des possibilités de l’éducation ouverte dans un autre domaine. Nous avons également la grande tâche de soutenir les politiques d’éducation ouverte, tant au sein des institutions que des gouvernements et au niveau mondial, qui nous incitent à promouvoir des activités et des stratégies d’éducation ouverte.

Ensuite, nous avons un autre domaine très vaste et dans lequel il est également très difficile de rendre plus inclusif et plus équitable l’accès à cette éducation ouverte en vue d’atteindre les diverses populations et d’accorder une attention aux groupes vulnérables. Nous avons également un domaine qui, à mon avis, est l’un des plus difficiles : quels sont les modèles de durabilité pour cette éducation ouverte ?

Parce que ces modèles sont l’endroit où se trouve toute l’infrastructure qui nous permet de continuer à croître, de continuer à planifier et de continuer à réaliser davantage d’activités dans le domaine de ce sujet. Et sans aucun doute, quelque chose de très important dans la question de l’éducation ouverte est la coopération nationale et internationale que nous établissons avec des réseaux avec diverses institutions, travaillant ensemble main dans la main pour rendre possible la croissance des instances d’éducation ouverte.

María Soledad Ramírez Montoya (OE Global Board)
- UNESCO/ICDE Chair Open Educational Movement for Latin America
Monterrey, Mexico (Wikipedia)
Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER) (UNESCO)
Tecnológico de Monterrey
- Institute for the Future of Education
- IFE Conference, January 28-30, 2025
- RITEC
Mexico National Open Access Policy
OE LATAM (OE Global)

So it was in 2020 during the lockdown I was elected as a board member. I was so proud and happy, and I wanted to contribute better to the open education movement. And, I asked Paul Stacey and Igor Lesko, if I could borrow the OEG logo, and, use it, not the trademark in any means, but the mark of OEG and use it to create OEG Francophone.

From scratch with one service provider, we organized a two days event in November, 2020, just before the Taipei conference. And we gathered 638 people from, more than 30 countries. And of course, this, was really nice because from the, end of August until November, I call all my network in open education and everyone gave me other names. And we ended up having 21 webinars with 57 different speakers.

Perrine de Coëtlogon on organizing OEG Francophone

Así fue en 2020, durante el confinamiento, que fui elegido miembro de la junta directiva. Estaba muy orgullosa y feliz y quería contribuir mejor al movimiento de educación abierta. Y les pregunté a Paul Stacey e Igor Lesko si podían tomar prestado el logotipo de OEG y usarlo, no como marca registrada de ninguna manera, sino como marca de OEG y usarlo para crear OEG francófono.

Desde cero con un proveedor de servicios, organizamos un evento de dos días en noviembre de 2020, justo antes de la conferencia de Taipei. Y reunimos a 638 personas de más de 30 países. Y por supuesto, esto fue muy lindo porque desde finales de agosto hasta noviembre, llamé a toda mi red de educación abierta y todos me dieron otros nombres. Y terminamos teniendo 21 seminarios web con 57 oradores diferentes.

C’est donc en 2020, pendant le confinement, que j’ai été élu membre du conseil d’administration. J’étais si fier et heureux et je voulais mieux contribuer au mouvement pour l’éducation ouverte. Et, j’ai demandé à Paul Stacey et Igor Lesko, si je pouvais emprunter le logo OEG, et, l’utiliser, non pas la marque déposée de quelque manière que ce soit, mais la marque OEG et l’utiliser pour créer OEG Francophone.

Partant de rien, avec un seul prestataire de services, nous avons organisé un événement de deux jours en novembre 2020, juste avant la conférence de Taipei. Et nous avons rassemblé 638 personnes de plus de 30 pays. Et bien sûr, ça, c’était vraiment sympa car de fin août jusqu’en novembre, j’appelle tout mon réseau en éducation ouverte et tout le monde m’a donné d’autres noms. Et nous avons fini par organiser 21 webinaires avec 57 intervenants différents.

Perrine de Coëtlogon, Board Member and President 2023-2025 (OE Global)
Lille, France (Wikipedia)
Université de Lille
- Implementation of Digital Credentials (University of Lille)
- Example Diploma
A OEG online community “OEG Francophone”: bienvenue! (OEG Connect)
- YouTube Channel
UNESCO Dakar
Francobadges (Canada)

Call for OE Awards Nominations in Spanish and French / Convocatoria de Nominaciones a los Premios OE en español y francés / Appel à candidatures pour les OE Awards en espagnol et en français

Pues es fabuloso, maravilloso ver todas las joyas que se dan en el mundo sobre diferentes prácticas abiertas tanto de libros como de portales repositorios, publicaciones, profesores, estudiantes tenemos. En Open Educación Global una amplia variedad de categorías dónde podemos postular en estos premios. Vamos a invitar mucho invito a la comunidad a que se anime a mandar sus postulaciones porque necesitamos tener mape qué es lo que pasa en el mundo y muy en especial que pasa en el ámbito hispano parlante.

María Soledad Ramírez Montoya sobre los Premios OE a la Excelencia

Bonjour à tous, il existe chez Open Education Global un formidable appel à candidature pour obtenir des récompenses officielles en tant que leader de l’Open Education ou technicien, ingénieur pédagogique de l’Open Education et bien d’autres titres de… Qui ont été imaginées et conçues par une équipe ouverte et qui sont formidables.

Il faut aller voir déjà les catégories. Moi, j’adorerais les adapter en français et faire un appel francophone. Mais là, avec les outils qu’on a maintenant pour traduire, et Alan qui vient de m’apprendre qu’on pouvait faire une candidature en français, je vous invite tous à venir candidater tous les amoureux de l’éducation ouverte.

À candidater et je ferai passer à tous ceux qui ont participé à mes webinaires notamment cette proposition après il faudra rédiger un peu quand même parce que les candidatures des anglo-saxons sont toujours très impressionnantes et très bien rédigées donc merci à tous les contributeurs de l’Open Education et à très bientôt. Au revoir.

Perrine de Coëtlogon sur les Prix d’excellence OE

Each OE Global Voices episode features a different musical intro track selected from the Free Music Archive. For this show in our Board Viewpoints series, we choose the track “Enjoy the View” by Lazenbee Industries, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License. Like most of our intro music, it is from the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).

This was another episode we are recording on the web in Squadcast. This is part of the Descript platform for AI enabled transcribing and editing audio in text– this has greatly enhanced our ability to produce our shows We have been exploring some of the other AI features in Descript, but our posts remain human authored unless indicated otherwise.

Cada episodio de OE Global Voices presenta una pista de introducción musical diferente seleccionada del Free Music Archive. Para este programa de nuestra serie Board Viewpoints, elegimos la canción “Disfrute de la vista” de Lazenbee Industries, que tiene una licencia de atribución Creative Commons. Como la mayoría de nuestra música de introducción, proviene del Free Music Archive (consulte nuestra lista de reproducción FMA completa).

Este fue otro episodio que estamos grabando en la web en Squadcast. Esto es parte de la plataforma Descript para la transcripción y edición de audio en texto habilitada por IA; esto ha mejorado enormemente nuestra capacidad para producir nuestros programas. Hemos estado explorando algunas de las otras funciones de IA en Descript, pero nuestras publicaciones siguen siendo escritas por humanos a menos que se indique lo contrario.

Chaque épisode d’OE Global Voices présente une piste d’introduction musicale différente sélectionnée dans les archives musicales gratuites. Pour cette émission de notre série Board Viewpoints, nous choisissons le morceau « Enjoy the View » de Lazenbee Industries, sous licence Creative Commons Attribution. Comme la plupart de nos musiques d’introduction, elles proviennent de Free Music Archive (voir notre playlist FMA complète).

C’était un autre épisode que nous enregistrons sur le Web dans Squadcast. Cela fait partie de la plate-forme Descript pour la transcription et l’édition audio dans le texte activées par l’IA. Cela a considérablement amélioré notre capacité à produire nos émissions. Nous avons exploré certaines des autres fonctionnalités de l’IA dans Descript, mais nos messages restent rédigés par des humains, sauf indication contraire. .

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We were fortunate to have Jennryn Wetzler visit our studio during Open Education Week for a conversation about her Open Education Individual Award for Excellence in the Catalyst category. The name “Catalyst” is an apt description for Jennryn’s work at Creative Commons as someone who “supports the ideals of the Open Education movement through their own practices and who creates engagement in Openness within an organization or community.”

This was recorded as an Open Education week event where we offered a seat in the studio for anyone who wanted to be there, which included her colleague Jonathan Portitz.

This podcast was recorded as a live event during Open Education Week 2024.You can learn in this podcast about Jennryn’s early experience in the Peace Corps, her work in the US State Department Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, and the catalyzing role she has played for Creative Commons including the highly successful CC Certification program , the Open Education Platform, and new interests in the area of Open Journalism. We were easily able to draw Jonathan into a animated discussion around artificial intelligence and he also reminded us about the definition of catalyst from chemistry as “a chemical which helps other reactions happen without being consumed itself.”

This aptly fits Jennryn Wetzler. Also stick around to learn about her activity for finding a “powerful” sense of balance, and more of what makes Jennryn the type of person the Catalyst word is designed to recognize.

Keep that in mind as the nominations for the 2024 OE Awards opens May 13, and we hope you know of a person in your sphere of Open Education work that ought to be recognized as a Catalyst this year.

In This EpisodeFYI: This section of show notes alone was generated by AI Actions in the Descript editor we use to produce OEG Voices.

Episode 67: OE Award Winner Jennryn Wetzler

In this episode, Alan Levine interviews Jennryn Wetzler, winner of the Catalyst Award at the Open Education awards for Excellence. They discuss Jennryn’s background, work at Creative Commons, involvement in Open Journalism, and perspectives on open education and AI. The conversation touches on the impact of OER in various contexts, the importance of human connections in the face of challenges, and the power of community collaboration in education.

Introduction to Open Education Week
Jennryn’s Journey and Catalyst Award
Peace Corps Experience and Education Insights
Open Education Work at Creative Commons
Challenges in Open Journalism
The Importance of Human Connections and AI
Community Collaboration and Impact
Reflection on Work and Inspirations

Episode 67 TranscriptDownloadListen with Transcriptat Descript.com

Additional Links and Quotes for Episode 67

I oversee our training and learning efforts writ large, and then our consulting efforts trying to use the certificate, kind of foundational learning and apply it in different contexts for different audiences and reimagine it in different settings, too.

So one of the things that we are really hoping to announce possibly today, is this micro credential program with the University of Nebraska Omaha, which came about through the certificate program. So this is one example of how the learning and training program finds new partnerships and pathways to keep bringing open licensing expertise to new communities.

Jennryn Wetzler on the CC Certificates program

Niger (Wikipedia) where Jennryn was located for her Peace Corps experience
State Department Collaboratory (US Government)
Open COVID Pledge
Washington School of Law Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property (PIJIP)
Creative Commons Certification
- Creative Commons and University of Nebraska at Omaha Partner on a Microcredential Course
- Introduction to Open Educational Resources (course at University of Nebraska)
CC Open Journalism

So as a connector across cultures, as something to open access to more education in a time of war, and as a something to point to so other people know, if it’s possible here in this really challenging set of circumstances where people are losing access to, electricity where they have, bomb sirens going off regularly, interrupting meetings and workflows and so on.

If they can make it work in a place that’s in the midst of war, then this can be done anywhere, this kind of collaboration and translation and the cross cultural understanding that goes with the translation can be done anywhere. So they did it.

Jennryn Wetzler on CC Education Platform support for librarians in Ukraine

CC Open Education Platform
- OEG Voices 051: Tetiana Kolesnykova on the Open Resilience of Librarians
- Gratitude to those Behind the Scenes (Paola Corti in OEG Connect)

Once again we urge listeners to make nominations for the people, projects and resources deserving a 2024 OE Award for Excellence — all of which will be future voices on this podcast.

Our open licensed music for this episode is a track called Catalyst by Anemoia licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Like most of our intro music, it was found at the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).

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As a special event during Open Education Week 2024, we opened up the podcast studio for anyone to join us in conversation with Maha Bali, professor of practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching at The American University in Cairo (AUC). This episode is part of our series honoring winners of the 2023 Open Education Awards for Excellence, in which Maha was recognized with an Individual Award in the Educator Category.

This episode was a live event during Open Education Week 2024.As always, Maha fills the room with her dedication to educating at all levels and demonstrating the practices of critical pedagogy and Intentionally Equitable Hospitality. She shared a description of what we’d see and experience in her teaching environment, how she supports her visually impaired students, critical AI literacy, her engaging style of facilitation, the idea of “iterating towards justice”, and much more.

Maha enlightens us about learning in every way possible, including what she learned and teaches us about “being brave enough to be bad” at crochet.

We hope you enjoy this wide ranging conversation. Thanks as well to Jonathan Poritz and Nate Angell for being there in the studio with us.

In This EpisodeFYI: This section of show notes alone was generated by AI Actions in the Descript editor we use to produce OEG Voices.

This episode features a rich conversation between Alan Levine from Open Education Global and the OE Award for Excellence winner, Maha Bali. They discuss intercultural elements in education, the integration of technology in learning, and the importance of accessibility and equity in educational environments. Maha shares insights into her teaching practices, the dynamics of her classroom, and her advocacy for visually impaired students. The discussion also touches on the challenges and possibilities offered by AI in education, the evolution of Maha’s courses, and her approach to fostering an inclusive and engaging learning environment.

Intercultural Education and Technology Integration
Accessibility and Equity in the Classroom
Interactive and Inclusive Teaching Practices
Reflections on AI in Education
Award Reflections and Open Conversations

Audio Note: Unfortunately we lost brief bits of the recording with network issues, note that at around 8:24 where Maha mentions the name of her course, the correct name is “Digital Literacy, AI Literacy and Intercultural Learning.”

Episode 66 TranscriptDownloadListen with Transcriptat Descript.com

Additional Links and Quotes for Episode 66

I add also coincidentally, four of my students are visually impaired this semester. So it’s like really out there, like I’ve never had that many in one semester. And I have this point though, it becomes really noticeable that first of all, it’s not like you have one, you have four. And it becomes a thing, like they’re not a minority in terms of numbers in my class, they’re really noticeable and they make a huge difference just being there. And it makes everyone in the class become more aware and everybody has a role.

And one of the things that we’ve been talking about in terms of like, when we used to talk about Intentionally Equitable Hospitality, we used to focus a lot on the facilitator’s role of making sure equity is intentional and making sure everyone’s welcome.

But actually it’s everybody’s role.

Maha Bali on intentionally equitable hospitality in her classroom

Maha Bali 2024 Individual OE Award for Excellence, Educator (OE Global)
Maha Bali (blog)
Openness as a Way of Being (Teaching in Higher Ed podcast episode 493)
Yasser Tamer Atef 2024 Individual OE Award, Student
Intentionally Equitable Hospitality as Critical Instructional Design, Maha Bali and Mia Zamora (in Designing for Care)

And when it’s collective and how all these things feed into ecosystems of care. How that helps us move towards more social justice. I don’t know if we talked about this before or during the recording, but it’s like distributed responsibility for being equitable. For that to happen, everyone needs to have a sense of what it means that there are inequities here and to notice the inequities and then to be willing to address them and wanting to address them.

Maha Bali on equity and care

Accessibility Tips (YouTube playlist)
Quick, Draw! (Google)
DS106 Assignment Bank (DS106)
AI Pedagogy Project (Harvard)
Resources on Critical AI Literacy (Maha Bali blog)

Let’s step back a second. So AI exists for a really long time. And Machine Learning has existed for a really long time. And, when I was an undergrad 20 years ago, I created a neural network that used machine learning to do something, right?

This has existed for a long time. It’s been used in medicine. It’s been used in a lot of different fields. if you understand the basic way it works, it helps explain a lot of things.

So whatever is changing, we’re still basically pretty much the same kind of technology, or elaborate, but it’s, if you understand that, that helps you understand a lot why it will always hallucinate, because it’s not meant to not hallucinate. We’re talking about machine learning and not expert systems that are trained to think like a particular expert, it’s trained to learn randomly, and then probabilistically, and so on. Yeah, the statistical model.

Maha Bali on machine learning and AI

Virtually Connecting
- VC@ Creative Commons Summit 2017 (Virtually Connecting)
Equity Unbound
- Mid Year Festival Myfest2024 (Equity Unbound)
On Being Brave Enough to Be Bad while Learning Crochet (Maha Bali blog)

So when you do something and they do it wrong and then you have to undo it and then you have to redo it again. And someone was talking about how important it is to be comfortable being bad at something new. We’re always bad when we’re new. if you were good at everything you’re new at, like that would be weird. Then what would be the point of experience? What would be the point of doing something for a long time, right?

Maha Bali on On Being Brave Enough to Be Bad while Learning Crochet

Our open licensed music for this episode is a track called I Dare You by Little Glass Men and is licensed under a Attribution License. Like most of our intro music, it was found at the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).

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Our newest episode takes you to Vancouver, Canada, where the voice Julia Alards-Tomalin, faculty at the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) describe the inspiring story behind the award winning Buds, Branches, and Bark, recognized with a 2023 Open Awards for Excellence in Open Pedagogy.

We can trace the path from Julia’s childhood curiosity about the natural world growing up in Gimli, Manitoba to her studies as an undergraduate at BCIT. Her observation then that the primary time of year, in winter, when students learn to identify plants and trees is a challenge given most guidebooks contain photos and descriptions from full summer display. This experience literally planted seed germinated as an idea when Julia, as an instructor at BCIT, decided to develop an open educational resource winter identification plant guide.

Inspired by a presentation (we guess it might have been one by Robin Derosa), Julia adopted an open pedagogy approach by having her students collaborate in researching, writing and illustrating the first edition of Buds, Branches and Bark. Presenting this work at BCIT initiated an expansion of its open pedagogy approach via a conversation with colleague in the media design program, who suggested having their students provide design support. Since then more than 200 students from three different academic departments have been part of this continually growing resource.

You will hear in Julia’s voice the excitement and enthusiasm for the the newest third edition released in December 2023. The production level of Buds, Branches, and Bark rivals commercially published guides. Listen in to our conversation to appreciate this award winning example of open pedagogy in practice.

In the OEG Voices Studio with (left to right) Julia Alards-Tomalin, Marcera Morales, and Alan LevineThis EpisodeFYI: This section of show notes alone was generated by AI Actions in the Descript editor we use to produce OEG Voices.

In the journey of open education and passion for natural world, Episode 65 unfolds the captivating conversation with Julia Alards-Tomalin, an open education enthusiast and instructor at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. Featuring her remarkable open pedagogy project ‘Buds, Branches and Bark,’ the episode delves into Julia’s roots in Manitoba’s woodlands, her educational path through BCIT, and her innovative approach to creating an open educational resource (OER) on winter plant identification. Host Alan Levine and co-host Marcela Morales engage in a rich dialogue about the inception, challenges, and triumphs of Julia’s project, highlighting how open education, collaboration across disciplines, and student involvement have been key in crafting an accessible, evolving guide for learners worldwide. The conversation also explores the broader impact and future possibilities of open educational resources in fostering a more equitable and connected learning environment.

