Image by OEGlobal CC-BY

Exciting, multilingual OEGlobal 2021 Online Conference program to contribute to the implementation of the UNESCO OER Recommendation

Open Education Global and the University of Nantes have published the full multi-lingual program for the annual Open Education Global Conference that will take place online from Monday, Sept 27th until Friday, Oct 1st 2021. 

This year, the online event puts a spotlight on each of the UNESCO OER Recommendation action areas. Through a range of live  webinars, pre-recorded presentations, interactive sessions and social activities, delegates will collectively contribute their  experiences, innovative ideas and inspiring proposals that will guide the implementation of the UNESCO’s OER Recommendation. Each day of the conference is dedicated to a different action area of the Recommendation.

  • Day 1: Capacity Building provides a spotlight on how the global open education community is currently building the capacity to create, access, re-use, adapt and redistribute OER.
  • Day 2: Policy will focus on the ways that the global open education community is developing supportive policy.
  • Day 3: Access highlights how the global open education community is generating effective, inclusive and equitable access to quality OER.
  • Day 4: Sustainability will look at ways to engage the global open education community to nurture the creation of sustainability models for OER.
  • Day 5: International Cooperation will focus on how the open education community can facilitate international cooperation and collaboration to advance the UNESCO OER Recommendation.

Using this structure, a diverse and exciting program for the online conference was created by the program co-chairs, Wayne Homes and Davor Orlic, and a large team of reviewers from the global open education community. 

The full OE Global Online Conference program’s structure includes a range of different formats that ensures the participants fully engage with the action areas …

  • 21 live webinars with 74 presentations across 5 languages: Each conference day will feature live webinars centred on the UNESCO OER action area of that day and scheduled by language. Each webinar will be facilitated by a session chair, will feature up to 5 presentations, and will conclude with a discussion. There will be 13 webinars in English, 3 in Spanish, 2 will be in French, with one webinar in Arabic and Chinese. 
  • 33 asynchronous interactive activities across 3 languages: Each online conference day will include asynchronous interactive activities that are focused on the action area of the day. Interactive activities are short, have a clear purpose, and produce an outcome that contributes to implementation of the UNESCO OER Recommendation.
  • 13 anytime presentations in English: Those presentations that could not be included in the live synchronous webinars, will be pre-recorded and uploaded to the conference platform and will be available across all five days. They will be further highlighted as relevant to the UNESCO OER Recommendation action area of the day.
  • Social Activities: There are a host of exciting, fun, and informal social activities planned to encourage connection and engagement between participants.

The online conference  will take place on OEG Connect. The conference area on OEG Connect is being developed to host the full interactive schedule. The platform will also  provide every session with a dedicated space featuring the abstract, slides, recordings, and relevant supporting materials. This dedicated space will enable links and resources to be added, and comments and on-going discussions to take place.

All sessions will also have rapporteurs, who will prepare summaries of the main findings and trends observed during the sessions in relation to the different UNESCO OER Recommendation Areas. Rapporteurs will also support event bridging activities during the period leading up to the OEGlobal 2022 In-Person Congress in Nantes in May 2022.

Learn more about the OEGlobal 2021 online conference here. Registration is open.

OEG Voices – Latest Podcasts

OE Global Voices

Welcome to the home of podcasts produced by Open Education Global. These shows bring you insight and connection to the application of open education practices from around the world. Listen at podcast.oeglobal.org

OEG Voices 076: Purvi Shah on Storyweaver

In this episode we take you to Bangalore, India to hear about a remarkable publisher, Pratham Books and its Open Education for Excellence Award winning platform Storyweaver, core to Pratham’s mission of a book in the hands of every child in the country, published in that child’s mother tongue.

We welcomed in the studio Purvi Shah, Senior Director of StoryWeaver & Strategy to tell use the story of Storyweaver, which was recognized with a 2023 Open Education Award for Excellence in the Open Repository category. At this time, StoryWeaver offers now over 64,000 stories in more than 370 languages spoken around the world, and offers a place for anyone to contribute images, new translations, and also age and subject specific teaching resources. All of this came about from a bold commitment in 2004 from Pratham Books to embrace open licensing for their published storybooks.

