The OEGlobal 2024 Board Election Results

The Open Education Global (OEGlobal) Board of Directors is pleased to announce the results of the election of the 2024 Elections. The top five candidates were elected/re-elected to the Board for the 2024-2027 term.

  1. Votes: 38, Perrine de Coetlogon, France
  2. Votes: 38, Glenda Cox, South Africa
  3. Votes: 35, Takaya Yamazato, Japan
  4. Votes: 34, Maria Soledad Ramirez-Montoya, Mexico
  5. Votes: 27, Robert Lawson, Canada

Congratulations to these Board members!
The rest of the voting results are as follows:

  1. Votes: 18, Nawaraj Ghimire, Nepal
  2. Votes: 18, Beatrice Canales, USA
  3. Votes: 17, Jim Ross-Nazzal, USA
  4. Votes: 10, Muhammad Hassan, USA

Forty-seven organizations participated in the elections out of 216 eligible. This amounted to a participation rate of 22% of the OEGlobal Institutional Membership.

The OEGlobal staff and board deeply appreciate Katsusuke Shigeta, the outgoing Board member, for his invaluable input in guiding OEGlobal forward. OEGlobal looks forward to working with newly elected Board members and all members of the open community on advancing open education around the world

Meet The New Board Members

Associate Professor Glenda Cox works in the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT) at the University of Cape Town. Her portfolio includes postgraduate teaching, Curriculum change projects, Open Education, and Staff development. She holds the UNESCO chair in Open Education and Social Justice (2021-2025) and is a member of the UNITWIN network on Open Education (2024-2028). She is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Students as Partners (joined in 2022). She is passionate about the role of Open Education in the changing world of Higher Education. Associate Professor Cox is currently the Principal Investigator in the Digital Open Textbooks for Development (DOT4D) initiative. Her current research includes analysing the role of open textbooks for social justice.

Dr. Takaya Yamazato is a professor and Deputy Director at the Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Nagoya University in Japan. He earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical Engineering at Keio University in Yokohama, Japan, in 1993. From 1993 to 1998, he served as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Information Electronics at Nagoya University. During 1997 to 1998, he was a visiting researcher at the Research Group for RF Communications at the University of Kaiserslautern. In 2006, he received the IEEE Communication Society’s Best Tutorial Paper Award. Dr. Yamazato initiated the Nagoya University OCW in 2005 and has been involved in its management and operation since then. He has been a board member of JOCW since 2005 and is currently a board member of OEJ. From 2016 to 2017, he was a member of the Board of Governors (BoG) of the IEEE Communication Society and served as the Director of the Asia/Pacific Board. Additionally, from 2009 to 2011, he was the editor-in-chief of the Japanese Section of IEICE Transactions on Communications. He also chaired the IEICE Communication Society editorial board from 2020 to 2021. Dr. Yamazato’s research interests encompass visible light communication (VLC), intelligent transport systems (ITS), stochastic resonance (SR), and open educational resources (OER).

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Robert Lawson is an Educational Developer at NorQuest College in Edmonton, where he has been promoting open education since joining the institution in 2016. His early efforts focused on encouraging faculty to integrate open images into their online courses. In 2020, Robert led the Reimagine Higher Education initiative, which envisions NorQuest as a largely textbook-free institution by 2030. The college now has an active textbook publishing program that is producing three open textbooks a year.

Beyond NorQuest, Robert is a prominent advocate for open education, both nationally and globally. In 2019, he organized the Alberta Open Education Spring Summit, bringing together open educators and advocates from across the province. Currently, he is co-director of the Open Education Alberta textbook publishing consortium steering committee. In 2023, he served as program co-chair for the 2023 Open Education Global Conference in Edmonton.

As a member of the Board of Directors, he is excited to have the opportunity to support OEG’s mission of building connections that advance open education on a global basis.

Meet the Reappointed 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.

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María Soledad Ramírez-Montoya (Marisol) is a senior researcher at the Institute for the Future of Education, Tecnológico de Monterrey (Mexico). She focuses her activities on dynamizing education initiatives through innovation, research, and global sense as a means of social transformation and impact for lifelong learning and sustainable development.

As Chair of the UNESCO Chair: “Open Educational Movement for Latin America”, Marisol (her short name) mobilizes training, production and research initiatives for open education. As Chair of the International Council for Open of Distance Education (ICDE) “OER Latin America”, she promotes activities with research teams to enrich access practices in distance education.

In her academic activities, Dr. Ramirez-Montoya forms talent for education with an emphasis on innovation, educational entrepreneurship, and multidisciplinary research. She leads research groups, establishing rich experiences for the generation of knowledge inspired by teamwork. She coordinates actions for innovation and globalization and generates innovation and research initiatives with national and international networks.

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.