00:00 Early Motivations and Open Education
00:28 Developing ‘Buds, Branches and Bark’
01:58 A Childhood in Nature
06:50 The Open Education Journey
24:35 Looking to the Future

Episode 65 TranscriptDownloadListen with Transcriptat Descript.com

Additional Links and Quotes for Episode 65

So the time of year when you’re a student, like it’s not ideal for looking at plants. Courses start in the Fall and they go from September till May. And in that time period, it’s mostly the winter here. It’s really hard to learn about the natural world when all of the resources that we had were focused on looking at plants during the growing season when they have leaves.

I remember standing outside in the forest looking at little trees and trying to figure out what the heck they were. And all we had was our book that only has pictures of leaves and things in it. And I was so frustrated.

I remember talking to one of my instructors about it being like, well, why aren’t there any resources? And he was like, well, you’ll just have to make one. I guess that kind of where seed was planted. I really wanted there to something to help me.

Julia Alards-Tomalin on inspiration to create Buds, Bark, and Branches

About Julia Alards-Tomalin (BCIT)
- Gimli, Manitoba (Wikipedia)
Forest and Natural Areas Management program (BCIT)
Open Education Grants (BCIT)
Buds, Branches and Bark: A Guide to Winter Identification in the Pacific Northwest (3rd edition, BCIT)
- 2023 OE Award for Excellence in Open Pedagogy (OE Global)
- Plant Press: A Plant Identification Card Game (early project, BCIT)
- Buds, Branches, and Bark (1st edition)
- Buds, Branches, and Bark (2nd edition)
- Buds, Branches, and Bark photos (flickr)
- The collaborative creation of Buds, Branches and Bark: A Guide to Winter Identification in the Pacific Northwest, a BCIT OER textbook (Open Education Week 2023 presentation)
- Presentation at the OEGlobal 2023 Conference

I was so honored. I was like almost in tears really. And when I went to school the next day and told students like they just burst out into a round of applause. People were hugging each other. I was so proud to see people working together, using each other’s different strengths, collaboratively. It’s just really touching to see what we can do when we work together.

Julia Alards-Tomalin on hearing the news of winning the OE Award

Our open licensed music for this episode is a track called I Don’t See the Branches, I See the Leaves by Chris Zabriskie and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Like most of our intro music, it was found originaly from the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist) – since the time of researching, this track is no longer available at the FMA.

This was another episode we are recording on the web in Squadcast. This is part of the Descript platform for AI enabled transcribing and editing audio in text– this has greatly enhanced our ability to produce our shows We have been exploring some of the other AI features in Descript, but our posts remain human authored unless indicated otherwise.

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As the next show of the Board Viewpoints series, we bring you conversations with and insights from two OE Global Board Members, which we are publishing every other month. In episode 64, we traveled via video conversations to Perth, Australia, to talk to Martin Dougiamas and then hopped over to Monza, Italy to hear from Paola Corti.

Martin tells us the fascinating story of his early school years learning via the legendary School of the Air, essentially distance learning delivered to him then via the radio and plane dropped packages of materials. With an early motivation to learn, he got into computers and the early internet, and it was at Curtain University where he began developing what we all know today as the open source learning management system, Moodle.

Studio visits with Paola Corti (left) and Martin Dougiamas (right)Martin shared his transition from running Moodle as CEO to following research interests in artificial intelligence and its potential for coaching from personal devices. We also learn what creatures live outside Martin’s door in Perth.

Next we learn from Paola of her entré into open education in 2015 with a project at Politecnico di Milano to create an early MOOC about Open Education Resources. This lead to her participation in the 2016 OE Global Conference in Krakow, how her unique approach to seeking advice from colleagues opened that window of opportunity with the open education community. Since then she has extended her energy into community building with open education librarians through SPARC Europe, including supporting the extraordinary resilience we heard about in Episode 51. Paola has large visions for what a global community can do, and you can sense how her favorite places to be outside inform that.

We hope these episodes give you sense of the people who provide the organizational direction for OE Global. These are the veew points of two more of these key people.

This EpisodeFYI: This section of show notes alone was generated by AI Actions in the Descript editor we use to produce OEG Voices.

In Episode 64, we converse with Martin Dougiamas and Paola Corti, board members of Open Education Global. Through this discussion, we delve into the impact of artificial intelligence on open education, strategies towards user-friendly technical infrastructures, and the critical role of Open Education Global in advocating open education policies worldwide.

AI in Open Education
The Need for Seamless Technical Infrastructures
Open Education Global’s Role
Power of Librarians in Open Education
Supportive Nature of Global Community
Influence of Policy Making
Personal Interests Outside Work

Episode 64 TranscriptDownloadListen with Transcriptat Descript.com

Additional Links and Quotes for Episode 64

I’ve gotta talk about AI. It’s a bigger impact to our species than the internet was. I believe it’s going to be bigger than the internet. We needed the internet to connect things, but the amount of change to society will be larger. And that’s a big statement, I think, when you see how we all got used to the internet in a couple of short decades and it runs everything.

You really can’t exist in society without using the internet nearly on a daily basis. Yeah, I think this is larger and it really affects education because we’ve basically invented brains and built them out of sand and rock. Those brains are now directly involved and impacting our main activities, our purpose as well.

A lot of people find meaning in work and the activities that we do. Now we find machines can do those too. And we are automating, or at least on the precipice of automating or being able to automate nearly everything, which is quite a large, a large step.

I really see a lot of positives in it actually. And, I’m simultaneously worried by old school thinking and capitalist commercial approaches to things, turning this into another bad thing. But I also see a lot of positives. So that’s a big one. And I feel it like it needs a lot of work. What is open education in a future of AI?

Martin Dougiamas on Artificial Intelligence

School of the Air (Wikipedia)
Out of the Silent Air by C.S. Lewis (Wikipedia)
Curtin University
Dougiamas, M., & Taylor, P.C. (2002). Interpretive analysis of an internet-based course constructed using a new courseware tool called Moodle
Moodle
- MoodleNet
- Moodle Research Lab
Virtual Reality
- Apple Vision Pro
- VFX1 Headgear (Wikipedia)
Network of Open Organizations (OE Global)
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (Wikipedia)
Toastmasters
CU-SeeMe (Wikipedia)
OE Global 2024 Conference in Brisbane
Cybermind Conference 1996 (Internet Archive)
Obsidian (note taking)
“Exciting”, “Friendly”, Potential” (Martin’s three words describing what it’s like to be on the OE Global Board.

I had to counter that with, no, “this is a absolutely beautiful way to share information and learn.” The openness, I mean, it comes back to physics actually. To make a copy of an electronic thing costs zero.

There is no production cost after you’ve made the first copy of it. it’s electrons, it’s, you know, negligible. And so, it makes sense that once you have digital things, nature wants them to spread and be copied. It’s a natural thing to me that we do that. .

Martin Dougiamas on openness

there’s a huge global community available to support and answer questions when doubts arise, which happens very often. Every experience might be different from the previous one, but having the community available, reachable behind the scenes. Like in this case, you know, there is no distance. And everything happens very fast and people are ready to support. So that’s what I think it’s a big added value.

Having librarians in this, given their service approach and their helping attitude, well, this makes a difference.

Paola Corti on community

Politecnico di Milano University (POLIMI)
- OER101: Using Open Educational Resources in Teaching
  - 2017 OE Award for Excellence
2016 OE Global Conference in Krakow
Setting the Default to Open (SPARC Europe)
- European Network of Open Education Librarians (ENOEL)
OEG Voices 051: Tetiana Kolesnykova on the Open Resilience of Librarians
UNESCO Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER)
- OER Dynamic Coalition
Open Access in the Netherlands (open access.nl)
OER-Strategie (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung)
Calm in the Storm (Chapter 11 from Higher Education for Good, co authored with Chrissi Nerantzi)
“Curiosity”, “Critical Approach”, “Opportunities” (Paola’s three words about Artificial Intelligence)

If you want things happen, people in the room should have a voice and maybe that’s why I was elected as a member of the board, to have the practitioner’s perspective in the room. So I’m very happy to be there and to get to know more the staff members. that work in OE Global, because you see the result of their work, but you don’t have many opportunities to work close to them all the time.

Paola Corti on being on the OEGlobal Board

Our open licensed music for this episode is a track called RF Mountain Air by legacyAlli licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Like most of our intro music, it is from the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).

This was another episode we are recording on the web in Squadcast. This is part of the Descript platform for AI enabled transcribing and editing audio in text– this has greatly enhanced our ability to produce our shows We have been exploring some of the other AI features in Descript, but our posts remain human authored unless indicated otherwise.

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You might think the answer to question “What is a photograph?” is trivial. Listen to our conversation with professional photographer and innovative educator Jonathan Worth to appreciate not only the difference between the digital image and the photography, but also an interesting perspective on what photography is in 2024, given the influece of not only artificial intelligence, but also the commons use of the devices Jonathan refers to as the “slab in your hand.”

Learn more about Jonathan’s formative years as a student of photography at University of Derby, mentorships with professionals, developing his own career creating images used for celebrities on magazine covers, an influential photo shoot with Cory Doctorow, and a coming to understanding of the futility of creating scarcity on the web taught to him by a 14 year old.

You will also appreciate listening to Jonathan’s thoughtful and fresh approach to his current teaching of traditional, fashion, and sports photography classes at Nottingham Trent University. And stay for his fresh perspective on what artificial intelligence has to offer now and in the future.

In the OEG Voices Studio with Jonathan Worth and Alan LevineThis EpisodeFYI: This section of show notes alone was generated by AI Actions in the Descript editor we use to produce OEG Voices

The episode features an in-depth conversation between Jonathan Worth, a photographer and educator, and Alan about the evolution of photography, the changes brought about by digital technologies, and the cultural implications of these changes. Jonathan shares his perspective on the difference between a photograph and an image, the use of AI in photography, the future of image-making, and the importance of mastering both technical and conceptual aspects of photography in education. The conversation also delves into the responsibility and ethics of photography and Jonathan’s experience in teaching film and darkroom photography. Towards the end, they discuss the new sports photography course Jonathan is developing, which focuses on experiential, immersive media.

Introduction: Reflections on Photography
Jonathan’s Journey: From Professional Photography To Educator
Conversation: Old vs. New Learning Approaches in Photography
Jonathan’s Personal Encounters and Anecdotes
Implications of Copyright in Digital Photography
Mentorship and Co-learning In The Field of Photography
What exactly defines a ‘Photograph’ in the era of AI?
Exploring the Future: The New Sports Photography Course
Conclusion and End Notes

Episode 63 TranscriptDownloadListen with Transcriptat Descript.com

Additional Links and Quotes for Episode 63

So it’s a bit of Marshall McLuhan’s rear view mirror as far as technology goes, you know, so always look in the rear view mirror. And as we try to describe something in terms of something old, we really limit the potential of something new. Obviously we think of examples like a camera, which used to be a camera obscura, which actually used to be a room, which then became this little box, which was like a room, a darkened box.

And now we carry this thing around this little sort of mindless slab [holds up a mobile phome]. This is our camera now. And of course it’s not a supercomputer. I think we need to push on past our expectations for AI if we’re only going to think of them in terms of that darkroom process that I described earlier on.

But here’s something I think is really cool. So if photography broke away from painting, which it did, and we know that through people like the f/64 group, when it stopped trying to be like crappy paintings and started to try and be really sharp, beautiful images, that it really established itself.

Jonathan Worth on looking back and forward in photography

University of Derby Photography
- Photography at NTU
  - Fashion Photography
  - Sports photography
John Blakemore (photographer)
Steve Pyke (photographer)
- Moonbug: My Journey to Photograph the Astronauts That Walked the Moon
David Campbell (photographer)
- Narrative, Power and Responsibility (audio for lecture at Coventry University)
- Photography and Narrative (David Campbell web site)
- The Integrity of the Image (for World Press Photo)
Cory Doctorow (Author and activist)
- Pluralistic (Daily links from Cory Doctorow)
- For the Remix (remix project with Doctorow’s photos)
From Closed to Open Photographer, Teacher, Potential Remixee (Heath Ledger photo story)
The Crack in the Rear View Mirror (Marshall McLuhan)
f/64 Group (Wikipedia)
Photography in the Age of Artificial Intelligence ( by Fred Ritchin, Vogue)
Ways of Seeing (John Berger)
Demosaicing (Wikipedia)
Juergen Teller (photographer)
Ansel Adams Zone System (Wikipedia)
Ian Campbell Cole (Instragram)
- Campbell Cole (product design)
Phonar (Photography + Narrative open course at Coventry University)
Red Bull Mega Swing (advertisement video)
Nottingham Trent University
- Photography at NTU
  - Fashion Photography
  - Sports photography

If I think about young people now, the ones that come through that we teach, there are profound differences between them and me at their age and subsequently what I’ve grown into.

So if I think about my formative years generally, they were spent watching TV. And that’s the very third person way of seeing the world. It makes someone who is patient enough to watch adverts, for example, right? So, the young people that are coming through now, they have spent their formative years playing video games, being, you know, the heroes of their own story.

They don’t understand video. They don’t understand adverts, right? That’s the other hilarious thing is “why are you watching adverts? ” So there is something quite profound.

What that means is that I think their media consumption is, there’s gonna be a drive or an openness to have first person media consumption. I think that means literally for the photographer, it means of course they would stand pitch side and make pictures of the game, but I think they will also make pictures in game as well.

Jonathan Worth on teaching sports photography

Our open licensed music for this episode is a track called Picture it all (Instrumental) by Lorenzo’s Music licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 International License. Like most of our intro music, it is from the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).

This was another episode we are recording on the web in Squadcast. This is part of the Descript platform for AI enabled transcribing and editing audio in text– this has greatly enhanced our ability to produce our shows We have been exploring some of the other AI features in Descript, but our posts remain human authored unless indicated otherwise.

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Now in its 16th year the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) continues on its trajectory as a community of practice for open education. Started in 2007 by Dr. Martha Kanter at Foothill-DeAnza Community College District, CCCOER joined what is now OE Global in 2011.

That moment too was when Una Daly began her long running role as Director of CCCOER, where she has led the growth and reach of CCCOER over the last twelve years. This December, Una is starting her “re-wirement” and welcoming Heather Blicher as incoming Director. Now was an ideal time for an OEG Voices conversation with Una about the evolution of CCCOER and to also hear from Heather who will be steering it into the future.

In the OEG Voices studio with (clockwise from top left), Una Daly, Heather Blicher, Alan Levine, and Marcela Morales.This EpisodeFYI: This section of show notes alone was generated by AI Actions in the Descript editor we use to produce OEG Voices

In this episode, host Alan Levine discusses the evolution of the Community College Consortium of OER (CCCOER) with outgoing director Una Daly and incoming director Heather Blicher. Starting with the early days of CCCOER, the episode highlights the milestones, such as its union with OE Global, the OER degree program with Achieving the Dream, and the burgeoning relationship with NorQuest College. The conversation delves deeper into the role of community colleges, the shifting scenario in global open education, the future of CCCOER, and the handover of directorship from Una to Heather.

00:06 Introduction to Community Colleges and Open Education
01:03 The Journey of CCCOER
01:23 Reflections on the History of CCCOER
01:34 Transitioning Leadership in CCCOER
03:24 The Role of Community Colleges in Open Education
06:30 The Early Days of CCCOER
10:32 The Evolution of CCCOER
25:41 The Future of CCCOER
27:50 Farewell to Una and Welcoming Heather
30:31 Closing Remarks

Episode 62 transcriptDownloadListen with Transcriptat Descript.com

Additional Links and Quotes for Episode 62

You know, it’s all about relationship building it’s what our members do and how we can lift them up. But there have been other infrastructure things that have come along too, which have been really helpful.

So there’s been funding that’s come along. About 2010-11 our federal government in the US really propped up the open education space with the original TAACCCT grants. I think it was $2 billion, That changed things dramatically. Prior to that there were believers in open ed, but it just, it didn’t get the same spread.

Una Daly

CCCOER logos over the years* Una Daly (OE Global profile) * About and History (CCCOER website) + Martha Kanter (Wikipedia) + Barbara Illowsky (De Anza College) - Introductory Statistics (Open Stax) + Judy Baker (Foothill College) + Community College Open Textbooks Project (College Open Textbooks) + Dear CCCOER Members (intro message from Una Daly, 2011) + First message on CCCOER email list (December 13, 2011) + OER ResearchHub Welcomes Visiting Fellow Una Daly (OERHub, 2013) + CCCOER Web Site July 2017 (Internet Archive) + CCCOER 10th Anniversary Retrospectives (CCCOER, 2017) + CCCOER Executive Council * CCCOER Projects + Achieving the Dream OER Degree Initiative + Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) grant program (US Department of Labor) + California Community College ZTC Program + Open for Anti-Racism Program (OFAR) + Regional Leaders of Open Education Network (RLOE) + Open Pedagogy Summer Adventure (OEG Connect)

Change happens faster at community colleges than at our other higher ed institutions. And so often we can introduce innovative programs that would take a bit longer even though community colleges do it with less resources.

Una Daly

Having been a student at a community college and later focusing my work with them, I can say that just as the name suggests, community colleges are for the communities they serve. They provide accessible and affordable education that can be a gateway to traditional four year institutions. They can also provide vocational pathways and certifications for in-demand fields that require specialized training, often teaming up with local companies to fill gaps in a skilled workforce. They offer flexible schedules to accommodate students with jobs and family responsibilities. And, because of all of these elements, community colleges can meet the needs of a diverse student body, all ages, income levels, and backgrounds.

Heather Blicher

Heather Blicher (OE Global profile)
Who is Heather Blicher? (OE Global News)
Northern Virginia Community Colleges Libraries (first OER work)
The Last Cuentista (by Donna Barba Higuera)
December 2023 CCCOER Member Mixer (Heather introduced, storytelling)

Community messages to Una from CCCOER December 2023 Member Mixer

Our open licensed music for this episode is a track called Infographics Loop by Serge Quadrado licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Like most of our intro music, it is from the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).

This was another episode we used Descript for transcribing and editing audio that has greatly enhanced our ability to produce show. We have been exploring some of the other AI features in Descript, but our posts remain human authored unless indicated otherwise.

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In another new series of episodes going into 2024 we will be sharing the voices of the OEGlobal Board of Directors, who provide the key leadership and direction for our organization. In this episode you will hear conversations recorded at OEGlobal 2023 in Edmonton with Board Vice-President Lisa Young and Board Member Cathy Casserly.

We hear a bit about their conference experience but also their viewpoints into the open education issues and topics that provide their direction in their role on the Board of Directors, who held a working meeting the day after the conference.

OEGlobal Board Members and Staff at OEGlobal 2023, CC-BY OEGlobalThese podcasts are part of the current board’s commitment to engage with the OEGlobal community. We plan to feature a new board member in a series every other month starting in the new year. In addition, the Board is taking turns posting a viewpoint on a topic of interest in OEG Connect, a place where you can respond and speak to them.

This EpisodeFYI: This section of show notes alone was generated by AI Actions in the Descript editor we use to produce OEG Voices.