StoryWeaver web site with menu items Read, Translate, Create, Resources, and Discover. One of the rotating banner displays a graphic style image of a teacher reading a book to her students with text: ”Storyweeaver in School, For Educators- We've worked with teachers so closely over the years that we've built these resources to be of real help. You'll find this section packed with stories, themes, activities, and more - all carefully ordered by grade and reading level.From language acquisition and reading comprehension, to textbook concepts and ideas, we'll help you nurture the joy of reading among all your students.”
https://storyweaver.org.in/

Enjoy the enthusiasm in Purvi’a voice as she shares the missions and global reach of StoryWeaver, as well as sharing examples of her favorite titles. And we appreciate the serendipty, than when Purvi offered to read a selection of a favorite story, from among the 60,000 titles in StoryWeaver, the one she chose was What Will Today Bring? authored by someone we know well here at OEGlobal, University of Leeds open educator Chrissi Nerantzi.

We also want to thank Sreemoyee Mukherjee from Pratham Books who joined us in the studio and was instrumental in coordinating this conversation.

In This Episode

FYI: For the sake of experimentation and the spirit of transparency, this set of show notes alone was generated by the AI “Underlord” in the Descript editor we use to produce OEGlobal Voices.

In this episode of OEGlobal Voices, host Alan Levine engages in an inspiring conversation with Purvi Shah, a key member of the StoryWeaver initiative by Pratham Books in India. StoryWeaver, a community-driven digital platform, earned the 2023 Open Education Award for Excellence in the Open Curation Repository category.

Key Highlights:

  1. Embracing Openness: Purvi discusses the organization’s decision to adopt open licensing to reach their mission of putting a book in every child’s hand. This shift from a traditional publishing model to an open platform allowed the community to create and translate stories, leading to the birth of StoryWeaver.
  2. The Genesis of StoryWeaver: The platform was launched on International Literacy Day in 2015 with 800 stories in 24 languages. Today, it boasts an impressive collection of 60,000 stories in 370 languages, serving as a vast repository of multilingual and multicultural stories.
  3. Innovative Features: StoryWeaver includes unique features such as “read-alongs,” which combine audio, video, and same-language subtitling to aid language learning and literacy. The platform also offers structured resources for teachers, such as thematic book lists and STEM programs.
  4. Translations and Impact: Purvi shares stories about the extensive translations available on the platform. “Rani’s First Day at School” has been translated into 138 languages, demonstrating the community’s active participation. She also narrates heartwarming anecdotes about how these stories have impacted children and teachers around the world.
  5. Community Contributions: The discussion highlights how users can contribute by translating stories or creating new ones using the platform’s vast library of images and easy-to-use creation tools. Purvi shares examples of innovative projects inspired by StoryWeaver, such as a literacy program developed in Mexico.
  6. Future Goals: Looking ahead, Purvi emphasizes the importance of expanding the depth of stories in each language and leveraging the community’s strengths to ensure that every child can access a book in their mother tongue.

Alan and Purvi’s conversation encapsulates the essence of open education and the incredible work being done by the StoryWeaver team to foster literacy and inclusivity. The episode concludes with a recommendation to explore StoryWeaver and an acknowledgment of the upcoming Open Education Awards.

Tune in to OEGlobal Voices to dive deeper into the world of StoryWeaver and the transformative power of open education.

(end of AI generated show notes)

Additional Links and Quotes for Episode 76

How can we work with the communities to increase the depth of languages? So that could be a potential future milestone. We were just discussing this in office the other day that it’s so interesting that while the platform has 370 languages and that’s a milestone in itself, but the real milestone is that for that one child reading the first book in their mother tongue is really the milestone.

We hit that milestone almost every day because every day a child is discovering a book in their mother tongue for the first time. That milestone will never get old, I think. And some of the other sort of milestones [has] been just not being a platform where we allow for stories, but say, when we created this whole different platform, the white label StoryWeaver for Room to Read in Indonesia and that helped kickstart their own platform called Literacy Cloud.

That was a pretty important milestone because whatever we have learned, we could empower other organizations. to build off our investments, our learning, in countries that they work with.

Purvi Shah on StoryWeaver’s milestones


Our open licensed music for this episode is a track called Fairytale Story by Serge Quadrado  licensed under a Creative Commons  Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Like most of our podcast music, it was found at the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).

The image of the reading octopus in this episode’s artwork is part the StoryWeaver web site, an illustration credited to Measa Sovonnarea.

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