2023 Open Education Awards for Excellence

This is the first of our series of episodes highlighting winners of the 2023 Open Education Awards for Excellence. Appropriately, we start with an award winning student, Yasser Tamer, a student in comparative literature plus minors in education and linguistics at the American University in Cairo. For his dedicated work as an open advocate for students with disabilities, researcher of artificial intelligence, and open education facilitator, Yasser was recognized in 2023 with an Individual OE Award in the Student category.

In this conversation, Yasser shares his passion for learning and research, constructively helping to grow their awareness and understanding of accessibility, and how he applies these practices in both social media and as a co-facilitator of the faculty development programs of Equity Unbound. Listen in to our conversation and you will come to expect to see one day Yasser with his PhD leading teaching and research in higher education.

This Episode

FYI: This section of show notes alone was generated by AI Actions in the Descript editor we use to produce OEG Voices

In this podcast episode, host Alan Levine speaks with Yasser Tamer, a student award winner from the Open Education Global. Yasser shares his journey as a blind student in Egypt, who aims to become an educator and normalize the presence of educators with disabilities. Discussing his academics, his activism on Twitter, his views on using AI in education, and his love for football, Yasser paints a vivid picture of multifaceted growth and determination. He touches on the important role that Open Education plays in improving accessibility and promoting inclusivity.

00:07 Introduction and Podcast Kickoff
00:57 Getting to Know Yasser Tamer
01:32 Yasser’s Background and Life in Cairo
02:53 Yasser’s Journey in Education and Advocacy
04:42 Yasser’s Motivation and Influences
05:57 Yasser’s Experience with Twitter and Online Activism
18:01 Yasser’s Future Goals and Aspirations
22:29 Yasser’s Perspective on Artificial Intelligence
27:31 Yasser’s Hobbies and Personal Interests
31:06 Yasser’s Thoughts on Open Education and Recognition
32:40 Podcast Wrap-up and Closing Remarks

Additional Links and Quotes for Episode 57

I want to just normalize the idea of students coming to a classroom, finding a professor who’s blind, different from them. And then I want to remove the idea of the stigma of how he’s going to teach us. No, he’s going to teach us by doing the same that other professors do.

Yasser Tamer

• Yasser Tamer: 2023 OE Award For Excellence: Student Award
• Ways of Being Intentionally Inclusive (Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast, Episode 477)
• Cultivating Compassionate Community to Foster Academic Integrity? (Reflecting Allowed blog, co-authored with Maha Bali)
• MyFest (Equity Unbound)
• ChatPDF and ChatDOC
• Be My AI (Be My Eyes)
• Blind Football (Wikipedia)

And I’ve been trying to explore what is happening in the other parts of the world that we’re kind of deprived from seeing due to the financial limited resources or the lack of support around conferences .

Being able to speak English is a privilege because you’ll get to read blogs, you’ll get to speak with people, you’ll get to understand their mentality. Then you’ll get to transform that experiential learning to Egyptian communities and to unprivileged youth. And Twitter has been a great step towards that.

Yasser Tamer

I hopefully will get a lot of other publications in the future. But this has been a kind of a dream. Like what prohibits me from publishing? What bans me from doing that. From reflecting on what I learned on MyFest. I’ve been leading sessions with educators. I have futurized the course at my institution that possibly can be taught in 20 years.

Yasser Tamer

Our open licensed music for this episode is a track called  Driving Over the Hills (ID 1974) by Lobo Loco and is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Like most of our intro music, it is from the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).

This was another episode we used Descript for transcribing and editing audio that has greatly enhanced our ability to produce show.We have been exploring some of the other AI features in Descript, but our posts remain human authored unless indicated otherwise.Just for interest, you can review a blog post drafted by the Descript AI action.