The podcast episode by Open Education Global features conversations with board members Lisa Young and Cathy Casserly. Lisa discusses the current issues impacting open education, the potential role of AI in the OER movement, and her experience serving on the OE Global board. Cathy shares her insights on the developments in open education over the last two decades, the importance of collaboration across different sub-sectors in the open ecosystem, and the potential of AI in open education. Both emphasised the importance of remaining connected to the global community, despite the constraints presented by limited resources. The conversations were recorded at the OE Global Conference in Edmonton.

00:05 Introduction to the Podcast
01:01 Introducing the OE Global Board of Directors
01:58 Conversation with Lisa Young
02:25 Discussing the Impact of Open Education
04:31 The Role of AI in Open Education
05:29 Lisa’s Experience on the OE Global Board
07:06 Conversation with Cathy Casserly
07:58 The State of Open Education
10:15 The Future of OE Global
11:57 Incorporating Indigenous Perspectives in Conferences
12:59 Closing Remarks

Note: The conversation with Lisa Young was recorded outside the conference center near a busy street. Even with the AI enhanced editing in Descript, the sound is not the best. If you prefer the full recording with all ambient sound, see below!

Episode 61 TranscriptDownloadListen with Transcriptat Descript.com

Additional Links and Quotes for Episode 61

I love having colleagues from around the world from so many continents and for them all to be able to share their viewpoints. It’s really continued to open up my mind and help me see the global issues that are occurring. As I’ve come to OE Global conferences over the years, I always have that moment where my mind just gets blown.

Lisa Young on being a board member

Lisa Young Board Profile (OEGlobal)
Maricopa County Community College District
Planned Communities: Building the Foundation for Successful Cross-Institution Open Collaborations (panel at OEGlobal 2023)
OEGlobal Strategic Plan
OEGlobal 2014 (Ljubljana, Slovenia)

Braided, Inspiring, and Networked

Lisa Young’s three words to describe OEGlobal 2023

Original audio recording with Lisa Young including much traffic noise and maybe a few dogs barking!

AI is changing the landscape of the world and education along with it. So I think in particular, with respect to openly licensed content, there’s a moment in time when we have to be proactive as a community to figure out exactly how we want to participate in the AI education space with the content that is openly licensed.

Because otherwise it will happen to us and we want to be proactive. So I think clarity on that is of utmost importance.

Cathy Casserly on the state of Open Education

Cathy Casserly Board Profile (OEGlobal)
Catherine M. Casserly, PH.D (web site)
Diamond Open Knowledge (Cable Green keynote at OEGlobal 2023)

Connection. Awesome and Introspective.

Cathy Casserly’s three words to describe OEGlobal 2023

Our open licensed music for this episode is a track called The View From The Window by Ian Sutherland licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Like most of our intro music, it is from the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).

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Can you still hear the buzzing energetic hallway conversations, the opening drumming of the Kiyanaw Group, stories of experience from the recent OEGlobal 2023 Conference hosted by NorQuest College in October?

We have a mix captured for you here in this episode, a sampler of the Indigenous music that opened and closed the days, clips of people talking about what they were seeing and doing, and a bit of a Vox Pop three word summary.

Opening OEG23 flickr photo by OE Global shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) licenseHere for you to hear, is a mix of sounds of OEGlobal 2023.

For a visual experience browse our collection of our #oeglobal23 tagged photos shared in flickr.

Audio SegmentsDrumming and music samplerVoices from the Conference FloorConference in 3 Words Vox PopMore Conference References* OEGlobal 2023 web site https://conference.oeglobal.org/2023/ * Ongoing Discussions in OEG Connect https://connect.oeglobal.org/c/oeg-2023/ * Conference video playlist (including all recorded keynotes and sessions)

Next Year in Brisbane!

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This is the first of our series of episodes highlighting winners of the 2023 Open Education Awards for Excellence. Appropriately, we start with an award winning student, Yasser Tamer, a student in comparative literature plus minors in education and linguistics at the American University in Cairo. For his dedicated work as an open advocate for students with disabilities, researcher of artificial intelligence, and open education facilitator, Yasser was recognized in 2023 with an Individual OE Award in the Student category.

In this conversation, Yasser shares his passion for learning and research, constructively helping to grow their awareness and understanding of accessibility, and how he applies these practices in both social media and as a co-facilitator of the faculty development programs of Equity Unbound. Listen in to our conversation and you will come to expect to see one day Yasser with his PhD leading teaching and research in higher education.

In the OEG Voices Studio with Yasser Tamer (left) and Alan Levine (right)This EpisodeFYI: This section of show notes alone was generated by AI Actions in the Descript editor we use to produce OEG Voices

In this podcast episode, host Alan Levine speaks with Yasser Tamer, a student award winner from the Open Education Global. Yasser shares his journey as a blind student in Egypt, who aims to become an educator and normalize the presence of educators with disabilities. Discussing his academics, his activism on Twitter, his views on using AI in education, and his love for football, Yasser paints a vivid picture of multifaceted growth and determination. He touches on the important role that Open Education plays in improving accessibility and promoting inclusivity.

00:07 Introduction and Podcast Kickoff
00:57 Getting to Know Yasser Tamer
01:32 Yasser’s Background and Life in Cairo
02:53 Yasser’s Journey in Education and Advocacy
04:42 Yasser’s Motivation and Influences
05:57 Yasser’s Experience with Twitter and Online Activism
18:01 Yasser’s Future Goals and Aspirations
22:29 Yasser’s Perspective on Artificial Intelligence
27:31 Yasser’s Hobbies and Personal Interests
31:06 Yasser’s Thoughts on Open Education and Recognition
32:40 Podcast Wrap-up and Closing Remarks

episode-059-transcriptDownloadListen with Transcriptat Descript.com

Additional Links and Quotes for Episode 59

I want to just normalize the idea of students coming to a classroom, finding a professor who’s blind, different from them. And then I want to remove the idea of the stigma of how he’s going to teach us. No, he’s going to teach us by doing the same that other professors do.

Yasser Tamer

Yasser Tamer: 2023 OE Award For Excellence: Student Award
Ways of Being Intentionally Inclusive (Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast, Episode 477)
Cultivating Compassionate Community to Foster Academic Integrity? (Reflecting Allowed blog, co-authored with Maha Bali)
MyFest (Equity Unbound)
ChatPDF and ChatDOC
Be My AI (Be My Eyes)
Blind Football (Wikipedia)

And I’ve been trying to explore what is happening in the other parts of the world that we’re kind of deprived from seeing due to the financial limited resources or the lack of support around conferences .

Being able to speak English is a privilege because you’ll get to read blogs, you’ll get to speak with people, you’ll get to understand their mentality. Then you’ll get to transform that experiential learning to Egyptian communities and to unprivileged youth. And Twitter has been a great step towards that.

Yasser Tamer

I hopefully will get a lot of other publications in the future. But this has been a kind of a dream. Like what prohibits me from publishing? What bans me from doing that. From reflecting on what I learned on MyFest. I’ve been leading sessions with educators. I have futurized the course at my institution that possibly can be taught in 20 years.

Yasser Tamer

Our open licensed music for this episode is a track called Driving Over the Hills (ID 1974) by Lobo Loco and is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Like most of our intro music, it is from the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).

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Open Education Global initiated a 12 month internship program in 2022 aimed at providing students, newcomers or practitioners in the...

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For this episode take a trip with us to the City University of New York (CUNY) where Sarah Kresh shares her open education efforts at the School of Professional Studies (SPS). In listening to Sarah you will understand why she was named a winner of a 2022 Open Education Award for Excellence in the Emerging Leader category. We hope this inspires you to consider a person or project to nominate for the 2023 OE Awards — nominations are open now through June 30, 2023.

Sarah shares her journey from degrees in linguistics to teaching, implementing technology, and ultimately her current role in the SPS Office of Faculty Development and Instructional Technology. As an entirely online program, the SPS has made strong efforts to address student needs through an extensive Zero Textbook Cost program plus advocating practices of open pedagogy and addressing diversity, inclusion, equity, and accessibility into course design. And as a bonus you will learn why Sarah loves her outdoor activity time.

Listen in to our conversation with Sarah and be thinking as well who you consider a key open educator worthy of a 2023 OE Award in Leadership (or any other category). Are you inspired? Start the process now and your efforts will help identify a future guest on this podcast.

In the OEG Voices Studio with Sarah Kresh (left) and Alan Levine (right)Episode 057 TranscriptDownloadNotes and Quotes for Episode 57

What I’m excited about and many people at my school are excited about is how OER and Zero Textbook Cost are concepts that are not taken for granted exactly, but just much more accepted and part of the culture at our school. This gives us the opportunity to start thinking about Open Pedagogy and also how OER and Open Pedagogy fit with different kinds of initiatives that are of interest.

At our school there’s a tremendous interest in diversity, inclusion, equity and accessibility throughout the institution. We’ve been talking about these issues amongst the staff, amongst the faculty, and we have a Faculty Advisory Board to our office, the Office of Faculty Development and Instructional Technology, and the Faculty Advisory Board has expressed a lot of interest in how DEIA fits into the process of online course development and online course review.

Sarah Kresh

CHILDES: Child Language Data Exchange System (Carnegie Mellon University)
New York State Government OER Initiative
City University of New York (CUNY)
- Open Educational Resources (CUNY Library Services)
- CUNY Open Education Research Program
School of Professional Studies
- OER @ SPS (CUNY School of Professional Studies)
- Zero Textbook Courses
- CUNY School of Professional Studies Leads Online Teaching Workshops for CUNY Faculty
- CUNY Online Teaching Essentials

The most exciting project recently that we’ve worked on is offering faculty a workshop where we provided them with some of these annotations, modelled after the Cal State- SUNY project that I just mentioned. [We] asked them to use these annotations along with the course review rubric to look at their course and reevaluate it from that perspective and then propose some sort of revision to activities, the content, the course design, and the online learning management system platform. The proposals that we had emphasized different OER and Open Pedagogy approaches to how you can increase inclusivity in the online classroom.

Sarah Kresh

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Course Design Rubric (University of California)
DEI Collaborative (Multiple institutions)
DEI Rubric for Equitable Course Design (Ease Learning)
SPS Committee on Institutional Equity and Diversity
Open for All Workshop & Discussion Series – Using OER & Open Pedagogy to foster DEIA in online courses (CUNY SPS, last offered March 2023)

But for our OER initiative specifically at SPS, one of the things we’re looking forward to is we recently acquired a platform called OpenLab…. an open,WordPress based platform that our whole school will be able to use. One of the things that I’m excited about for our OER initiative group is to try to get more of our materials on this open platform.

Sarah Kresh

CBOX OpenLab (part of the CUNY Commons in a Box Project) functionality of
- CUNY OpenLab (City Tech)
- City Tech courses on OpenLab
CUNY Pressbooks
- Published Open textbooks (Pressbooks Directory)
  - Concepts in Statistics (CUNY SPS)
  - H5P Activities (Concepts in Statistics)
CUNY Academic Commons
Manifold (Open publishing platform, see OEG Voices Episode 14)
SPS Digitcation Eportolios (Digication)

Our open licensed music for this episode is a track called Jonah’s Message for New York by Doctor Turtle licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License. Like most of our intro music, it is from the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).

The introduction was created with the OEG Voices Mixer featuring voices of Gardner C, Patrina L, Kristin H, Clint L, Lena P, Lori-Beth L, Maren D, Laura H, Lorna C, Kevin H, Werner W, and Doug B (learn how to add your voice to the mix).

This was another episode we used Descript for transcribing and editing audio that has greatly enhanced our ability to edit and transcribe our show.

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Just in time for the opening of nominations on May 15, 2023 for the 2023 OE Awards for Excellence and in the theme of being inpsired by previous winners, we are sharing a conversation we recorded with Giovanni Zimotti who was recognized in 2022 with an OE Award in the Educator category.

As Director of Spanish Language Instruction at the University of Iowa, Giovanni has taken on applying and developing Open Educational Resources in the Spanish courses and has led the development of several open textbooks, two of which are focused on Spanish in professional fields (healthcare and education).

Listen in as Giovanni shares his journey from the Italian village of Cagnano Varano to Iowa City, how open education became his focus and mission, and more about his ideas on teaching with OER and applying virtual reality in language teaching.

In the OEG Voices studio (left to right) Giovanni Zimotti and Alan LevineEpisode 056 TranscriptDownloadNotes and Quotes for Episode 56

We have a pretty big Spanish program with around 800, 1000 students per semester and my goal for this program right now is to fully switch every single level to OER textbooks

Giovanni Zimotti

2022 OE Award for Excellence in the Educator Category (OE Global)
Giovanni Zimotti, Ph.D., Director of Spanish Language Instruction (University of Iowa)
- Giovanni Zimotti (Personal website)

So there are many opportunities. First of all, you are not restricted to what the traditional publishers are offering. For example, when we started using the first textbook, there were some mistakes and there are always mistakes in [the] textbook. Either if it’s OER or a traditional publisher textbook.

But the good thing about OER, that if you find a mistake, another professor finds a mistake, you can fix it right away. You don’t have to wait for a second edition of the book coming in three years. Another opportunity for OER is that it can be localized to the student needs of your town, of your area.

Giovanni Zimotti on OER

Maletín médico. Intermediate Spanish for Health Care Professionals (University of Iowa Pressbooks)
Salón de clase. Intermediate Spanish for Education Professionals (University of Iowa Pressbooks)

Lately we have been working on one additional project about VR. There is a colleague of mine that is teaching Spanish Medical Interpreting. We’ve been recording a series of 360 videos of medical encounters. There is a patient, there is a medical provider, a doctor, a nurse, medical assistant, any of them, and then an interpreter.

So we record the situations with actors and then we put them on YouTube. It’s 360 videos and we use them in various way. We mute when the interpreter is talking, so the students can use them as practice . And we also use them as an assessment at the end of the semester. So students, they get either in the VR or if they have issue with VR, they can just watch it on YouTube. And they have to interpret what’s going on while the video’s playing.

Giovanni Zimotti on his VR projects

Virtual Reality Training for Language Medical Interpreting (FLTMAG)
Medical Imaging VR (YouTube playlist)
Ready, Steady, Spain (Giovanni Zimotti)
Virtual reality training: reducing social distance abroad and facilitating spanish second language acquisition (Giovanni Zimotti dissertation, University of Alabama)

There are benefits from using OER for example, students have access to the textbook from day one. They don’t have to wait until when they can actually buy it or when they’re financially clear. So some students are waiting until two or three weeks before they can buy a textbook. That’s gonna affect their grade. That’s gonna affect the way they learn because the first two or three weeks or plus are basically useless for them because they cannot read the book. The most affected people are gonna be the students that don’t have money to buy them. If you’re a rich kid, spending $300 for a textbook and those are like real prices, it’s okay. You’re not gonna pay it, you’re not gonna be affected by it. You’re still gonna be able to go to a restaurant and eat.

But for someone that doesn’t have the money or the resources, that’s gonna be really impactful for them when they have a free textbook instead of a textbook that is so expensive.

Giovanni Zimotti on benefits of OER

OER Textbooks (Giovanni Zimotti web site)
Greyled “The OER platform that thinks like you do” (Giovanni Zimotti’s new platform in development)

AI Magic for Podcasting?Note: In our ongoing process of exploring new technologies, we tested a new AI powered podcast content creation tool called Castmagic— we uploaded the audio for this episode and it generated suggested podcast titles, highlights, key points, even text social media posts (see the full set of results).

All our summaries above are human written, but for a taste of what Castmagic generated from the audio for this episode:

On this episode of OEG Voices, we delve into the world of Open Educational Resources (OER) and the benefits they bring to language learning. Our guest speaker talks about their experience working on VR projects for medical interpretation and language immersion, as well as their passion for creating OER textbooks that are accessible to all. We explore the advantages of OER, such as localization and customization, and the challenges they face, such as lack of support for homework. Join us as we dive into the world of OER and the impact it has on language education.

Podcast introduction generated by Castmagic

At first it looks rather magical indeed that Castmagic could do all of this writing, summarizing, even, social media post writing, just from analyzing the audio content. We leave it to the reader/listeners to judge it’s value, for now, our content remains human produced!

Our open licensed music for this episode is a track called La paloma de la paz by Robo, licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Spain License. Like most of our intro music, it is from the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).

The introduction was created with the OEG Voices Mixer featuring voices of Isla H-F, Ajita D, Charlie F, Lisa Y, Józefa F, Ewan M, Lori-Beth L, Alex E, Cynthia O, Clint L, Catherine C, Lorna C, and Vera K (learn how to add your voice to the mix).

This was another episode we used Descript for transcribing and editing audio that has greatly enhanced our ability to edit and transcribe our show.

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As we enter the opening soon of nominations for the 2023 Open Awards for Excellence this episode ought to inspire you with our conversation recorded way back in December with Ewan McAndrew, last year’s winner of an Individual Award in the Support Specialist category.

Ewan’s impact on students, faculty, and the wider community as a Wikimedian in Residence based at the University of Edinburgh is deep and wide, a challenge to cover in just an hour of conversation. Starting in the shadow of his workplace adjacent to the iconic Castle, we hear of Ewan’s spreading both the joy of Wikipedia and the potential of helping countless people become active contributors to the greatest body of knowledge we have today.

Listen in as Ewan clearly demonstrates the value and that the ways into this act are something he has repeatedly shown people can do in one sitting. Through this conversation, the awarding to him in the support specialist category for the OEAwards may only partially indicate his impact as a Wikimedian in Residence.

In the OEG Voices studio with (left to right) Ewan McAndrew, Marcela Morales, and Alan LevineEpisode 055 TranscriptDownloadReferences and Quotes for Episode 55Note: In the spirit of Ewan’s mention of “that joy of going down the rabbit hole of clicking through all the wiki links to find out about opening up obscure topics to a general lay audience” we maybe too many links from this conversation!

It is a strange kind of excitement. It’s weird how people love and know Wikipedia so well, but they don’t know what’s under the bonnet. They don’t know how that information gets there. They also think that there’s some sort of elves that just, overnight magic, a page together, and that this work happens organically, like Santa’s workshop every year. There’s something going on there that they don’t know how it happens, but they expect the information to be there. They also don’t maybe necessarily question or understand the nature of how a statement got that citation at the end of it, that you should be clicking on the citation to find out more, to make sure it’s a verifiable statement. It’s when you start saying, look, this is something you can edit and here’s how.

Here’s the sort of easy route in. Suddenly their eyes light up a bit , “Oh, I can actually contribute here. It looks reasonably easy. How can I, how can I help? “And it’s just saying, look, you know, start small or start big, fifty words or more, and you’ve got something you can publish as long as you’ve got those citations and cite what you write.

Ewan McAndrew

2022 OE Award for Excellence in Support Specialist Category: Ewan McAndrew (OEGlobal)
- Username EMcAndrew (Wikipedia)
- Username “Stinglehammer” (Wikipedia)
- Aberdeenshire (Wikipedia)
- Newburgh (Wikipedia)
Wikimedian in Residence (University of Edinburgh)
- University of Edinburgh Wikipedian in Residence (Wikipedia)
- Wikimedia in Education Case Studies (University of Edinburgh)
- Wikimedian in Residence Channel (University of Edinburgh, Media Hopper videos)
- Wikipedian in Residence Videos (YouTube Channel)
- Down the Rabbit hole of Knowledge (Wikipedia Quick facts, University of Edinburgh)
- Reflections on a Wikipedia assignment – Reproductive Medicine (University of Edinburgh)
- Wikidata in the Classroom – Data Literacy for the next generation (University of Edinburgh)
Wikipedian in Residence (Wikipedia)
- Liam Wyatt (First Wikimedia in Residence–username Wittylama is an anagram)!
  - Archive project at British Museum
- Martin Pounter (Wikipedian in Residence)
  - Bodleian Library projects

They can see that their work is published and has some lasting good. There was one student in particular, Áine Kavanagh ,who I keep going back to because she talks about how the work that she did in reproductive medicine hadn’t really been relevant outside of lectures and exams.

