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UNESCO and the Mohammed Bin Rashid Knowledge Foundation (MBRF) organised the 3rd UNESCO OER World Congress from 19 until 20 November in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. OEGlobal's Marcela Morales & Igor Lesko, OEGlobal Co-Executive Directors and Perrine Coëtlogon, OEGlobal President of the Board of Directors, were there.

Home page, News, OEG Board of Directors, OEG in Action, OEG Members

The 3rd UNESCO OER World Congress

Isla Haddow-Flood on December 20, 2024

News, OE Awards

OE Awards 2021: Nominations announcement

Nominate your favourite Open Education contribution! Nominations can now be made for the Open Education Awards for Excellence in 2021. For the last 10 years, the Open Education Awards for […]

Isla Haddow-Flood on May 20, 2021

News

Open Education Global Announces 2021 Board Election Results

The Open Education Global (OEG) concluded the Board of Directors 2021 elections on the 1st April 2021. There were five Board positions to be filled. The results of this election […]

Isla Haddow-Flood on April 21, 2021

Home page, News, OEG in Action, OEG World

Call for Developers and Mentors for OE4BW 2025

The University of Nova Gorica and UNESCO Chair on Open Technologies for OER and Open Learning at the Jožef Stefan Institute announced the eighth round of the Open Education for […]

Isla Haddow-Flood on January 7, 2025

ED Insights, News, OEG Board of Directors, OEG in Action, OEG Members

Marcela Morales and Igor Lesko confirmed as OEGlobal’s Co-Executive Directors

In a speech at OEGlobal 2024 in Brisbane, Australia, OEGlobal Board Chair, Perrine de Coëtlogon, and Connie Blomgren, Vice-Chair of the Board, announced that long-time OEGlobal staff members, Marcela Morales […]

Isla Haddow-Flood on December 20, 2024

Home page, News, OEGlobal Conference

OEGlobal24 Down Under: Open is Everyone’s Business

OEGlobal 2024 took place in Brisbane, Australia, in November 2024. The conference was packed with an incredible diversity of people and projects to celebrate, including new approaches and inspiring work, […]

Isla Haddow-Flood on December 17, 2024

Home page, News, OEG in Action, OEGlobal Conference

2026 OEGlobal Conference Hosted by MIT OpenCourseWare

On the last day of the recently concluded 2024 OEGlobal Conference in Brisbane, Australia, the OEGlobal team confirmed that the OEGlobal Conference would return to Massachusetts, USA, in 2026.

Isla Haddow-Flood on December 10, 2024

News, OE Awards

Meet the 2024 Open Education Award Winners attending OEGlobal24 in Brisbane

In a special session at the OEGlobal 2024 conference in Brisbane, Open Education Global honored winners and project representatives of OE Awards that were attending the conference. Executive Co-Directors Marcela […]

Alan Levine on November 18, 2024

News, OEG Board of Directors

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.

Isla Haddow-Flood on October 4, 2024

Home page, News, OE Awards, OEGlobal Live

Celebrating Excellence in Open Education – the 2024 OEAward Winners

On September 18, 2024, in a live show with previous award winners, Open Education Global (OEGlobal) announced the 2024 Open Education Awards for Excellence (OEAwards 2024) winners. Meet all the winners!

Isla Haddow-Flood on September 23, 2024

News, OEGlobal Conference

Taylor & Francis Sponsors OEGlobal24

Open Education Global (OEGlobal) is proud to announce that Taylor & Francis is a bronze sponsor of the OEGlobal Conference in Brisbane, Australia, from November 13th to 15th!

Isla Haddow-Flood on September 16, 2024

News, OE Awards

Watch it Live: Revealing the Winners of the 2024 Open Education Awards for Excellence

The moment is coming in a few days. Two week ago we highlighted the short list of finalists for the 2024 Open Education Awards for Excellence. We are now a […]

Alan Levine on September 13, 2024

OEG Voices

OE Global Voices

Podcasts from Open Education Global

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.

Episode 76 Transcript Download

Listen with Transcript

at Descript.com

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:

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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

2023 Open Education Award for Excellence (Open Repository Award, OEGlobal)
Pratham Books
- One Day One Story (Pratham Books)
- First published In Scribd (2014)
International Literacy Day 2015
Storyweaver
- Our Open Philosophy
- Stories mentioned
  - Goal!
  - Why Do Sunflowers Love the Sun?
  - What Will Today Bring? (author is Chrissi Nerantzi)
  - Rani’s First Day at School
  - Angry Akku
    - Angre Akku (in Bahasa Indonesia language)
  - Chintu
- StoryWeaver Foundational LIteracy Program
- Badan Bahasa (Indonesia organization)
Worldreader (International children’s book reading programs)
Room to Read (International organization improving literacy and gender equality)
- Literacy Cloud (Story platform based on StoryWeaver)

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 shows. We have been exploring some of the other AI features in Descript, but our posts remain human authored except where indicated otherwise.