“Extend the reach of higher education beyond the walls of universities”
Name: Jacques Dang
Position: Secretary of the Board of Directors L'Université Numérique, Paris, France
Expertise: public policy, OER, international cooperation
Institution: L'Université Numérique
Country: France
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An interview with Jacques Dang on 27 January 2022
How did you come to be involved in Open Education?
Our organisation, L’Université Numérique, the French digital university, federates Higher Education institutions in France, mostly universities, originally around Open Educational Resources (OER), and the use of OER by academics within universities. So it was kind of a natural way for us to encounter and open up educational resources as well as to develop practices around Open Education (OE) to address the needs of both the students in our university, but also other learners outside our university.
How would you say that Librarians supported you or your organisation on that Open Education journey you describe?
Originally there was a competition between those involved with technology and those involved with pedagogy. We had people from the audio-visual world, people from the library, people from data processing, and then we had academics and learners. I’m glad to say that today all of these originally separate communities work together. Regarding Librarians, it’s very important for us to have people — experts — that guide us through the maze of information that is available in digital format or in libraries.
Regarding Librarians, it’s very important for us to have people — experts — that guide us through the maze of information that is available in digital format or in libraries.
We now have good experiences collaborating with the Librarians, and we also have specific projects we work on with them in terms of OER. However, it’s not only about the production of OER; it’s also important to make OER known and available to learners in the general public. So issues such as indexing and publication (of which Librarians are the utmost experts) are very important for us because we need to spread the word and make OER available to the larger public.
In your opinion, who has benefited from Open Education, thanks to the work done at L’Université Numérique? What have been the key benefits from the expansion of Open Education?
In my experience, the onset of the pandemic has been a turning point. Before the pandemic, we typically worked with the people who were already interested in innovation or pedagogy. For example, the people who were on the leading edge of learning, teaching and convincing students and embracing knowledge. So originally it was less focused on institutions and on faculty departments; it was much more focused on what an individual teacher could bring to their students.
However, with the onset of the pandemic, we began to have a different focus because we were receiving different requests. We now have requests for content that is more closely aligned with academic programs with, for instance, 30-hour courses, something that can be used operationally for teaching, not only for developing innovative approaches. And we’ve also had to address at least two different types of populations: the ones that were originally involved in e-learning and innovative pedagogy, which was very much focused on cognitive issues, and then the newcomers, those that had no experience with distance learning or Open Education and who just wanted to broadcast their lectures to their students one week after the onset of the pandemic, with little change, if any, from the lectures they were doing in the classrooms or amphitheaters.
There are other categories as well, but the needs of these two populations are very important for us and we need to address them in different ways. So we’ve moved from innovation in pedagogy for the individual academic to a more institutionalized, hybrid, massified use of Open Education. And in the process, we created an extended reach outside the walls of the university.
More towards lifelong learning?
Much more towards lifelong learning. We support the adoption of Open Education not just for a single academic, but we have had greater success in cooperation between different faculty members within the specific disciplinary department, and also across departments. For example, we now have people from medicine and healthcare working with people from economics and management more naturally than they used to in the past. We also have improved our outreach to stream outside the university setting, to those with limited access or to those who have a physical impairment, and also to those who are in regions outside the scope of metropolitan France. For instance, our colleagues from French speaking countries in Africa. We’ve shared our OER with the major traditional university in Senegal, in Dakar, as well as with the virtual University of Congo, of Senegal, and Mali.
In the case of the Republic of Congo, we’ve set up a specific platform for pedagogical continuity during the pandemic, at the request of the Ministry for Higher Education of the Republic of Congo.
Last week, my colleagues were in Togo to develop the use of Open Educational Resources and open educational practices for the University of Lomé and University of Kara. The national policy there is quite clear: they have a large surge of students graduating from secondary education but they are not willing, for budget reasons, to build a single additional building or classroom. They want Open Education to be available across the territory, from the south of Lomé to the north at the border of Burkina Faso, and they want to make it available to students wherever they are. Of course there are additional issues such as the cost of Internet access. When the cost of what we feel is ordinary Internet access is about one-third to one-half of the median salary in Togo, it’s a bit of a challenge.
Of course there are additional issues such as the cost of Internet access. When the cost of what we feel is ordinary Internet access is about one-third to one-half of the median salary in Togo, it’s a bit of a challenge.
Additionally, we need to address issues linked to OER. The goal of this cooperation is to help these partners, but also, in the end, to learn from them too, and to co-construct with them a future path. As an example, France is a rich country, we have a lot of public universities, but in these other countries, they have room for maybe 10% of the students that graduate from secondary education. So their goal is also to promote private initiative or Higher Education and have a good understanding of the way they operate and how to regulate these commercial providers. So this is something we are less familiar with in France, and something which we can learn from them also.
From your own experience, and all the information and data you’ve gathered, what are the other key successes of the Open Education movement?
When we had meetings with our colleagues in these universities, it was quite refreshing because they were very much aware that Open Education is not a choice, it’s something that they have to embrace in a way that they are comfortable with. They’re not focused on past benefits that the university status granted you in traditional universities in Europe; they know they need to move forward. What we aim to do is to help them remove stumbling blocks. Also, there’s a specific context, for better or for worse, in these countries that is linked to our joint heritage, about the fact that Higher Education is seen as a public service, more than a market opportunity as can be found in Kenya or other English-speaking countries in Africa. And there’s also a slight difference between copyright on the one side and intellectual property rights on the other side, and between common law and civil law countries. This is something we’ve worked with UNESCO a lot to try to bridge these differences.