And she was taking that knowledge that hadn’t seemed terribly relevant and applying it in a real world application of teaching and learning, taking her scholarship and creating this page about high serious grade carcinoma, one of the most deadly and most common forms of ovarian cancer. And it didn’t have a page on Wikipedia. She was plugging a knowledge gap online, using her research and credible open access material, at least 60 citations in that article, and creating her own diagrams because she couldn’t find any copyright free ones. So she had to create her own diagrams in Photoshop to help explain this high serious grade carcinoma to a lay audience.

That page has been viewed 150,000 times since she published it. So that’s impact right there. And she still talks about it. She’s left the university now and she still came back to talk with us when we did a podcast last year. She still felt really proud and enthused about the work she’d done on Wikipedia as part of that course.

Ewan McAndrew on the impact of a student experience adding knowledge to WikiPedia

High-grade serous carcinoma (Wikipedia Article started by Aine Kavanagh)
Wikipedia in the Classroom – Interview with Aine Kavanagh (University of Edinburgh)
Hannah Rothmann, 2021 OE Award for Excellence (University of Edinburgh student)
- Wikipedia How to Videos (YouTube playlist)
Edinburgh Award (University of Edinburgh)

What was really great is that we already had this rich data set, which looked at all the historical records in Scotland of accused witches. And weirdly, Scotland did document quite a lot of what happened, and they just put it in this Microsoft Access database they completed in about 2003. It remained relatively static– there’s 30 tables, 300 columns of information, a really rich data set.

There are lots of gaps in the data because it’s historical data. One thing we do seem to have for most of the accused witches in here is at least some idea of their place of residence that seems to have been noted.

If we could just get a student with a geographic background, we could get them to sit down with some old georeferenced maps from the National Library of Scotland, take the names of these places and see if there are coordinates we could get them approximately or exactly right. It wasn’t always easy, but it was a lot of detective work and we managed to get somewhere in the region of 800 place names geolocated and that allowed us to create maps.

That seemed to bring home to people the sort of extent of the witchcraft panics in Scotland. But also it localized things and seemed to bring home that “Oh, there was like three accused just down the road from me,” and you’d want to read a bit more and wondered why there was no sort of memorial to them.

Ewan McAndrew on the Accused Witches Project

Map of Scots women accused of witchcraft published for first time https://t.co/odW6tT31EN

— Ewan McAndrew (@emcandre) September 23, 2019

Full house at first @EdCDCS seminar of the academic year! @emcandre introducing Emma Carroll on the Wicked Findings of the Witchfinder General: using linked open data to put accused witches on the map. @wikidata meets GIS meets historical data on #Scotland’s witchtrials. pic.twitter.com/hAR9ZYwZ5d

— melissa terras (@melissaterras) September 11, 2019

Survey of Scottish Witchcraft Database (original database, University of Edinburgh)
Witches of Scotland (Locations mapped from Wikidata, University of Edinburgh)
Mapping Scotland’s accused witches through Open Data (Heritage Fund)
Some witchy history and a very smart woman in data science (Anne-Marie Scott blog)
Witches of Scotland (Public campaign)
Remembering the Accused Witches of Scotland (RAWS, Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation)

There are about a dozen open knowledge projects supported by Wikimedia. My role is Wikimedian in Residence, so I’m supposed to facilitate engagement with all of these projects.

…

It’s that opening up of all of the different platforms and being able to wiki link between them in a really useful way that I think gives the Wiki universe an edge over other platforms.

Ewan McAndrew on Wikimedia Knowledge Projects

Wikimedia Knowledge Projects
- Wikisource
  - Robert Louis Stevenson (Wikisource)
  - A Lodging for the Night (Wikisource)
- Wikivoyage
  - Traveler’s Pub (Wikivoyage)
- Wikiquote
  - SheSaid Campaign (Wikiquote)
Frederick Bower (Google search results reveals Wikidata infobox)
Wikimedia Chapters (Find support)
Wikipedia Essentials Module (Wikimedia Labs)
Wikipedia Day (wikipedia’s birthday)
- 1Lib1Ref (Wikipedia)
Citation Hunt Tool (Wikitech Toolforge)

I run online workshops every month. Anyone’s welcome to attend. I try and teach people within forty-five minutes to an hour how to edit. And then if they want to, they can stay on for the rest of the afternoon, and I will suggest pages that they can create related to a notable woman that doesn’t have a page on Wikipedia.

And all we need, like I say, is fifty to a hundred words. Cite what you write. Write in your own words. And so fifty to one hundred words backed up by three or more reliable published secondary sources, and you’ve got something you can publish by the end of the afternoon. So I run those sessions on the last Friday of every month, both online and in the library at the University.

Ewan McAndrew on monthly Wikipedia workshops (in person and online)

University of Edinburgh/Events and Workshops/Women in Red (last Friday of every month, 1:00-5:00PM Edinburgh Time, convert to local time)
- Women in Red Project (Wikipedia)
- How to edit Wikipedia – a 1 hour tutorial (University of Edinburgh)

Our open licensed music for this episode is a track called Wiki Leads by M33 Project licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Like most of our intro music, it is from the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).

The introduction was created with the OEG Voices Mixer featuring voices of Maren D, Rowena B, Robert S, Gino F, Józefa F, Ajita D, Catherine C, Alex E, Lena P, Clint L, Judith S, Ewan M, and Cynthia O — Ewan contributed his voice during our recording session (learn how to add your voice to the mix).

This was another episode we used Descript for transcribing and editing audio that has greatly enhanced our ability to edit and transcribe our show.

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Recorded way back in the early part of the year, we finally get to share this conversation with Catherine Cronin, independent open education, scholar, researcher, and all around champion of openness. We start with a bit of location setting for Catherine’s home near Galway Island, with a description of the picturesque Flaggy Shore where she often walks.

Our conversation walks along with Catherine from her upbringing and influences growing up in New York City, to multiple academic degrees (Engineering, Women’s Studies, and Open Education), experiences of teaching and research, her leadership with Ireland’s National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning, a GO-GN Fellowship, projects in introducing open practices to community groups, plus the upcoming publication of Higher Education for Good co-authored with Laura Czerniewicz.

Walk along and listen in our conversation with Catherine, where we are joined as well by OEGlobal’s Una Daly (these two had a bit of a Bronx/Galway connection you will hear about).

In the OEG Voices Studio with (left to right) Catherine Cronin, Una Daly, and Alan LevineOEG Voices 054 TranscriptDownloadReferences and Quotes for Episode 54Willow on the Flaggy flickr photo by catherinecronin shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

And I’m quite near the coast, so if you go out to this area called the Flaggy Shore– actually the name comes from these big natural flagstones from from the Ice Age when the ice,scraped across and created these huge flat flagstones.

So everyone calls it the Flaggy Shore. And when you walk along the Flaggy Shore, you’re right on Galway. To the north you have Galway, beautiful Galway and the mountains of Connemara. And to the south you have Clare and The Burren. So it’s just beautiful and wild. And Seamus Heaney wrote one of his most well-known poems, “Postscript” about a walk along the Flaggy Shore.

Catherine Cronin on the Flaggy Shore

Kinvara County, Galway (Wikipedia)
Galway (Wikipedia)
Catherine’s photos of the Flaggy Shore (Flickr Album)
“Postscript” (poem by Seamus Heaney)

So I was teaching with the Open University when they brought in the CoSy system, which was the first kind of text communication system between students and teachers. And that was in about the mid 1990s. So I progressed along that kind of online digital education in the early days.

And then when I realized that I didn’t come to find my way to OER but I found my way to open tools where other educators who were teaching online, were sharing their stories and ideas with each other. I got it then, and from there I just followed the threads, connected with people and found my way to Open from that.

And once I found Open Education, it clicked with so many things that I had done in my life, community education, Women’s Studies. I had done a master’s degree in women’s studies. Because again, others have noted as well that, a lot of the roots of open pedagogy are in feminist pedagogy.

Catherine Cronin on her path in Open Education

It ended up being really generative concept and kind of pillar around which to organize the work. It draws on the capabilities approach, from the area of human development, which is about what a human is able to do and to be. And the key I think for me around capabilities is that you don’t look at just a person’s abilities, but you look at a person’s abilities within a bigger context, the kind of social, political, economic educational context. For the National Forum to state as its overall aim to build and develop open capabilities, recognize that people, students and staff and everyone are coming into the higher education sector with a whole range of different backgrounds and sets of skills and levels of confidence .

They’re in different kinds of institutions, but we really want to be sure to help each person to develop. So yes we need to talk about policy and strategy and structures and so on, but if the focus is helping each person to develop their capabilities, then I think that we’re winning.

And that’s winning in the sense of that is what many of us talk about when we talk about critical and social justice approaches to Open. To be able to do that, within the auspices of a national organization was really exciting. And a lot of people really, in different institutions got on board with that and are continuing that work.

Catherine Cronin on collaboration and the capabilities approach

CoSy computer conferencing system (Wikipedia)
University of Galway
National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
Capability Approach (Wikipedia)
Feminist Perspectives on Learning, Media, and Educational Technology (Learning, Media, and Technology)
Seven Principles of Data Feminism (Internet Just Society)

One is that there generally isn’t an awareness about open licensing and open education at the community level and also, the work that’s happening there is so essential and so fundamental, it’s completely connected to what the community needs. By definition, they’re community organizations.

….

And little support. So I sought to engage with community organizations around what I called, the name of the project was Just Knowledge, but it was around the concept of open knowledge. So I just went in and asked, “What are you sharing, with your community? How are you sharing it? What challenges do you have doing that?” And particularly in a post- can we say post pandemic? Particularly in a COVID environment. A whole lot of things had started to be done online that had never been done online in community groups because of COVID so it was ripe for having those kinds of discussions.

Catherine Cronin on Just Knowledge GO-GN Fellowship project and community organization work

Just Knowledge (GO-GN project)
Just Knowledge research partner: Galway Traveller Movement & community mapping project (GO-GN)
- Irish Traveller Movement https://itmtrav.ie/ (Community Organization)
- Galway Traveller Movement http://gtmtrav.ie/
Just Knowledge research partner: Green Sod Ireland & Biodiversity (GO-GN)
- Green Sod Ireland (Community Organization)
Swift Conversation Ireland (Community Organization)
Community Knowledge Initiative at the University in Galway
Just Knowledge: a community-focused open knowledge project (OER22 presentation, YouTube)

The concept of Higher Education for Good was there right at the very beginning, and we know that we’re facing multiple and intersecting crises globally and in higher education.

So COVID climate, austerity, inequality, surveillance, et cetera, et cetera. We wanted to send out a global invitation to invite people to speak to the current crises but also find some hope. So look to the future and paint possible hopeful futures. If possible, because we think like in looking at other areas in the work in the area of climate, for example, some of, I think the most powerful work is work that does that, doesn’t just diagnose the issue, but points to ways that we can move forward, more positively and more hopefully.

…

So we have at this stage we have 27 chapters, 70 authors, 17 countries, I believe. We had an amazing review process that was also global reviewers. Many of those reviews were open. And throughout the course of this year, we’ve been editing, revising and what’s really exciting is that we don’t just have academic chapters.

We invited people to write in whatever genre they chose. So there are chapters written in the form of a dialogue. There’s poetry, one in the form of haiku. There are theoretical pieces. There’s an audio podcast. We also invited artists to contribute artwork.

Catherine Cronin on Higher Education for Good

Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures
Call to action to address the impact of COVID-19 on education in emergencies (UNESCO)
Indigenous Open Educational Resources: Respectfully Uplifting Community Voices (BCcampus)
Response to Call for Proposals for ‘Higher Education for Good’ (Catherine Cronin blog)
Recentering Open: Critical and global perspectives (OER19 Conference, National University of Ireland, Galway)
Dr. Angela Davis Speaks on art and its role in social change (Blurred Culture)
Open Book Publishers
Begin Again by Eddie Glaude
Higher Education for Good: Criticality, resistance and hope (presentation slides, – OER23, Inverness, Scotland, 6 April 2023 )

Our open licensed music for this episode is a track called Soul Walking by Juanitos licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. Like most of our intro music, it is from the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).

The photo background for this episode’s featured image is Sunset, Flaggy Shore flickr photo by catherinecronin shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

The introduction was created with the OEG Voices Mixer featuring voices of Catherine C, Lena P, Igor L, Lisa Y, Kevin H, Cynthia O, Jonathan P, Clint L, Vera K, Wayne M, and Robert S — Catherine contributed her voices in time for this episode (learn how to add your voice to the mix).

This was another episode we used Descript for transcribing and editing audio that has greatly enhanced our ability to edit and transcribe our show.

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This episode brings you the voices of two California Community College faculty sharing their experiences developing OERs implementing a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion framework for use in high enrollment (and high impact) courses. These projects were completed with the support of CC ECHO (California Consortium for Equitable Change in Hispanic Serving Institutions Open Educational Resources).

Speaking of echoes, this follows up nicely from another CC ECHO project we shared in October, 2022– OEG Voices 042: Vera Kennedy and Rowena Bermio on the Ethnic Studies Primer Open Textbook.

In our current episode will hear from Susan Rahman, professor of Sociology, Psychology and Behavioral Sciences at the College of Marin about two open textbooks she co-created with her students– A People’s History of Structural Racism in Academia From A(dministration of Justice) to Z(oology) and Sexuality, the Self, and Society. It was very fitting too to have on a podcast, Brian Barrick, who teaches Political Science at Los Angeles Harbor College, as his project was creating an accessible version of American Government OpenStax textbook as an audiobook. Plus we also hear from CC ECHO Project manager Kelsey Smith at West Hills College Lemoore about the project as a whole and what it has been able to achieve.

In the OEG Voices Studio with Kelsey Smith, Brian Barrick, Susan Rahman, Una Daly, and Alan Levine.Download TranscriptDownloadReferences and Quotes for Episode 53

CC ECHO is an initiative, funded by the U.S. Department of Education Open Textbook Pilot Program, by which four California community colleges promote textbook affordability, student success, and diversity, equity, and inclusion to benefit all students. The program provides professional development for integrating DEI in OER and curriculum to create culturally relevant OER through a peer-reviewed process for twenty high-enrolled courses that have limited or no OER available.

CC ECHO web site

Definitely I think it was more difficult than we thought it was going to be. When we originally put in the proposal for the grant, the gaps were totally different or the gaps in OER were totally different than they are now. As there’s lots of OER initiatives and grants out there producing work, and things were ever evolving.

The best way we could think to do that was a gap analysis between the four colleges in CC ECHO. At the beginning of every year, we would ask the leads at each college, which courses are your high enrolled and which ones are still aren’t using OER and then we would go from there, see if we can find interested faculty on our campuses.

Kelsey Smith on how CC ECHO subject areas were selected

CC ECHO California Consortium for Equitable Change in Hispanic-Serving Institutions Open Educational Resources
- Allan Hancock College
- College of the Canyons
- College of Marin
- West Hills College Lemoore
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA)
U.S. Department of Education Open Textbooks Pilot Program (funding)

I think the idea behind using students was something that I always felt like important in terms of the ways in which OER is, by the people, for the people…. It makes it more relevant for students to be involved.

There’s so many learning outcomes that come of them actually being contributors to the work rather than just passive takers of the knowledge. For me it was really part of my teaching, but it also became a way in which students could branch out, get some really valuable experience in terms of being published authors at the community college level.

It’s not very typical that they get that access at such an early point in their career.

Susan Rahman on open pedagogy approach of students as OER authors

Susan Rahman (College of Marin profile)
CC Echo Projects
- A People’s History of Structural Racism in Academia From A(dministration of Justice) to Z(oology) (PDF) (LibreTexts)
  - A People’s History of the United States: 1492 – Present (influence by Howard Zinn)
- Sexuality, the Self, and Society (LibreTexts)

I teach Political Science, so one of the most popular OER texts for PolySci is definitely the OpenStax American Government text.

I’ve been using it for several years. We’re on the third edition now and I started using it back on the second edition. And I really like it because I always know that my students have access to the text. Before that, I was assigning a book that was about a hundred dollars and oftentimes students wouldn’t get their financial aid on time.

And so I really like this text. The project that I did was essentially to take that text and to adapt it as an audiobook. We’ve released that on a number of different platforms. As of today, there are 17 chapters that have been recorded totalling about 30 hours of free audio that students can use.

…

And the way that I was able to connect with CC ECHO was years ago when I was working at East LA College, another college here in our district, Una and Kelsey came to my campus and did what is to this day, the best training I’ve ever been to.

It was a two day OER bootcamp and we sat in the library there for two days all day. And what I really liked about the training was when I walked away from that, I had a full game plan to go into the next semester and use OER so it was like intro to OER but also here are all of the resources, practical tips that you can use.

Brian Barrick on the American Government audiobook project

Brian Barrick (YouTube channel)
OpenStax American Government Audiobook (web site)
- Listen on YouTube
- American Government open textbook (OpenStax source)
- Add OpenStax Audiobook to Your Canvas Course (YouTube video)
Anchor Podcast Platform (now part of Spotify)
Bitcoin Audible (Brian was influenced by Guy Swann)
“The Secret of Getting Ahead is Getting Started” (Mark Twain or ?? Quote Investigator)
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (case of interest to Brian)

[We] have several projects that are in the Geosciences right now, which is a gap. There was a lot of OER out there for the three main Geography courses and a couple of Geology ones, but they’re getting a little old. And I know a lot of colleges, at least California community colleges, want your textbook to be within five years. So fairly new. One of them that we’ve been missing and it’s exciting for California people is :California Geology”… It’ll be all interactive with like virtual field trips and all of this stuff.

…

Since we saved some money on some travel because COVID was still going on and we weren’t able to travel as much as we thought we were going to, we dedicated that money to more projects. Our goal was 20 OER and I think we’re going to be closer to 26 by the time the grant is over.

Kelsey Smith on latest CC ECHO

Our open licensed music for this episode is a track called New World Echo (ID 1805) by Lobo Loco licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, and like most of our intro music, in the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).

The introduction created with the OEG Voices Mixer features voices of Maren D, Alan L, Kristin H, Cynthia O, Rowena B, Lori-Beth L, Isla H-F, Terry G, Rajiv J, Kevin H, Lisa Y, Jöran M-M, and Vera K — five of those voices are from CCCOER! (learn how to add your voice to the mix).

This was another episode we used Descript for transcribing and editing audio that has greatly nhanced our ability to edit and transcribe our show.

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As another special recording session for Open Education Week, we opened up the studio for anyone interested to be there for our conversation with Delmar Larsen, Director of the LibreTexts project who also manages to be a full time professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Davis.

