As September beckons, here’s a quick round-up of what’s been happening at the Hub over the past month:

Join us to explore Open Research

As you might be aware, we’ve been working on our School of Open Open Research course over the past few months … August saw the launch of our four-week exploration into of the concept and practices of open research, including how to conduct research ethically and in the open, dissemination and the relation between openness and reflection.

Sign-up is open until Friday 12 September with the course formally starting on Monday 15 September 2014. We’re super excited and honoured to have had so much interest in the course and hope that you’ll be able to join us!

You can read our blog post announcement here and also check out the course and sign-up here.

Your Open Research course facilitators! (Clockwise: Bea de los Arcos, Beck Pitt, Natalie Eggleston and Rob Farrow)

Your Open Research course facilitators! (Clockwise: Bea de los Arcos, Beck Pitt, Natalie Eggleston and Rob Farrow)

Here be Monsters! Data Update 

August saw our resident “data master” Bea reveal the secrets of putting together our “monster dataset” … With over 6000 responses drawn from across 18 different questionnaires there will be lots more research to share with you shortly. If you’re heading to OpenEd 2014 in November you’ll be able to hear us talking about some of our findings on Thursday 20 November 2014. In the meantime repeat after me “darkness is bad, open is good…”

Collaboration and Impact Map News 

More good news as we officially announced our collaboration with MERLOT earlier in August. As Rob explains in his post here, we’re running a shorter survey and are aiming to produce some great data visualisations and a separate MERLOT map on our Impact Map with the data. If you use MERLOT and want to get involved, head on over and take the survey!

In other Impact Map news, August also saw us incorporate the Open Education Timeline created by the Open Knowledge Foundation into our Impact Map. Read Rob’s post on developments here.

In other collaboration news, we’ve just closed the pre-course survey for P2PU and College Unbound‘s Writing for Change course which “…help[s] learners accomplish social change through writing effective and compelling op-eds, grant applications and project proposals.” More on the findings from this study and the Spring time School of Open facilitated courses shortly. Work with a number of colleges in the US to create detailed case studies on large cohort use of OpenStax College open textbooks also began during August.

This month also saw Rob head to Singapore to meet with the ROER4D Impact Studies team mid-August time and we had not one, but two, infographics produced by collaborators. Check out the Co-PILOT librarians and OpenStax student survey infographics here. A big thanks to Eleni Zazani and Dani Nicholson for making these possible!

Rob (front) with the ROER4D Impact Studies team (Picture credit: ROER4D CC-BY 4.0)

Rob (front right) with the ROER4D Impact Studies team (Picture credit: ROER4D CC-BY 4.0)

What’s happening in September?  

In addition to our Open Research course beginning mid-September time, next month sees the team back on the road. Look out for Martin and Rob at ALT-C, Rob at BERA 2014 and Bea heading to Chile to participate in Congreso Iberoamericano de Pedagogía 2014. We will also be submitting our final report to our funders The Hewlett Foundation. Watch this space!