One important obligation for us is that we have to have a strong and long lasting relationship with authors of content because we need them to allow us to keep their content freely available.
One important obligation for us is that we have to have a strong and long lasting relationship with authors of content because we need them to allow us to keep their content freely available. In some countries they have the right to remove this content from public access, so this is one of the reasons we need to have a good relationship with them. The second one is that we do not have as many Open Educational Resources in French as there are in English or in Mandarin. When one of our OERs becomes obsolete for technological reasons, such as the discontinuation of Flash or for content reasons, it’s not the same as in the United States; we don’t have another course that emerges naturally that replaces the one that is no longer usable. So that is an additional reason for us to have a strong relationship with authors.
Regarding the motivation of authors, they’re quite dynamic in African universities. What we can help them with is making them conscious of stumbling blocks, because most of them are civil servants. So that means that across the various government departments we need to have a common approach to the intellectual property rights of content that is produced even when it is within their administrative status as a university teacher.
The second thing that we need to do is to work on the sustainability of Open Educational Resources. How do we motivate authors to keep them up to date? How do we reward them for improving the quality of their content on a continuing basis, year after year? That’s something that is still an open question in many ways, and something that we need to work out with authors.
You talked a little bit about the global adoption of Open Education across entire universities in France, can you tell us a little bit about that?
We’re currently working on a project that is linked to the reform of health studies in France. It’s slightly less competitive than in the past and puts greater emphasis on non-medical content. It’s a competitive examination and students in medicine are conscious now that the grades they will have for healthcare studies is one thing, but the grades they will have for their minors, be it economics, or law, or psychology, will be important and can be key to the ranking they will have on the competitive examination. So we’re currently working with our colleagues from healthcare to develop the minors in various fields — economics, management, psychology, English, and engineering studies — that can be used by students who are majoring in medicine and health care.
In a way it has forced us to work together with our colleagues in healthcare and to understand why the requirements can be difficult, not from the student side, but from the way we operate. In our field there is a shortage of teachers for management and economics and so there’s no need to give additional teaching hours. On the other hand, in medicine and healthcare there’s no such shortage so they are not focused on providing more teaching hours. Also, moving from additional courses to courses with a small number of students that are more focused on operational issues and specific content, and the learning of each individual student.
What still needs to be done for OE to truly take hold? Apart from the challenges we just discussed, what are the other key challenges today in Open Education?
We’ve seen some aspects of a challenge in our partner countries in Africa. They are at the stage, hopefully, where they are defining the national strategy — a national digital strategy for Higher Education and professional training. We’ve seen that at universities there is already a trans-disciplinary approach between people from cognitive science, people from the content side, and people from technology. Perhaps there are not that many people from standards and norms working with university teachers yet and that’s something that we should improve.
At the government level, on the other hand, defining the national strategy can be a challenge, because you sometimes have people from the Ministries of Education dialoguing with the people from the Ministry of Higher Education, but seldom with the people from professional training and labor, and never with people from foreign relations or economics and commerce. And yet when our colleagues in universities say that we need to relax the rules on IPR and we need to increase the use of open source software, when you are at the government level, you need to address the needs of other constituencies. In France we use both BigBlueButton and Jitsi open source software in universities, and Moodle, of course.
On the other hand, we have a world class player for proprietary software which is called CATIA, from Dassault Systèmes, which is the leading provider of software for manufacturing aircrafts. So when you are dialoguing at the World Intellectual Property Organization, or the World Trade Organization in Geneva within the United Nations scope, you need to be conscious of the needs of these two constituencies, you need to balance the needs. It’s not that you’re not going to do open software, but you need to understand fully what the diplomats from your country will be defending as a position in international negotiations. A greater understanding across Ministries will probably help remove stumbling blocks that people in universities are facing today.
What are your plans for the future with Open Education?
I would say that what we still need today is greater involvement and greater discussion from different parties involved in Higher Education, professional training, and open development because we don’t have a full understanding if we are just providing content in economics, and we don’t have a full understanding if we are just technology experts for fiber optics or for H5P development. What is important is that we take the time to discuss with our colleagues who have different backgrounds in order to do something that will not necessarily be perfect but that we can improve over time in order to better shape how we address the needs of students.
What is important is that we take the time to discuss with our colleagues who have different backgrounds in order to do something that will not necessarily be perfect but that we can improve over time in order to better shape how we address the needs of students.
It’s a continuing process but I think that everyone who is involved in OE and distance learning today has experienced that over the past decades. I think we are on the right path and technology is there to help us, but we need to improve the quality, breadth and depth of our discussions about the issues that surround the use of Open Education — societal use, economic use, legal issues — we need to take into account all of these aspects. The increased discussion and improved understanding across various communities, that is a challenge that if we rise to the occasion, will help us continue with Open Education for our learners.
Is there anything you'd like to add?
Just to make the point that in our day to day work, open education exists alongside commercial providers and there is probably a need to ensure that a harmonious co-existence benefits learners. I would like to thank you for the opportunity to have this discussion, and also to bring this discussion to other colleagues. Thank you so much, and I hope we can continue in various forms, with various audiences, and work together.
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