A special recording session for Open Education WeekThe LibreTexts team offered so many Open Education Week events we struggled to count them (23?) so we appreciated it even more that Delmar agreed to spend some time with us Monday, March 6. This was also our opportunity to highlight the sweep of two 2022 OE Awards for Excellence given to LibreTexts, in both the Open Curation and the Open Infrastructure categories.

Listen in to learn how Delmar’s childhood experiences led to a love of Chemistry and also what propelled him to take on an open pedagogy effort using a wiki-based approach to build his first open chemistry textbook. We hear first hand how it grew from there into what is now known as the “LibreVerse” including libraries for multiple disciplines, integration of a variety of open platforms for homework and adaptive learning practices, plus a machine language approach for making open textbooks available in a wide range of languages. And hear about the news of the newest grants that will support the next evolution of the ADAPT platform.

And finally, hear Delmar describe his vision of an effective ecosystem of learning resources that make his vision of “world domination” (in the best ways)! Sit down for an enjoyable conversation with Delmar, recorded during Open Education Week 2023.

in the OEG Voices studio with Alan Levine and Delmar Larsen. Off camera guests included Jennifer Rogers, Shira Segal, Marcela Morales, Cristina Moon, and Allison Vanouse.Download TranscriptDownloadReferences and Quotes for Episode 52* OEAward for Excellence Curation Award (for the LibreTexts libraries) * OEAward for Excellence Open Infrastructure Award (for the LibreTexts OER Remixer)

But the one thing that I picked up on is I have loads and loads of students. My large general chemistry class is 500 students . So if I were to motivate just 20%, 10% of those students in order to start writing and contributing to it. And I used a wiki based approach, which is the ideal technology for large scale collaborative construction efforts to do exactly what I want to do.

I can do that. So we started to do that. So I did what’s now referred to as open pedagogy. In fact, we’ve used 5000 to 10,000 students that have contributed to the LibreTexts Project over over the last 15 years.

Delmar Larsen on his start in open publishing

ChemWiki (where it all started)

We’re in academia. We recognize that’s the start of the issue. That’s not the end game and we need to go through curation efforts. We need to constantly update. We need to constantly curate because there everything needs to be updated and what one person thinks is the right level for the quality of a book, it could be very different from a different person who has the same book. It’s a constant active thing. And because we are subject matter experts, not in every subject matter of course, but we have lots of people on our team in order to do that, we’re constantly updating and curating our content.

And that right there distinguishes us from other platforms that essentially that’s not their game. Their game is, here it is, you use it, give us the money, and we’re done. And actually the hard part is the curation effort.

Delmar Larsen

LibreTexts “Free the Textbook”
- Advanced Features
- OER Remixer (Chemistry as an example)
- Realizing the 5R Dream: The LibreTexts’s Quest to Build a Centralized OER Platform
- Affordable College Textbook Act Reintroduced in Congress (2019)

We built an infrastructure that we called ADAPT because it has, I would say simple adaptive learning capabilities.

It doesn’t have a black box engine. It has a, what I refer to as a choose your own adventure story which is a decision tree approach that students get to take agency in order to guide their education, which I like a lot more than spoon feeding from a black box.

The intent is that instead of giving individual questions, students get a question. If they get wrong, they can go into a a remediation tree in order to help guide them in terms of understanding what’s necessary, what are the skills that they need in order to be successful with that question, and then they can decide which of the branches they want to go down. It helps to build metacognition, it helps to build self-efficacy. It builds agency– I like students to be involved in their education instead of just being again, spoon-fed..

Delmar Larsen on the ADAPT system

LibreTexts Adaptive Learning Assessment System (ADAPT)
- LibreTexts Announces New Grant to Expand ADAPT

However, last year, two AI-based machine translation algorithms have gotten pretty good. Are they perfect? No, they are not. But they are pretty good. And the argument that we had here is it better to have a hundred thousand pages in a new language that’s 95% good versus 20 pages that are perfect in that language.

And the answer by far is it’s much better to have many more pages that are able to help that students can actually get through a little bit of the clunkiness in order to be able to advance that. We’ve been eyeing machine translation for a while. But the Ukraine situation provided us with an opportunity, although it was, obviously a very bad situation over there in order to couple with Amazon. So Amazon had a machine translation infrastructure and then coupled with MindTouch or NICE CXOne, the company that actually hosts our central libraries in order to be able to make a new library that was completely machine translated. And we did that in Ukrainian.

Delmar Larsen on offering multilingual libraries

CXOne Expert Knowledge (translation provider)
LibreTexts Español (Spanish)
LibreTexts Ukrayinska (Ukrainian)

Then I’ll go back to what people don’t like me saying as “world domination:. So there’s still a lot of global need for OER out there. There’s a lot of OER in English, but there’s less in many of the other languages, and there’s a need in order to be able to address that.

Delmar Larsen on his “dream”

Our open licensed music for this episode is a track called It’s Ok, We Have Chemistry by Dr. Wylie is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License found, like most of our intro music, in the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).

The introduction created with the OEG Voices Mixer features voices of. Jonathan P, Rajiv J, Ajita D, Lisa Y, Judith S, Patrina L, Shinta H, Cynthia O, Kevin H, Gardner C, Alex E, Lorna C, and Bonni S (learn how to add your voice to the mix).

This was another episode we used Descript for transcribing and editing audio that has enhanced our ability to edit and transcribe our show.

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The universe could not have aligned better for this episode. For Open Education Week, we schedule special recording sessions that are open to anyone interested in being in the studio with us, usually featuring winners of the most recent Open Education Awards. What could be better than organizing one around the 2022 Award for Open Resilience recognizing the heroic (or herOERic?) efforts of the Scientific Library of the Ukrainian State University of Science and Technologies during last year’s Russian invasion of the Ukraine.

We thought it might be a long shot when we invited Paola Corti, one of the European Network of Open Education Librarians (ENOEL) who coordinated the international effort to support their library colleagues in the Ukraine. Not only was the answer an immediate yes, she also coordinated to bring to the studio Tetiana Kolesnykova, Director of the Scientific Library at the Ukrainian State University of Science and Technologies located in Dnipro… “if she had sufficient electricity”!

How do you spell resilience? Start with a “U..K…R…”

Paola also arranged as well to have with us Mira Buist-Zhuk (University of Groningen) who provided amazing feats of translation for us. The event was added to the OEWeek schedule and we welcomed an extra guests to the studio who just wanted to be there.

A special event for OEWeekBut wait, there is more! We happened to schedule this for Wednesday, March 8, the day of International Women’s Day.

And open education, open access journals, open science, were hardly new to the Ukrainian State University of Science and Technologies- Tetiana and her colleagues had been part of advocating openness since 2009. In fact, the day before the 2022 invasion, Tetiana, Paola, and Mira held an online meeting to discuss plans for an upcoming conference.

Listen in to hear Tetiana’s own voice, translated by Mira, almost calmly describe how just 3 weeks after the bombs fell on Dnipro on February 24, 2022, how the University staff, in basements and bomb shelters, operationalized its crisis plan and sought first to helped displaced students. The Ukrainian librarians went about doing everything to preserve their books and digital collections, assure access to resources by students and researchers, and most amazingly, were back at their library just three weeks later.

In the OEG Voices Podcast studio, first row, from top left to right, guest Esperanza Zenon, Alan Levine, and Marcela Morales (OEglobal), and second row, Mira Buist-Zhuk (University of Groningen), Paola Corti (SPARC Europe), and Tetiana Kolesnykova (Ukrainian State University of Science and Technologies).
Not pictured OEWeek Guests Paul Stacey and Lorna Campbell.This was, on all fronts, a most remarkable episode just to be there. Thank you Tetiana, Paola, and Mira for making this possible. And please, after listening, add your comments and questions below in our OEG Community conversation space.

Download TranscriptDownloadReferences and Quotes for Episode 51

We are humans, we’re human beings. We are super resilient and flexible more than we think we are. And we are adaptable to new circumstances. And even when you think you’re not, you will find a way… to make it work.

….

It’s not just private life. Work is also a calling and a big part of their life indeed. And when you see that what you’re doing is meaningful, highly needed and requested by the community you’re trying to serve, it gives you the energy and the opportunity to go ahead, to go further, to persevere to go no matter what.

….

And work also serves as a distraction to people, of course serving your community, not just work in general, but serving your community as well. In order to go through all these explosions, tears, despair you need to distract yourself and preferably with something meaningful, something needed, something useful such as the work that the Tetiana and her colleagues are doing.

And in that way they also came up with lots of new ideas, creative path for achieving some new things and that is quite motivating and help them survive through those times, through that period.

Tetiana Kolesnykova via translation on resilience

Advocacy work of the Scientific Library to advance Open Education in Ukraine (OE Award for Excellence, in Open Resilience)
Ukrainian State University of Science and Technologies
- Scientific Library
  - Director’s Page
  - OER Information
  - OER Resources in Ukrainian
  - Scientific Library YouTube Channel
  - eaDNURT (digital repository)
  - e-journals
Open Education developments in Ukraine in times of crisis: A librarian’s perspective (translated letter from Tetiana shared by Paola Corti in OEG Connect, June 2022)

And we go back in time to February 2022, just before the full scale invasion happened. So that was just business as usual. Before that, of course, they were busy as any other university library in the world. Busy preparing a report for the previous year for 2021. They were busy talking about future opportunities, development possibilities for the library and for the staff.

They were just busy assessing the potential topics for the university based conference, an international conference that their university hosts. It’s an annual event that happens in September, October of each year. And for some reason, they were thinking of dedicating the central theme of the conference the crisis times, Education, researching in times of crisis.

Tetiana Kolesnykova via translation, speaking of the February 23, 2022, the day before the bombing of Dnipro

So the answer to this question goes back to 2009 when Tetiana and colleagues talked to the university management and some university researchers into hosting an institutional repository, which was a big step towards the openness and towards open science… the scientific library where Tetiana works and is director of, is the one managing and hosting that repository.

And so already in 2011 they managed to launch the first open access journal in cooperation with the faculty of humanities, the philosophy department they were proud of this in their region. The first in the region And today this journal still exists and it’s being indexed in the Web of Science. So it’s a continuous effort.

Building this expertise, building this capacity, they were able to launch two more open access journals. So in total, they’re now supporting three open access journals. One of them is a library centered, dedicated journal. It’s being indexed in Scopus as well. And it’s the only open journal in Ukraine related to library open access.

Tetiana Kolesnykova via translation on open access publishing

And so the next issue they had to resolve after making sure everybody’s at least safe, they had to decide what to do with their digital infrastructure, what to do with their digital objects and digital repositories they’ve been working so hard on, whether they needed to evacuate servers that were hosting all that information, all those digital objects.

[T]he reality of that situation was that its mostly women who were left working at the library, at the university in those war conditions. And it was quite scary to get out, scary to get out of the house with air raid alarms happening every 30 minutes or so. They were hiding in bomb shelters.

….

But already a few days after that , some of the colleagues started returning to the library, to the university, especially those who lived nearby or who could arrange the transportation because public transportation wasn’t working back then.

They had to return, they had to resolve some very crucial issues, some urgent tasks that they as a library had to take care of. And Tetiana is really grateful to her colleagues for their time and risking their lives literally while doing that.

….

So other librarians would understand this as well, says Tetiana. Every librarian knows that there is a sort of like a manual, what to do in emergency situations. And task number one is to try and rescue the books, try and rescue the objects you have in your library.

Tetiana Kolesnykova via translation on first efforts by the Scientific Library

90% of their teachers have already returned back to work, and they all work from the Ukraine. Most of the students are back too back to Ukraine. Of course, those who went to fight, who joined the Army both students and professors, they get extension of their contracts or extension of their study programs. Many have returned. And Tetiana is also happy to say that the student numbers for the next study year, for the next academic year are growing and they will be larger than they were last year.

It’s restoring a little bit even in such difficult circumstances.

…

They’re also donating their campus buildings to internally displaced, those from other regions of Ukraine that are now heavily affected by fighting, by the active war, people from Donetsk, Luhansk regions, people from Mykolaiv, from Kherson, from all those cities that are either currently occupied by Russia or have just been liberated by the Ukrainian army.

Tetiana Kolesnykova via translation on the current situation at the University

The irony of the situation is that the war actually accelerated the adoption of Open Education and OER. On the one hand, a desired outcome. On the other hand, the circumstances are far from ideal. So ironically, the war is playing in favor of Open Education… this situation now is not comparable to the situation as it was in 2009 in terms of the development of the topic of Open Science, Open Education at their university, because back then when they were just starting the teachers, it was quite difficult. The teachers were laughing.

They were accusing them of trying to infringe on their intellectual property. Oh, why would I, submit my article or why would I do things in the open anyway. The situation has changed dramatically by now despite everything.

Tetiana Kolesnykova via translation on an unexpected outcomes of the war situation

Our open licensed music for this episode is a track called War Mode by Kirk Osamayo licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.found, like most of our intro music, in the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).

The introduction created with the OEG Voices Mixer features voices of Shinta H, Florence D, Clint L, Paul S, Lena P, Patrina L, Terry G, Bonni S, Vera K, Lisa Y, Shannon S, Alex E, Ajita D, and Rajiv J. (learn how to add your voice to the mix).

Again, on a production note, this was another episode we used Descript for transcribing and editing audio that has enhanced our ability to edit and transcribe our show.

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As a followup to our January news story “Connecting Back to the Roots of OEGlobal at MIT” we sought to hear more about MIT’s open education efforts in 2023. After reaching out to our rep, Curt Newton (Director of MIT OpenCourseWare, OCW) to organize a podcast session, we are pleased to share this conversation with Curt along with Sarah Hansen, MIT OpenCourseWare senior manager, and Chris Capozzola, Senior Associate Dean for Digital Learning at MIT.

Curt shared the excitement and start up atmosphere of the first years of OCW and how its mission really was that of the institution itself, to share knowledge publicly. But most of the excitement in the conversation was about the recognition of the world wide impact of OCW and a new effort for MIT to want to actively listen to the global community to serve even better the learners it reaches “beyond the Dome.”

The iconic “Great Dome” atop Building 10 on the MIT Campus. Maclaurin Buildings & The Great Dome at MIT (Cambridge, MA) flickr photo by @CarShowShooter shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) licenseListen in for more, and you will gain an appreciation for not just the technology of OCW but the humanity behind it plus the continued drive at MIT to share openly and globally because it remains a core mission of the institution. Plus, you can learn the story of “Tim” the mascot ;-).

We are excited about the interest Curt, Sarah, and Chris expressed for connecting with the global open education community. Listen in and then add your ideas below in the OEG Connect conversation about this episode.

Download TranscriptDownloadReferences and Quotes for Episode 50* Connecting Back to the Roots of OEGlobal at MIT (OEGlobal News) * MIT Open Learning * MIT OpenCourseWare + OCW Stories + OCW on YouTube * MIT Educator Initiative * MIT Great Dome (MIT Technology Review) * MIT Infinite Corridor (Wikipedia) * Chalk Radio Podcast + Unpacking Misconceptions about Language & Identities with Prof. Michel DeGraff (Chalk Radio Episode) * MIT History Department * Tim the Beaver mascot * US Government Open Science Announcements from Federal Agencies * OSTP Issues Guidance to Make Federally Funded Research Freely Available Without Delay (US Whitehouse) * Creative Commons Open Climate Campaign

I don’t know how to describe it, but you walk down the halls and you’re just inspired by the work everybody’s doing, and this really funny thing happens. You start to feel like you can do those things too. Like if I just have access to the right materials, I could learn this stuff. It’s nothing I’ve ever experienced anywhere else.

It’s completely inspirational. And I think through our work, that’s what we’re trying to share through OCW and other projects is that feeling of you can do this. You know, if you have the right materials, you can learn and do anything. And so I think that’s something that maybe people don’t realize until they come to MIT, that this energy is real.

….

And actually my whole goal in doing this is to help people outside of MIT feel like they’re here with us, under the dome, walking down the Infinite Corridor with their favorite professor for 15 minutes between classes. Like I want them to have that same experience of magic that we get right here on campus.

Sarah Hansen on what it’s like to work at MIT

I think I would add that that authenticity is not just in the podcast, the educator insights offerings, but it’s actually in the course materials themselves. We try to let that just unfold as naturally as possible and that’s why OpenCourseWare materials don’t have the feel of like a really polished kind of corporate education. You feel like you’re at MIT. And our faculty are so different in the way that they operate in the classroom. And we try to kind of showcase that as much as we can.

Chris Capozzola on MIT faculty reflections in the Chalk Radio podcast

The stakes in many ways have never been higher [and MIT] has a special ability to put a stake in the ground for open and to be a voice and an advocate for all things open, right? Not just OpenCourseWare, right, but open access materials open, open source code, open platforms, open protocols, all of that. And there is both a need for it and a real energy around it that I think we can really tap into.

Chris Capozzola on MIT OCW in 2023

I think we all celebrate that very tangible and impactful demonstration of what Open can do. I know it’s a thing that’s referenced when we’re talking about, the power of continuing to expand and grow our open capabilities. You know, I’m thrilled to see, things like the recent US White House announcement about pushing, for stronger open access to research policies.

Curt Newton on openness in 2023

So we are pretty excited to begin a next chapter, which is really focused on collaborations with other people in the open ecosystem, and that’s gonna begin with a lot of listening. We’ve brought a new colleague on board, Shira Segal, whose job will be to listen to people in the open ecosystem, understand what their successes are, their challenges, their needs and to work with us to understand that and then to find points of connection where we can support the work of people in ecosystem.

We can shape what we do it,w hen and if we can, in response to those needs. And we’re just really excited about two, three, ideas, oh my gosh, they like keep bubbling up… So for one of them, Una, we’re excited to begin working with community colleges to see if we can support faculty in teaching with resources from OCW, but more importantly, adapting them to make learning really powerful in their own settings.

Sarah Hansen on new efforts at OCW

Our open licensed music for this episode is a track called Pioneer by Simon Mathewson licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License found, like most of our intro music, in the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).

The introduction created with the OEG Voices Mixer features voices of Maren D, Ajita D, Rowena B, Shannon S, Cynthia O, Andreia I, Lena P, Robert S, Nicole N, Wayne M, Isla H-F, Lori-Beth L, Bonni S, and Judith S (learn how to add your voice to the mix).

Again, on a production note, this was a third episode we used Descript for transcribing and editing audio.

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We are continuing our series of conversations with recent winners of the OE Awards for Excellence. In this episode we take you to Lund Sweden to learn more about the far reaching achievements of Ebba Ossiannilsson who was recognized with an award in the Leadership category.

You will hear about an impressive array of key Open Education projects and efforts Ebba is involved in and/or leading, hence the well-deserved award presented to

an individual who has demonstrated significant leadership and longstanding involvement with Open Education. A person who has made significant and clear contributions to the furtherance of the Open Education movement, whose contributions to Open Education have spanned regions and/or had a global impact.

In this episode you will learn more about Ebba’s interests, motivations, and also a bit about the city of Lund she clearly enjoys living in, from a conversation we recorded just before the end of the 2022 year.

