Image by OEGlobal CC-BY

OEGlobal Announces New Board of Directors Leadership

The Open Education Global (OEGlobal) Board of Directors is pleased to announce the election of a new President, Vice President, and Treasurer to the Board of Directors on September 1st, 2023.

The changes to the OEGlobal Board Office Bearers include:

Connie will serve as Vice President of the Board along with Lisa Young, who was voted Vice President of the Board in January 2023.

At the same time, Cathy Casserly (USA) and Martin Dougiamas (Australia) were re-appointed as Board Members.

The OEG Board of Directors would also like to sincerely thank Lena Patterson (Canada) and Willem van Valkenburg (The Netherlands) for their service as President and Past President of the Board, respectively.

Lena Patterson served as President of the OEG Board of Directors from 2021 until 2023 and will continue her involvement with OEGlobal as the Past President of the Board until 2024.

Willem van Valkenburg has served on the OEG Board of Directors since 2013. From 2019-2021, Willem served as President of the Board of Directors. He completed his term as the Past President of the Board in 2023.

Meet the newly appointed Board Members

Perrine de Coëtlogon (France) works on Open Education and Digital Identity at the Directorate for Pedagogical Innovation of the University of Lille. She represents the French authorities in the European Blockchain Partnership and leads a public transformation project to gather an eWallet diploma and micro-credentials. She is also in charge of developing open education activities and policies. She has participated in OEGlobal since 2016, when she co-hosted the Open Education Leadership Summit in Paris. She has been a board member of OEGlobal since 2020 when she launched the OEGlobal Francophone online conference and network.

Perrine holds a Master of Law from the University of Paris Saclay (France) and an LLM from the University of Potsdam (Germany). She was a lawyer at the Paris Bar from 2002 to 2009 and the General Secretary of a public interest grouping promoting open education resources in health and sports sciences from 2009 to 2015. Perrine was then a digital expert (Europe and International) at the Ministry for Higher Education, Research and Innovation from 2015 to 2018. She joined the University of Lille in 2018 on Blockchain and Open Education.

“We look forward to advancing the vision and mission of Open Education Global (OEG). Adopting a collaborative approach, we will work with the OEG Board members, staff, members and partners to accelerate mainstreaming of Open Education within education systems worldwide. We strongly believe in the power of Open Education to transform education practices and address pressing societal challenges.”

Perrine, Connie, Lisa and Marian
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Constance Blomgren (Canada) is an Assistant Professor of Education at Athabasca University, Canada’s Open University. Her background as a K-12 teacher in rural, remote, and northern Canadian locations now informs her research and interest in open educational resources and open pedagogy for K-12 teachers and learners. She curates the BOLT Multi-author blog that houses videos and podcasts regarding open pedagogy and OER for K-12. Her research on strengthening K-12 teacher awareness and using OER and open practices was published in IRRODL and Open Praxis. Connie is interested in visual and multi-literacies, participatory technologies, teacher-professional learning, and open pedagogy.

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Hsu-Tien (Marian) Wan (Taiwan) is the Associate Dean of the Office of Information Technology at Taipei Medical University (TMU). In 2017, she founded the Digital Initiative Center at the College of Interdisciplinary Studies at TMU, whose vision is to promote the best practices of OER, e-learning, and MOOCs. Marian holds a Master of Computer Science and a Bachelor of Pharmacy.

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Cathy Casserly (USA) is the founder and president of Casserly Consulting & Coaching. She is an experienced leader and a focused strategist who challenges entrenched thinking and positions individuals and organizations for accelerated performance. Her work spans the U.S. and international arenas and involves consulting partnerships and executive coaching with philanthropic, nonprofit, corporate, startup, and learning organizations.

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Martin Dougiamas (Australia) founded the open-source Moodle LMS (used by over 60% of all higher education in the world). Martin has a mixed academic background with multiple post-graduate degrees in Computer Science and Education and two honorary doctorates (from Spain and Belgium). He continues to focus on researching how technology can support teaching and learning in open and human ways, primarily when it supports the UN’s sustainable development goals.

“Congratulations to the newly elected office-bearers and re-appointed board members. The diversity of experiences and expertise embodied in the Open Education Global (OEG) Board of Directors is remarkable. We look forward to working with the OEG Board, staff, members and the open communities on the implementation of OEG’s strategic plan to ensure mainstreaming of Open Education Practices worldwide.”

Marcela and Igor, Interim Co-Executive Directors

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 was part of a previous version of the StoryWeaver web site, an illustration credited to Measa Sovonnarea.

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 showsWe have been exploring some of the other AI features in Descriptbut our posts remain human authored except where indicated otherwise.