In the OEG Voices Studio with Ebba Ossiannilsson and Alan LeviuneEpisode 49 TranscriptDownloadReferences and Quotes for Episode 49

Actually I’m very, very concerned and involved with and try to connect everything what I’m doing. First of all, of course, to the SDG goals, but not just Number Four, but also the others because number four has an impact and influence on all the others. And I never talk about Open Education, OER or the open movement without, starting to talk about the SDGs and the issue of human rights and equity and social justice, because I think this overall, mission is very important.

Ebba Ossiannilsson

Innovation 4 Quality (Ebba’s professional web site)
- Profile (LinkedIn)
- Publications (ResearchGate)
- Swedish Association for Open, Flexible and Distance Education (SADE)
- Teaching/Advising
  - Kaunas University of Technology (Lithuania)
  - Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand)
2022 OE Award for Excellence in Leadership (OEGlobal)
Lund Sweden (Wikipedia)
- Lund University (Wikipedia)

I think that’s, that’s very important and also I’m very concerned and committed to, the initiative by UNESCO about a new Social Contract for Education. Of course I think really we need to have another direction for the educational agenda, not at least to take the learner’s perspective. And really to see what is the role of education and how education needs to both organize but also perform both the content, format and methods related to because the global challenges need to be solved to global solutions as well. And that is an interdisciplinary work. So that is why we need to have a new social contract for education.

Ebba Ossiannilsson on the new Social Contract for Education

Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations)
- Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all (UN SDG Goal 4)
Futures of Education: A New Social Contract (UNESCO)
OER Advocacy Committee (ICDE)
International Council on Badges and Credentials (ICoBC)

What I’m really, hoping for and working on is about the implementation and mainstreaming of the OER Recommendation. I think it is so crucial and still there just a lot about awareness raising and that is important as well. There really needs to be this implementation on the broad front and mainstreaming in all five areas. So that is work. I will like to continue it and, do what I can to advocate for [the implementation of the OER Recommendation].

Ebba Ossiannilsson on her focus for 2023

Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (UNESCO)
- Swedish Version
Annotating the UNESCO Recommendation on OER (OEGlobal)

So then when I got the message that I was the winner of the award for open leadership, it was, fantastic. I was humbled, honored and so pleased, of course. It was fantastic. But I used to say when people are asking me about it I will say that all of us who are working in this field on openness are winners . Everything what we are doing may count and everything one person or one individual can’t do anything, but together we can do a lot….

But to be recognized by a global community really means, a lot.

Ebba Ossiannilsson on earning the OE Award for Excellence in Leadership

Our open licensed music for this episode was selected in honor of Ebba’s dedication to the UN Sustainable Goals is a track called Sustainable Survival by The Cow Goes Moo,, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License found, like most of our intro music, in the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).

The introduction created with the OEG Voices Mixer features voices of Judith S, Ajita D, Igor L, Una D, Robert S, Jonathan P, Gardner C, Cynthia O, Nicole N, Kevin H, Catherine C, Maren D, Clint L, Alex E, and Verena R (learn how to add your voice to the mix).

Also on a production note, this was the second episode we used Descript for transcribing and editing audio, it feels like a game changer for podcast production!

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Our 2023 season commences a sequence of conversations with the people recognized in the most recent Open Education Awards for Excellence. It is fitting to start with Robert Schuwer, who was recognized with an OE Individual Award for Lifetime Achievement. As we hear in the episode, it might take a lifetime to cover all of Robert’s contributions to Open Education.

The OEG Voices podcast studio traveled to visit Robert in the village of Malden, just south of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Listen in to learn about his early influences, a career path from classroom teacher to computer science professional, and ultimately his rise as a key figure for implementing open education and open educational resources on a national level in the Netherlands. His work in the field and influence as a mentor has extended far beyond that.

In Robert’s voice and his descriptions of his career you will understand why he has been honored with this lifetime achievement OE Award for Excellence. At the time of the recording, Robert was days away from his retirement as a professor Open Educational Resources from Fontys University of Applied Sciences, but it is not surpising, as you hear, he will remain engaged in research on the sustainability of OERs. As a bonus, hear Robert describe the metaphor meaning of the black hole image in his zoom background and also learn about his passionate interest in classical music.

In the OEG Podcast Studio with (clockwise from top left), Robert Schuwer, Alan Levine, Paul Stacey (in one of his last appearances as OEGlobal Executive Director), and Marcela Morales.Episode 48 TranscriptDownloadReferences and Quotes for Episode 46

Actually the technical issues were the least difficult, [but it was] how to interest board members, how to interest students, how to interest teachers to be part of this, to adopt the sharing and re -sharing and reusing of resources.

…

So my real interest is in what can we do to widen adoption of OER and overcome all those barriers, which are mostly cultural barriers and psychological barriers and not so much technical barriers.

Robert Schuwer

2022 OE Award For Excellence for Lifetime Achievement
OpenER (Open University of the Netherlands)
Wikiwijs (Wikiwise) project
- Kennisnet (primary and secondary educators using Wikiwisj)
Fontys University UNESCO chair for Open Educational Resources
- OER Knowledge Cloud
GO-GN (Global OER Graduate Network)
SURF Special Interest Group in Open Education
HBO SAMEN hbo-verpleegkunde (Good Practice Professional Community, Nursing)
- Hbo Verpleegkunde (Nursing Project in Wikiwijs)
Towards Digital (open) Educational Resources (national acceleration program)
- Digitaliseringsimpuls Onderwijs (Digital Transformation Impulse for Education)
Robert Schuwer (web site)
- About Robert
- Open Educational Resources Adoption: Where Do We Go From Here? (Dec 1, 2022 blog post)
- Classical Music site

Those are two important milestones to come to this situation that working with OER should be as normal as working with classical textbooks was 10 or 20 years ago for each teacher and for each student also.

That’s what’s going on in Netherlands. And that is what I also trust that will be the case in 2030, that was also how I ended my blog, because when I started in 2009, 2010, Fred Mulder said to get OER mainstream, it’ll take 20 years.

Well, 10 years have been past since then, so 2030, then it is 20 years later. I think all the conditions are now. There’s the UNESCO OER recommendation, which our government has signed. There’s a UNESCO Open Science recommendation. The Netherlands had signed it. We have this agreement with all board members from higher education.

We have this program, which is huge with a lot of money from the government where this OER is part of this program. And there it is a lot of very interested people who want to go further with it. So, if the lights are green, it is now or never.

And I’m convinced it is now. People really will take the responsibility and work on this. And of course there will be drawbacks. Certainly there will be barriers, but I’m convinced that in 2030, this goal, this picture I have in my mind, will be a reality then in the Netherlands.

Robert Schuwer

Our open licensed music for this episode was selected in honor of Robert’s music interest, a track called Beethoven – Bagatelle op.119 nº9 by Circus Marcus licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License found, like most of our intro music, in the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).**

The introduction created with the OEG Voices Mixer features voices of Robert along with Lori-Beth L, Ajita D, Terry G, Catherine C, Gardner C, Lisa Y, Alex E, Judith S, Jonathan P, Bonni S, Clint L, and Shinta H (learn how to add your voice to the mix).

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Just sneaking this episode in before the old year ends, I (Alan Levine) wanted to share hints at the next few episodes of OEG Voices that will be published in January 2023 and also spout a few thoughts about formats, guests, and ideas for our podcast series.

So while this could have been done easily as a blog post, I thought, why not just record it? This is our last episode then for 2022…

2022/365/340 The Mic Is On! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)Episode 47 TranscriptDownloadReferences for Episode 47 As of December 31, 2022 we have published 47* episodes of OEG Voices. You can view them: + As a single list in order of most recent first + From locations on a world map + Episodes By Year - 2022 - 2021 - 2020 + featuring winners of OE Awards for Excellence + featuring members of CCCOER (Community College Consortium of OER) + recorded in Spanish + Regional Perspective episodes * Participate in OEG Connect * Introduction Voice Mixer + Add your voice to the mix * Subscribe to Podcast: + Apple Podcasts + Google Podcasts + Spotify + by email + RSS Feed * Free Music Archive + OE Global Curator Page + OEG Voices Intro Music Playlist

Oh, and our podcast host forgot to mention we have added a top menu item that will translate the web site (not the audio) to other languages via Google Translate

OEG-Stimmen “Ein Podcast von Open Education Global”, OEGの声 “Open Education Global のポッドキャスト”, Голоси OEG “Подкаст від Open Education Global”, etc

OEG Voices “A Podcast from Open Education Global” translated into German, Japanese, and Ukrainian just to show a few examples

The OEG Voices web site now offers Google Translation for all contentWe will be back in the new year with more voices of open educators… if you have ideas, suggestions, please reply below via OEG Connect.

Our music for this episode is Going Forward Looking Back by Podington Bear licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License found, like most of our intro music, in the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).

The introduction created with the OEG Voices Mixer features voices of Cynthia O, Lori-Beth L, Paul S, Ajita D, Gino F, Shannon S, Isla H-F, Rowena B, Clint L, Vera K, Shinta H, and Terry G (learn how to add your voice to the mix).

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For a perspective on openness in action a bit outside of the higher education circles, in this episode we talk with representatives of an organization that not only works in the open, but lives it as We Are Open. I’ve known and collaborated for many years with both Laura Hilliger and Doug Belshaw who have roots working in education, but now are core members of the We Are Open Cooperative, that lives and works the principles of openness with a wide range of organizations.

In our conversation we hear from Laura and Doug about working openly as a social cooperative organization, how they help organizations adopt open practices, developing and supporting communities of practices, open badges (and the Keep Badges Weird community), social media, the fediverse, system change, and more.

For more visit We Are Open and make note especially of their open resources at Learn With WAO.

In the OEG Voices studio with (left to right) Laura Hilliger, Doug Belshaw, and podcast button clicker Alan LevineEpisode 46 transcriptDownloadReferences and Quotes for Episode 46

It’ll be seven years in May and we just get to do some cool stuff. What are some of the people that we worked with before? Well, we’ve worked with people like Greenpeace, with tech companies, with nonprofits, and all different kinds of people doing community work, doing courses, helping them work more openly, like Sport England at the moment. They’ve got lots of different bodies that look after Basketball England and Hockey England and they don’t work together, really. We’re helping them work together and share data and share ideas and approaches and just take those first steps that lots of people listening to this will just take for granted, but actually are really needed to open up organizations.

Doug Belshaw on the We Are Open co-op

I was just reflecting on the different avenues that clients come in from. I think one of the things that we do quite actively is we promote open working. We do get clients come in that want to be a little bit closed down and we take it upon ourselves to push our clients towards being more open. We very, very rarely take on projects where we can’t be completely open. We do have some, but most of them we go into it saying, okay, but we’re going to want to write about this on the internet, we’re going to want to talk about it. We want to be open by default and this is really important for us because we’ve been involved in openness so long, it’s actually hard to not be open about things.

Laura Hilliger on being open by default

We Are Open (WAO) Cooperative
- Tools and Approaches
- Learn With WAO
  - What We Talk About When We Talk About Open (email course)
- TAO of WAO (podcast)
Laura Hilliger (web site)
- 2020 Women in IT Digital Leader of the Year
- Writing on openness (medium.com)
- @epilepticrabbit@mastodon.social (Mastodon)
Doug Belshaw
- Open Thinkering (blog)
- Thought Shrapnel (ideas)
- @dajb@social.coop (Mastodon)

I think a lot of people think that if you just build the space for people to show up to, then people will show up, but that’s not actually how it works. There is architecture behind a successful community of practice and there are people who promote the principles and values of that community and work to network people together and try to have it be a fun, welcoming space or well, welcoming, at least, maybe not always fun, depending on how serious a particular community is. Activist communities might not necessarily be what I would call as fun, but they’re organizing around a particular set of ideals and that is architected.

But if it is too strong-arm architected, if the moderation of the community or the organization who’s running the community, funding the community tries to put in too much structure or doesn’t pay attention to what people in the community are actually doing, then that can stifle it as well. For me, community building is definitely a balancing act between providing structure for people so that they have a place that they can engage and letting go of structure so that that engagement, regardless of what it is, is something that furthers the community.

Laura Hilliger on community building

5 Practical Tips for Working Openly
Buzzing Communities: How to Build Bigger, Better, and More Active Online Communities (2012, Richard Millington)
Howard Rheingold

…especially if you work in academia, you might have been exposed to badges in the early days and anytime you are exposed to something quite early in the maturity of something, you think you know it and then it evolves and changes and then you see it again and you have to revisit your previous opinion. One of the things that we’ve learned over the last 10 years of Badges is that the motivation for why it is that you want to earn a badge is important. As Laura said there, there’s badges that you are working towards because you can see them. There’s stealth badges that you don’t know that you can earn that are just given to you in a secret way. We’ve also learned that if you go to an event and you’re literally issued the patch, the sew-on patch of a badge that you’ve earned, that’s a really powerful thing.

Doug Belshaw on approaches to badging

Keep Badges Weird (community space)
- KBW Overview
Fediverse Pioneer Badge (OEG Connect)

Because one of the things about social media for years and years and years has been behavioral economics. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, those tools are designed to have people act a certain way and to have them value certain kinds of things like attention. The Fediverse doesn’t work like that. Mastodon as a short-form blogging platform doesn’t care about attention and doesn’t reward you for having more attention. I wonder, what does it really mean for society? Does it mean that people that are going to stop caring what a rando on the internet thinks? I don’t think that that’s a change that’s going to come very quickly because I think that the behavioral economics of social media platforms were based on capitalism anyway. But it is a ripe rabbit hole for philosophical discussion on how we as human beings behave, for sure.

Laura Hilliger on the Fediverse

I think there’s lots of people making grand pronouncements about what it means for society and this and that and whatever. I don’t particularly want Mastodon to go mainstream, and that’s for two reasons. Firstly, because it would mean I have to go get out of there quickly. I remember seeing a bumper sticker years ago saying, if you’re not on the edge, you’re taking up too much room or something like that. That stuck with me in terms of my career and innovation and stuff. Chase the weird stuff. But secondly, Mastodon, as people are probably sick of me saying, Mastodon is not the Fediverse. It’s like saying, oh, are you on Gmail when actually you mean email? It’s one part of it. I’m experimenting with Pixel Fed, which is a bit like Instagram.

Doug Belshaw on the Fediverse

Mastodon (federated messaging)
Pixelfed (federated image sharing)
- Exercise.cafe (Doug’s Pixelfed instance)
Misskey (federated microblogging)

I was just going to try to loop back to your question that kicked off this bit of conversation and thinking about what people can do inside of higher education institutions or other organizations. I think what Doug just said there about questioning constraints. I think one of the things that we don’t tend to question is some of the social norms that we’re brought up to understand. The idea of having a boss, which is something that at the co-op, we make fun of this idea of having a boss. Somebody is going to boss you, a full-grown adult, around and tell you what to do. We know that that’s not what good leadership looks like or a good manager.
You’ve heard the phrase that people don’t quit jobs, they quit managers. We know what good leadership looks like and good leadership looks like the boss treating their subordinates, which is also a language that we shouldn’t be using, in a way that respects their self-autonomy and their what they can actually bring to the table. People have different skills and competencies, they have different talents. Questioning those social norms around hierarchy inside of higher education institutions is really important because we are not perfect. Our societies aren’t perfect and there’s always room for improvement.

Laura Hilliger on organizational leadership and social norms

Cramlington Learning Village had this amazing approach to pedagogy and everything like that. I wish I could have sent my kids there. They just basically said, you have to start off doing innovation before things start to decline. Everything has an arc to it, like a tennis ball being served over a net and you have to push onto the next thing before you start your decline.

When you start that next thing, there’s going to be a little bit of awkwardness and pushback. Actually things will get a little bit weird, not as productive for a while, but so you can move onto the next level. It’s like an S-shaped curve. That’s always stuck with me even since I saw it about 15 years ago, because that’s a hard thing to do with clients in any organization, trying to say there’s going to be a little bit of awkwardness and weirdness while we do this innovation work, but then you’re going to open up these massive opportunities to do some amazing, amazing things.

Doug Belshaw on the shape of change

How to Unf*ck Your Organisation (WAO free email course)
Feminism is for Everybody, Especially Educators (WAO free email course)
The Sigmoid Curve (pdf)
Cramlington Learning Village
Two Loops Model, Our Theory of Change (Burkana Institute)

Our open licensed music for this episode is a track called Together by Au fond du car licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License found, like most of our intro music, in the Free Music Archive

The introduction created with the OEG Voices Mixer features voices of Ajita D, Doug B, Kevin H, Judith S, Laura H, Rajiv J, Maren D, Alex E, Jöran M-M, Bonni S, and Verena R (learn how to add your voice to the mix).

Buzzing Communities: How to Build Bigger, Better, and More Active Online Communities

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In this episode we take you to Seville, Spain, to hear from OEGlobal’s new Executive Director, Andreia Inamorato, who is in her first few weeks of this role. Joining in from Vancouver, Canada, is outgoing Executive Director Paul Stacey who announced his retirement in February, 2022.

This conversation is aimed at helping the OEG community get to know Andreia, her extensive background and interests in open education, Paul’s perspective on the last five years of his leadership role, and maybe a peek inside to what a day is like for a global organization leader.

Listen in for an informal conversation, a few laughs, singing, but more than that, to hear both Andreia and Paul share their perspectives on the role and potential for open education going forward into 2023.

In the OEG Voices studio with Andreia Inamorato, Paul Stacey, and Alan LevineEpisode 45 TranscriptDownloadReferences and Quotes for Episode 45

I think that open education is a compound of elements that we can choose what makes most sense to us at a particular time in a particular context. And it can range from a variety of things starting from perhaps a philosophy of openness as a value. I want to be an open educator. I want to live in a more open and democratic society, more inclusive.

And that means inclusiveness in all senses, lowering barriers to education, financial barriers for people who have some sort of physical challenges, accessibility. So it can be all that discourse around inclusion, but it could also mean other things like more access to knowledge overall in general for anyone, anyone who wants to upscale or re-skill, there are so many opportunities for everyone to engage of open education. There is not only one type of profile of person that can benefit from it. So I actually think that we don’t need to have a single description of open education. I think that rather we should really try and engage with the concept and try and understand how broad it is and then find ourselves within that.

Andreia Inamorato

OEGlobal Board Announces Andreia Inamorato dos Santos as the OEGlobal Executive Director (OEGlobal News)
Andreia Inamorato dos Santos (Andreia’s web site)
- OEGlobal announces new leadership: thank you note (blog)
  - Future of Education is Open
  - Projects
Joint Research Center (European Commission)
- Opening up Education: A Support Framework for Higher Education Institutions

And so for me, the global part of open education is a bit like that. It’s a bit like travel. You’re experiencing how a particular culture embraces the underlying principles and then enacts them, puts them into practice. I think that from an OE Global point of view, organizationally, I’ve always thought that in some ways we have the mandate to bring together the practitioners and the understandings of open education globally under one central organization, if you will that can help advocate and advance it no matter what part of the world you’re in.

And in some ways, Open Education Global looks for what is common, what’s similar about open education in all parts of the world. And let’s enable and help that flourish by bringing people together to exchange best practice and knowledge about it. But then on the other hand, we also have to acknowledge and support and foster the uniqueness of open education in particular parts of the world. And balancing both, enabling the kind of universal things about open education common at a global level while still acknowledging and embracing and supporting the unique diverse ways in which open education’s put into practice is a very interesting element of working at OE Global and I’ve certainly tried to make both happen.

Paul Stacey

Open Education Global Board of Directors Announces Upcoming Transition for Executive Director, Paul Stacey (OEGlobal News)
Next Steps (Paul Stacey blog)

I think of my role is more strategic than anything else. It’s really try and see the wonderful things that OE Global is already doing and how we can do even more by looking at the new strategic plan that has been developed and how we can tap into that a bit more and keep on doing what you’re doing well and reframing some other things and engaging more with members. So yes, there’s a lot about it that has to do with thinking, thinking time and taking the time to think strategically and engage with people.

Andreia Inamorato

Open for Public Good (OEGlobal Strategic Plan)

I think that’s one of the things that we need to see is a recognition that open is not an add-on, but is a core, what I think of as an operating system. It’s not something that you add onto the side. It ought to be at the core of what you’re trying to accomplish, but that takes different strategy and different investment, and those are big system changes and sometimes those are the hardest to make. But I am seeing some inklings of that. I’ll say, here’s a few more, very short. I’ll make this short, but here’s a few more things that I think are on the radar screen and in new ways compared to say even when I started five years ago, open pedagogy for sure, I think is really a huge thing of major importance. And I’m looking forward and excited by the way that’s being embraced by faculty and students, especially students, and the involvement of them in producing, let’s call them, digital public goods that generate some benefit to society.

Paul Stacey

I think that social issues now are very important at the core of our political agenda.And through open education, we can help tackle them even by doing simple things as we’ve always done. When we create an open online course, not even necessarily a book, and just by making it available, we’re making knowledge available to people who really want to know from trusted sources such as schools, colleges, universities, so we can teach people more about a more sustainable society, financially speaking, climate wise, so and so forth. So I really think that if we engage further with the social aspects and try and make open education more relevant in terms of social challenges, we can even open new roots for action when it comes to openness in general. So it’s not only about government and teachers and students anymore, to me it’s now about citizens’ engagement as a whole, an opportunity.

Andreia Inamorato

And then I do think where there’s some uncertainty in my mind is around AI, in particular, artificial intelligence. And that’s been brought up once already in this podcast. I just wonder what the role of open is there. And clearly some of the early examples of AI have been treading on what might be thought of as the principles of open without really any repercussions. So that’s one that I’m actually personally investing in right now as I try to bring up my own learning and understanding about what the role of AI is.

Paul Stacey

As I said before, one needs to engage with the concept to truly understand it. So it would be great to understand and to hear from members and know members their barriers, but also their hopes and wishes, what they think is going really well, or anything that they think would be available for us to focus on that could really bring global value. So I think that listening to experiences in general from members would be fantastic, and I’m very open for that. In fact, Alan, I would really like to open up some space in my agenda as of the beginning of 2023 to have one-on-one conversations with members that are willing to, short conversations in the beginning for them to get to know me, for me to get to know them. And I think this will be a good opportunity for me to increase that knowledge in terms of the community.

Andreia Inamorato

There was much much more in this conversation (including some bonus content at the end of the show). And as Andreia mentioned you can look forward in 2023 to taking up her invitation to schedule a one-on-one conversation with her. And you can always be part of the ongoing conversations with the community in OEG Connect.

Our open licensed music for this episode is a track called Transition by Metre licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License found, like most of our intro music, in the Free Music Archive

The introduction created with the OEG Voices Mixer features voices of Rowena B, Judith S, Shannon S, Jonathan P, Kevin H, Lena P, Andreia I, Isla H-F, Alex E, Shinta H, Andy L, Paul S, Rajiv J, and Ajita D (learn how to add your voice to the mix).

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This episode number is quite out of numerical sequence, and I have to humbly apologize to our guest, Bonni Stachowiak, host of the Teaching in Higher Ed (TiHE) podcast, as we recorded this conversation months ago this year!

On the podcast air since 2014, Teaching in Higher Ed is “a space to explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning.” In addition to podcasting, Bonni is the Dean of Teaching and Learning at Vanguard University as well as actively teaching as a Professor of Business and Management.

As an example of taking OEG Voices “on the road” by recording episodes in the homes of other podcasts, Bonni published a copy of our conversation as episode of TiHE 405 in March, 2022. Despite the fact her production team sent me a polished recording and a transcript, I fell down on getting it published. But better late than never, it’s going out on the road finally as OEG Voices episode 31, and as the last one was episode 44, we are out of numerical sequence.

There is a bit of serendipity of numbers, as Bonni and I have a common connection of noticing and taking photos of meaningful numbers, mine is 106 and hers is 208 (you will have to ask us for the back story). And in time for our podcast recording, in fact I scheduled it as a timed tweet, my old truck’s odometer had hit her magic number the week before.

If my scheduling chops are working, right now I am in the @tihighered studio with @bonni208

Let's see if I can distract her with the double double 208 photo of my odometer taken last night.

Also, note the time of this tweet. pic.twitter.com/GnR8TFiQ3s

— Alan Levine (@cogdog) February 18, 2022

Beyond my embarrassment of podcast production chops and fascination with numbers, Bonni and I had a fantastic conversation about openness in the broadest sense, what it means to enter someone’s space via a video conference camera, being with people through just audio, classroom observations, motivations for open sharing, annotation (and annotating faucets), on making mistakes in public, and more.

Listen in, our conversation from February feels just as timely today:

Episode 31 Transcript (from TiHE audio)DownloadReferences and Quotes for Episode 31* Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast 405: Open Education as a Way of Being * MIT – Open Courseware Initiative * How to explain open educational resources to students, in terms of the value of college? (Loïc Plé) * Why does he do it and please never stop. (Terry Greene) * “How do you guide people into the most appropriate level/literacy for the moment, and get them started? (Joe Murphy) * What the SPLOT is that? * Jon Udell * Hamburger Menu on NetNarratives website * Alan Levine’s shower interface photos on Flickr * Remi Kalir * Annotated 13 Ways of Looking at a Sticky Note * Jeffrey W. McClurken * Mike Caulfield’s SIFT Check Starter Course * Bonni’s YouTube playlist: SIFT (Four Moves) * Episode 399: Satire from McSweeney’s * Julie Cadman-Kim replies to a question about if her fantastic article is available in audio form * CogDog’s Pinboard.in digital bookmarks * Gold Medal Ribbon ice cream

Thanks again (and many apologies for being so late), Bonni. If you do not listen to her show, add Teaching in Higher Ed to your podcast app.

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From alpine mountains to Sonoran desert the “Grand” state of Arizona has magnificent and diverse landscapes. Listen to this episode as we learn about the equally described landscape of open education at three community college systems plus how Arizona is working to collaborate on OER at a statewide level.

This is another in a series of episodes bringing you the voices of CCCOER members and a new category of shows that will highlight similar regional cooperation. You will hear about open education initiatives at the Maricopa County Community College District, Yavapai College, and Pima Community College as well as the Arizona Regional OER Conference (OERizona) and the Open Text Books for Rural Arizona project.

We are excited to have you listen to Lisa Young and Matthew Bloom from the Maricopa County Community College District (Lisa is also an OEGlobal Board member), Megan Crossfield from Yavapai Community College (and representing the Rural Arizona project), and Josie Milliken from Pima Community College.

In the OEG Voices studio with (clockwise from top left) Lisa Young, Matthew Bloom, Megan Crossfield, Alan Levine, Una Daly, and Josie Milliken.Episode 44 TranscriptDownloadReferences and Quotes for Episode 44

We have made substantial progress in the last year particularly. We started off of course with our Achieving the Dream initiative, which we can speak more about later. .. Then last year expanding OER was part of our college’s strategic goals and so I had the honor and the pleasure of being an owner of that goal or a sub owner. We participated in the 2021-2022 AAC&U OER institute with a real diverse selection of members from our institution with helped us get the year off to a great start in terms of our planning for the year that followed. Then, from that work in the fall of last year, we developed an OER task force because we wanted to expand this initiative college-wide, rather it being consolidated amongst a team of approximately five to six people.

Josie Milliken, Pima Community College

Pima Community College, PimaOnline and Achieving the Dream Open Educational Resources = Student Textbook Savings
OER and Open Textbooks (PimaOnline)
Pima Community College 2021-2025 Strategic Plan (includes OER)
AAC&U OER Institute

We [at Maricopa] started almost 10 years ago… it will be 10 years in 2023, which we were very excited to celebrate. When we started, we were really looking at increasing access and cost savings with our Maricopa Millions project. A few years ago, Matthew was able to rebrand us to Open Maricopa, which lended itself to a lot of really good work in regard to open education practices, taking it beyond cost savings and access to equity to inclusiveness.

Lisa Young, Maricopa Community College

As Lisa was saying the idea of transitioning the brand from Maricopa Millions… was the implication that it was about saving students’ money, which was great because Lisa and the team that founded Maricopa Millions set out to save students $5 million over the course of the first five years. It ended up being almost like $13 million that we estimate students save because of faculty decisions to use OER or low cost, no cost materials. But the idea was that it was time to evolve the project. The initiative was deeply institutionalized. I was in the role of the first person to be chosen in the role of the OER coordinator for the District. I was fully reassigned to that work. One of the things that I really wanted to try to do was focus on pedagogy and equity and all of these other things that we can use open education to try to address basically, beyond the cost savings.

Matthew Bloom (Scottsdale Community College)

Maricopa Millions Project
- Incentivizing Faculty Leads to over $11 Million in Savings (CCCOER)
Maricopa Open Digital Press
Open Educational Resources (Academic Support)
Maricopa Open Educational Resource Learning System (MOER) (formerly MathAS)
OER Professional Development Competencies Framework (Maricopa)
- L’Initiative francophone pour la formation à distance des maîtres, IFADEM (Open Educational Resources Competency Framework)

At Yavapai College, we’ve been doing OER for over three years, but really formalized the initiative in fall 2020, which correlated with our Higher Learning Commission quality initiative report. We put together a whole quality initiative research study, and it was a two year study that concluded in spring of 2022. We submitted the report and have some great findings and research that we got from it.

Megan Crossfield, Yavapai College

OER at Yavapai College
White Paper: Improving Student Success Through the Use of Open Educational Resources (Yavapai College)

The cost of textbooks and the cost of higher learning for the population in rural Arizona is really causing them to not be able to earn a degree or certificate to move along. Then also being able to get jobs to have a standard of living. That’s why the grant was really written to focus on colleges within rural Arizona.

We just concluded our first year of the project and we have done amazing work. I am amazed at how much has happened in one year… We created consortium wide standards. We created procedures that other institutions can adopt and adapt so they’re not having to start from square one essentially, and being able to utilize that foundation. Then what we’re also trying to work on is really looking at cross-institutional collaboration because one of the reasons we strategically wrote the grant for rural colleges is because they’re smaller.

And so we are using OER Commons for our shared repository– we have a hub, and on that hub is where all of the material is going to be located. That way, anyone in the state, but anyone in the general public.. can access the materials, they can adopt them and use them within their own classes. Really trying to increase access to OER, not only increasing the development of OER.

Megan Crossfield on the Open Textbooks for Rural Arizona project

Open Textbooks for Rural Arizona
- OER Commons Hub

When you reference OER Arizona… that actually grew out of something that Lisa and the people who were in leadership at Maricopa Millions before I took over for that period, they had these annual OER Dialogue Days where they would invite someone to come — they were Maricopa focused.

But one year we had Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani as our keynote, and we invited people from Arizona State University, University of Arizona. I think we may have had some people from some of the other community colleges. I think we had some folks from the Yavapai there that day. It was pretty clear at the end of that event that there was a lot of excitement across the state and that this kind of thing needed to be more generally promoted, publicly promoted, so that it wasn’t just like, hey, this is for Maricopa folks, right? We started the Arizona Regional OER conference and we are now in our fifth year. That’s really super exciting. We have a pretty diverse set of folks involved in the planning committee, as I already mentioned. We typically have somewhere between two, 300 people register for the conference and maybe about 100 or 200 who actually participate.

Matthew Bloom on the Arizona OER Regional Conference

Arizona Regional OER Conference (OERizona)
Serving Social justice & Pedagogical Innovation with Open Educational Practices (Rajiv Jhangiani Maricopa Dialogue Day March 2018)

[At the] 2021 Arizona OER Regional Conference I attended a showcase in which I saw … the renewable assignments that were produced through the UNSDG Open Pedagogy Faculty Fellowship. I was fully just enamoured and I immediately thought Pima needs to be part of this fellowship. I started doing searches, sending emails, and one of the emails ended up getting routed, fortunately, to Debbie Baker at Maricopa, who… then connected me with the fellowship opportunity. Pima was able to participate with twelve fellows in that 2021 cohort… Now, we’ll begin recruiting for our third year this upcoming winter.

… General education is shifting. Along with that, there is a greater emphasis on interdisciplinary curriculum, high impact practices, collaboration, and project based learning. Critical thinking and all of those skills are embedded into this fellowship.

Josie Milliken on the UN SDG Open Pedagogy Fellowship

United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Open Pedagogy Fellowship (Montgomery College)
- UNSDG Fellowships Toolkit
- Shinta Hernandez, Michael Mills, and the Award Winning SDG Open Pedagogy Fellowships (OEG Voices Episode 15)
UN SDG Fellowship at Pima Community College
UN SDG Open Pedagogy Fellowship at the Maricopa Community Colleges

Arizona has become a member of DOERS, and so we have a lot of opportunity as we put this new collaborative network together to have different organizations or institutions within Arizona participate in these really critically important projects. I mean when we think about the tenure process, when we think about this equity rubric, there’s so much work that we can do and the next steps that come out of DOERS in terms of looking at what’s the next big challenge in OER that we need to face? Now, those of us in Arizona can have a voice towards that and help, which is really exciting and fun. It’s something that as we have this organization or networking established, we can plug people into these different roles.

Lisa Young on DOERS3

Driving OER Sustainability for Student Success (DOERS3)

Our open licensed music for this episode is from the Free Music Archive, a track called “Cadillac Desert” by William Tyler licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works License, found, like most of our intro music, in the Free Music Archive

The introduction created with the OEG Voices Mixer features voices of Jonathan P, Gino F, Gardner C, Florence D, Lisa Y, Kristin H, Nicole N, Shinta H, Rajiv J, Maren D, Ajita D, Werner W, Clint L, and Una D (learn how to add your voice to the mix).

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Travel with us this episode to the Italian village of Capriglia (close to Pisa, see map), for a conversation with...

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Our latest episode brings you a conversation with West Hills College Lemoore professors Vera Kennedy and Rowena Bermio sharing the...

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As part of our putting the podcast on the road series we recorded this episode at the podcast studio of...

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There is something going on with Open Education in Edinburgh. In episode 40 we get to hear first hand from...

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Listen in to this episode for an inspiring and joyous story about an international project about openness, told as a...

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The voices for will hear in episode 38 come from nearly antipodal locations but are very much connected as both...

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Do you have ideas who or what deserves 2022 Open Education Awards for Excellence? This is the time for action...

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While it has been three weeks since the end of the Open Education Global 2022 in Person conference in Nantes...

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In our ongoing effort to bring you the voices of last year’s Open Education Awards for Excellence, we aimed in...

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En este episodio conversamos con el equipo creador del Micro MOOC de Recursos Educativos Abiertos en español. Nos acompañan desde...

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In another OEG Voices episode recorded during Open Education Week, we bring you the voices of two inspirational leaders, each...

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We hope you enjoy the energy and perspectives of our Episode 32 guests, Gino Fransman and Werner Westermann, both of...

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For our 30th OEG Voices episode we bring you voices from Alberta, Canada, in a podcast about… podcasting. Well, there...

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As 2022 moves on ahead, we are still catching up with bringing you the voices of the winners of the...

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For our first episode of 2022 we brought the podcast studio virtually to Cardiff, Wales, to chat with Maren Deepwell,...

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We hope you took the opportunity last week to participate in OERcamp.global 2021, an online, 48 hour festival of Open...

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Web annotation is on our minds at OE Global with our initiative to use this technology to add examples, commentary,...

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Sit back and listen as we take the OEG Voices Studio on the virtual road to Cromwell, New Zealand to...

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With another in our series of podcasts recorded in Spanish. we hear from Ana María Sandoval Poveda and Silvia Barrenechea Azofeifa sharing about the Technological Devices for Students project at the Universidad Estatal a Distancia (UNED). This project was recognized in 2020 with an OE Award For Excellence in the Open Policy Category.

En el estudio de OEG Voices con Ana María Sandoval Poveda and Silvia Barrenechea Azofeifa Físicamente desde nuestros hogares y conectadas gracias a la tecnología, usamos nuestra imaginación para transportarnos a Monte Verde, Costa Rica para tener esta conversación. En esta charla Ana María y Silvia nos cuentan sus experiencias al trabajar con educación abierta desde sus diferentes áreas dentro de la Universidad Estatal a Distancia (UNED). Por un lado, Ana María como representante del Fab Lab Kä Träre, y por otro lado Silvia como vocera de asuntos estudiantiles. Al ser la UNED una de las primeras instituciones latinoamericanas en unirse al OEG en el 2009, sobran historias que contar.

La UNED empieza su trayectoria de educación abierta lanzando el proyecto OCW UNED. Iniciativa que fue, y sigue siendo, un éxito ofreciendo opciones de aprendizaje en diversos temas para cualquier persona interesada en aprender, aún sin tener la experiencia de ser estudiantes universitarios. Esta primera experiencia establece los cimientos de una cultura de colaboración, creando espacios en los cuales los docentes de diferentes escuelas pueden compartir y mostrar su trabajo al mundo.

En esos primeros años el equipo de la UNED se da a la tarea de investigar nuevas alternativas de cómo hacer las cosas. Busca romper los retos de implementación de tecnologías innovadoras para encontrar nuevas formas de acercarse a las personas. Costa Rica tiene una población diversa y dispersa, con necesidades diferentes y el equipo de la UNED afronta el reto de poder llegar a cada uno de ellos.

Siendo el equipo innovador que son, la UNED sigue expandiendo su oferta de enseñanza abierta. Hoy 12 años después del lanzamiento del OCW UNED, nos encontramos celebrando uno de sus últimos esfuerzos, los “Dispositivos tecnológicos para el estudiantado de la UNED”. Ganadores del premio de políticas abiertas del 2020.

La iniciativa nace bajo el marco de otro proyecto de mejoramiento institucional con el claro objetivo de fortalecer la educación a distancia y hacerlo a través de la incorporación de diferentes tecnologías a disposición del estudiantado. En este contexto surge la inquietud de qué pasaría con las personas que no tuvieran acceso a la tecnología, ya fuera por temas económicos, de geografía, o cualquier otra circunstancia que limitara su acceso a ellas.

En búsqueda de una respuesta nace la alianza entre la Dirección de Asuntos Estudiantiles y el Fab Lab Kä Träre con el objetivo de encontrar una solución. En colaboración, identifican las necesidades de las poblaciones para poder acercarlos a una educación a distancia y analizan diversos dispositivos que pudieran ayudar en el proceso.

Con algunas ideas en mente, lanzan un programa piloto con Raspberry y Tabletas acercando los dispositivos a los estudiantes y guiándolos en su uso y aplicación. Los resultados fueron muy favorables, incluso mejor de lo anticipado. Vieron como el estudiantado tomaban los dispositivos y los hacían propios sin importar el reto que representaban al no ser dispositivos tradicionales como teléfonos inteligentes. Esto les dio un aporte de exploración, de conocimiento y de acercamiento a algo totalmente nuevo y diferente. Tal fue su aceptación que el estudiantado solicitaba quedarse con los dispositivos por más tiempo, muy por encima del cuatrimestre inicialmente pensados.

Fue una gran experiencia para todo el equipo. A Silvia y a mi nos tocó ir a varias giras entre las comunidades. Íbamos a las casas de los estudiantes que tenían los dispositivos a ver cómo lo habían instalado, dónde lo habían ubicado, el tipo de uso que le estaban dando, y de pronto nos dimos cuenta de que no le habíamos dado el dispositivo a una persona, sino a una familia o hasta a una vecindad.

Ana María Sandoval

Al ver los resultados del proyecto y la buena recepción de la experiencia por parte del estudiantado se confirmó que era una buena iniciativa. Estos resultados permitieron demostrar a las autoridades universitarias la necesidad del programa. Las autoridades por su parte recibieron la información y actuaron dando como resultado la incidencia de política institucional que se espera siga extendiéndose en otras áreas y otros proyectos.

Summary in English In the distance but connected thanks to technology, we use our imagination to transport ourselves to Monte Verde, Costa Rica to have this conversation. Ana María and Silvia tell us about their experiences working with open education in their different areas within the Universidad Estatal a Distancia (UNED). On one hand, Ana María as representative of the Fab Lab Kä Träre, and on the other Silvia as spokesperson for student affairs. As UNED was one of the first Latin American institutions to join the OEG in 2009, there are plenty of stories to tell.

UNED begins the journey of open education by launching the OCW UNED project. An initiative that continues to run successfully offering learning opportunities in various subjects for anyone interested in learning. This first experience established the foundations of a collaborative culture, creating spaces in which teachers from different schools could share and show their work to the world.

Being the innovative team that they are, UNED continues to expand its open education proposal. Today 12 years after the launch of OCW UNED, we are celebrating one of its latest endeavors, the “Technological devices for UNED students”, and the 2020 Open Policy Award Winners.

The initiative started as part of a larger institutional framework with the clear objective of strengthening distance education through the incorporation of different technologies. But there was a concern. What would happen with the students that did not have access to technology? Regardless of the situation, whether it was due to economic constraints, geography, or any other circumstance that limited their access. What would happen with them? How could they be included too?

In search for an answer, the Department of Student Affairs and the Fab Lab Kä Träre start an alliance in search for a solution. In collaboration, they identified the needs of the population and analyzed various devices that could help in the process. They launched a pilot program with Raspberry and Tablets and brought the devices closer to the students. The UNED team guided the students in the use and application of the devices.

The pilot program was a success, even beyond their expectations. They witnessed how the students adopted the devices and made them their own. The fact and initial concern that these were not traditional devices such as smartphones, turned into an opportunity to explore and learn something totally new and different. Students valued the devices so much that requested to keep them for longer.

It was a great experience for the whole team. Silvia and I had to go on several tours in the communities. We went to the houses of the students who had the devices to see where and how they had installed it and the type of use they were giving it. Suddenly we realized that we had not given the device to a person, but rather to a family or even an entire neighborhood.

Ana María Sandoval

After seeing the results of the project, and the great feedback from the students, there was no denying that it was a good initiative. These results proved to the university authorities the need for the program. The authorities analyzed the information and acted by creating the first incidence of institutional open policy in UNED; expected to continue to spread in other areas and projects within the institution.

La música utilizada en este episodio fue “Joyful Meeting” de Crowander del Free Music Archive compartido bajo una licencia Creative Commons BY-NC (Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0).

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This episode of OEG Voices features a conversation with Nick Sengstaken who was recognized with a 2020 Open Award of Excellence in the category that recognizes students. His efforts in OER began in 2016. As an undergraduate student at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Nick took up the challenge of bringing student voices to the issue of textbook affordability. As you will learn in the conversation, Nick approached that work and later efforts all with a perspective of emphasizing the need to to have students included in the conversations about policies that affect them.

He absolutely defines this description of the student award for excellence:

This award honors the outstanding endeavors of a student who has advocated for or benefitted academically from the use of open educational resources (OER). The award is presented to the student whose achievements may inspire others to pursue degree programs that utilize open resources and/or someone who played a prominent role in advocating successfully for the promotion and advancement of OER and open education.

https://awards.oeglobal.org/awards/2020/student/nick-sengstaken/

Nick graduated in 2020 but has continued on at UNC with related work as a Program Coordinator for Operational Excellence and Strategic Initiatives. A few of his recent projects involved supporting the development of open syllabi repository and work on project to mark ZTC (Zero Textbook Cost) courses in the course catalog, also well as being involved in communicating to students about COVID testing.

Jump in now and listen to this inspiring conversation with Nick and OE Global staff Paul Stacey, Marcela Morales, and Alan Levine.

In the OEG Voices virtual recording studio with clockwise from top left, Nick Sengstaken, Alan Levine, Marcela Morales, and Paul Stacey. He got looped into advocacy through vote registration work leading up to the 2016 US Presidential elections through the the UNC chapter of NCPIRG (North Carolina Public Interest Research Group). Nick describes himself as a “shy kid” but who always had a passion for politics and the value of education. His drive to stepup and be active is rooted in his students as a music major in jazz saxophone. “It’s almost like being on stage with music,” Nick says, “I got pushed out in the world and had to interact, there’s no hiding behind a clipboard. ”

After the elections were over, Nick came across an NCPIRG campaign on textbook affordability, where the person running program left. So as a sophomore he more or less fell into the role. His work included being a catalyst and co-author of the UNC Open Textbook Pledge came from an interest in engaging faculty in the textbook affordability efforts, one of the most successful efforts of its kind.

I saw how if we switched to something more accessible and more equitable, look how more people we can bring to the table, look how many less barriers we can have for our students.

I realized this is what we need to be doing, not just as an institution, but a society. If we go open, we are just making things better.

Nick Sengstaken

Much has changed since Nick’s start in 2017 when the effort was aimed at making print textbooks available to students at an affordable cost. He describes a massive industry shift from publishers from promoting expensive textbooks, or as he described, “the types of products that have half lives” to lock-in options for digital assets.

Nick has served a national role as a spokesperson for students who opposed the failed merger between Cengage and McGraw-Hill including testifying before the US Department of Justice. He also has been an outspoken critic of “inclusive access” the practice of automatic billing of textbooks to a student account as it removes student choice as to how to get their own learning materials.

In short it’s as if you are enrolling a class you are going to get billed for the textbook. It completely gets rid of the secondary market, buy backs, and used books.

At the end of the day it is neither inclusive nor does it increase access.

Nick Sengstaken

Nick is acknowledged for his contributions to the US PIRG report Automatic Textbook Billing: an offer students can’t refuse? published in February 2020.

This is very timely as the opening of the Inclusive Access organization’s web site devoted to being “a community-driven initiative to raise awareness of the facts about automatic textbook billing.” Nick describes what he sees as student desires for choice:

I think students want choices. They don’t want to be told they need to buy this access code which os 10% of their grade.

Nick Sengstaken

His work in OER has led Nick to be concerned about lack of privacy for student data, having seen what he describes as “a lot of laissez fair with student data in using access codes and proctoring.”

Nick provides us a valuable perspective on the value of Open Educational Resources:

When I describe OERs I say they are the same or greater quality as a traditional book. And it’s for that customization aspect of it, the fact that we can tailor a book to a course rather than the other way around.

Nick Sengstaken

We appreciate Nick for taking the time to share his views and his works. Keep an eye on this young man and do not be surprised if he wins a future award for Open Education Leadership.

The 2021 Open Education Awards for Excellence are being announced in waves, with the UNESCO OER Implementation awards shared October 1 and most recently, the winners of the Open Assets Awards shared October 15. The next winner of the student award will be known in November 15 when all of the Individual awards are published.

Music for this episode is “Joyful Meeting” by Crowander from the Free Music Archive shared under a Creative Commons BY-NC (Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0) license. If you have a suggestion for a music track we should use for future episodes, we are taking suggestions in OEG Connect.

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Since March 2020 most of us have been in a deluge of online meetings. But how often do we willing log on to the screen of faces for something with no agenda, just to talk, decompress, or to share a cup of coffee?

This was the simple idea of Educator Coffee (or Tea) Time aka #educoffee created by Ken Bauer, professor of computer science at Tec de Monterey in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Ken has been an active and sharing open educator, encouraging his students to blog about their coursework, participating in Virtually Connecting, leading discussions on topics such as Ungrading, and being a board member of the Flipped Learning Network.

This is his description of #educoffee:

Many of us in education are now working from home. This can be challenging as we juggle family responsibilities, finding quiet space for each member of the family to work, as well as time together with family to work through issues and concerns in the middle of a pandemic.

We need time to talk with colleagues and friends. It helps us to realize that we are not alone with our challenges in these times as well as an opportunity to learn and teach with others.

https://blog.kenbauer.me/2020/03/25/educator-coffee-or-tea-time/

We could describe it more, but listen to this recording of an #educoffee session we made (with everyone’s consent) with Ken and seven other repeat visitors- Miguel, Donna, Viviana, Jakob, Lawrie, Jorge, and Joe dropping in from various locations in Mexico, the US, Paraguay, and the U.K.

The format of #educoffee was/is simple. When he started Ken opened his zoom room twice a day, offering times for conversations in Spanish or English. He announced via his blog and twitter, offering the login details via email or direct message. His schedule is not quite every day but he still offers maybe two or more per week.

You will hear participants describe here the essence of care that is an important topic for educators, in all times, but even more so during COVID-19. Some find solace here, a relief from tension, even described as place for emotional healing. Others describe how they have adopted similar approaches in their own work groups. There is something to be said for the power of no agenda

Coffee Art flickr photo by kenbauer shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license also used for the featured image of this episode. To learn more or participate in #educoffee:

Educator Coffee (or Tea) Time (Ken Bauer blog)
Follow Ken on Twitter @ken_bauer
educoffee announcements (Twitter)

Podcast Note In a typical podcast (and all the ones we have done so far for OEG Voices so far), we invite guests to come to our space, our “studio” to record a conversation. What if we flipped this around? This episode is an experiment in a different modality, where we put take podcast recorder “on the road” and visit the spaces others meet or record podcasts. We are curious how this might change the atmosphere and we have a plan or two for more like this. If you do your own podcasts or just group gathering and want to invite us in to your space, we would welcome the opportunity.

Music for this episode is “Joyful Meeting” by Crowander from the Free Music Archive shared under a Creative Commons BY-NC (Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0) license.

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In this newest episode of our series of podcasts recorded in Spanish. we hear from Luis Clemente Jiménez-Botello and Roberto Avila-Vázquez sharing their experience in creating the SALUS Project and the Node Covid-19. This project earned a 2020 OE Award for Excellence in the Open Resilience category.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) showed us worldwide the fragility of the human species. Providing the population with useful, current, and dependable knowledge about COVID-19 was vital to mitigate the damage and expansion of the disease. The SALUS Project, Node Covid-19 was launched with this challenge as their mission. Striving to provide reliable information to everyone that needed it presented in a way they would understand.

The SALUS Project Node Covid-19 is a collaborative effort of health professionals and academics sharing their knowledge and expertise with the world. They provide accurate, updated, relevant, brief, and free information to the general population, in compliance with the UN Sustainable Development Goal 3, Health and Well-being.

In México as in other Latin-American countries, most indigenous people identify strongly with a traditional native language. These languages are intrinsically linked to their way of life, culture, and identity. Languages embody their values, history, and development, affirming and maintaining well-being, self-esteem, and a strong sense of identity. Recognizing this reality, SALUS, Node Covid-19 answers specific questions about the disease in different indigenous languages to make sure that every community has the information they need to keep safe.

Contributions of SALUS

Strengthening indigenous culture and identity.
Reduce indigenous disadvantages and lists the associated building blocks for action.
Acknowledging the culture must be recognized in actions interned to overcome indigenous disadvantages.
Understanding specific evidence about COVID-19, its prevention, and factors such as their lack of access to effective monitoring and early-warning systems, and adequate health and social services.

SALUS is currently expanding and in the process of becoming Red Pharos. A network that provides health information worldwide in many languages. The system will have a collaborative integration with the inclusion of physicians, translators, and academics of many countries and in many languages. Providing relevant and updated health information to communities that wouldn’t have access to this knowledge otherwise.

En el estudio OEG Voices con Luis Clemente Jiménez-Botello, Roberto Avila-Vázquez, y Marcela Morales En éste, el más reciente episodio de nuestra serie de podcasts grabados en español, escuchamos al Dr. Luis Clemente Jiménez-Botello y Roberto Ávila-Vázquez compartir cómo iniciaron el Proyecto SALUS y lanzaron el Nodo Covid-19.

La enfermedad del coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) nos mostró a nivel mundial la fragilidad de la especie humana. Distribuir información útil, actualizada y confiable sobre COVID-19 se convirtió de vital importancia para ayudar a mitigar el daño y la expansión de la enfermedad. El Proyecto SALUS, Nodo Covid-19 se lanzó con este desafío en mente. Ofrecen proporcionar información confiable y entendible a todas las poblaciones que la necesiten.

El Proyecto SALUS, Nodo Covid-19 es un esfuerzo colaborativo de profesionales de la salud y académicos que comparten sus conocimientos y expertise con el mundo. Proporcionan información precisa, actualizada, relevante, breve y gratuita a la población en general, en cumplimiento con el Objetivo de Desarrollo Sostenible 3 de la ONU, Salud y Bienestar.

En México, como en otros países latinoamericanos, la mayoría de las poblaciones indígenas se identifican con una lengua nativa. Estos lenguajes están intrínsecamente vinculados con su forma de vida, cultura e identidad. Su idioma representa sus valores, historia y desarrollo. Afirman su bienestar, fomentan su autoestima y les da un gran sentido de identidad.

El proyecto SALUS, Nodo Covid-19 reconoce esta realidad y ofrece respuestas a preguntas específicas sobre la enfermedad en diferentes idiomas indígenas para asegurarse de que cada comunidad tenga la información que necesita para mantenerse segura.

Contribuciones de SALUS

Fortalecimiento de la cultura e identidad indígena
Reducir las desventajas indígenas e identificar los componentes básicos para acción
El reconocimiento de la cultura debe ser parte de las acciones que se realicen para superar las desventajas indígenas.
Comprender la evidencia específica sobre COVID-19, su prevención y factores como su falta de acceso a sistemas efectivos de monitoreo y alerta temprana, y servicios sociales y de salud adecuados.

El proyecto SALUS se encuentra en expansión para convertirse en la Red Pharos. Una red que proporciona información de salud para todo el mundo en diversos idiomas. La red tendrá una integración colaborativa con la inclusión de médicos, traductores y académicos de diversos países. Busca brindar información de salud relevante y actualizada a comunidades que de otra manera no tendrían acceso a este conocimiento.

La música utilizada en este episodio fue “Joyful Meeting” de Crowander del Free Music Archive compartido bajo una licencia Creative Commons BY-NC (Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0).

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In another of our series bringing you the voices of last year’s OE Awards for Excellence winners, listen now to Kim Ernstmeyer sharing the outstanding success of Nursing Pharmacology, recognized by a 2020 award in the Open Textbook category.

A nursing educator at Chippewa Valley Technical College and director of the Open RN project (Open Resources for Nurses), Kim describes the impressive amount of collaboration, including authors, contributors, and the input of a national review board, that went into producing this first of five open textbooks. Hear more from Kim in this conversation with OEGlobal’s Marcela Morales, Una Daly, and Paul Stacey.

In the OEG Voices studio with clockwise from top left, Kim Ernstmeyer Paul Stacey, Una Daly, and Marcela Morales Funded by a US Department of Education grant, Nursing was chosen as a topic for open textbooks as it is a high enrollment program with also high textbook costs for students.

The Open RN project is led by Chippewa Valley Technical College as part of the Wisconsin Technical College System (WTCS) consortium. OER nursing textbooks and virtual simulations are collaboratively developed by faculty based on the WTCS State Nursing curriculum and the current NCLEX-RN Test Plan. Textbooks undergo national peer review by faculty, deans, industry members, and nursing students to ensure the content is accurate and relevant, written in clear language for pre-licensure nursing students, and based on current, evidence-based practices. All Open RN materials have CC-BY 4.0 Creative Commons licensing.

https://www.cvtc.edu/landing-pages/grants/open-rn

Kim brought the latest statistics and noted that the Nursing Pharmacology textbook has some 80,000 users. And while half are from the USA, it has seen significant use in from the Philippines, India, Canada, Australia, the UK, Nigeria, Kenya, Malaysia, and Pakistan.

https://wtcs.pressbooks.pub/pharmacology/ The Nursing Pharmacology textbook is well known too for its high degree of interactivity. Kim shared that the project chose Pressbooks as the publishing platform and an added feature was the built in support for H5P to create interactive practice exercises. They made use of use of flashcards, quiz questions, and drag and drop exercises (see a list of all H5P activities), but according to Kim the branching scenario activities have been the most exciting.

These activities give learners a chance to be introduced to a patient, hear than describe symptoms, read reports from nurses, and then respond to decision points where they apply what they have learned in the chapter they are reading.Each one takes about 10-15 minutes to work through. Kim reports that the feedback from students indicate this about right amount of time to apply knowledge and get formative feedback.

Explore this example on Therapeutic Communication – Cultural Competency.

To create these activities, the project was fortunate to have access to a good amount of video content created for another project, including actors playing health care workers and patients. You can see some of these published in the Open RN YouTube channel that could be used directly in the H5P branching scenarios.

Explore more of the Open RN branching scenarios in their LibreStudio collection. Kim noted that these activities were of great value to learners during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the project has access to VR equipment to create more immersive simulations, the H5P versions are much more accessible to students (e.g. can be used on mobile devices) as they do not require special equipment.

Kim highlighted another lesson learned from teaching through the pandemic– the importance of having learning materials available to students offline. Their research indicated 60% of students prefer a print copy of textbooks. This is why in addition to the digital textbooks published in Pressbooks (and also shared in LibreTexts for easy remixing), the Open RN titles are made available via XanEdu in affordable, soft cover print versions.

Following Nursing Pharmacolgy the Open RN project has published ones on Nursing Skills and Nursing Fundamentals. Currently in development and aimed for publication in 2022 are two more titles- Management & Professional Concepts as well as Mental Health & Community Concepts.

Kim is looking forward to analyzing student course completion data to explore the impact of the Open RN textbooks. You can hear her enthusiasm for the level of collaboration this project has achieved. She reports that faculty participating as authors have express the value of collaborating with colleagues from other institutions. In addition students have been involved in he project in reviewing content, creating media, and being models/actors in the interactive media.

We hope you are excited to hear about the Open RN project– learn more from their web site. Thank you Kim for taking time to be part of this conversation.

Music for this episode is “Joyful Meeting” by Crowander from the Free Music Archive shared under a Creative Commons BY-NC (Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0) license.

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