At the core of OER Hub is a team of researchers who work across a range of projects. Although not every researcher works on every project, there is considerable overlap, promoting synergy and agile ways of working. The Hub as a whole can be seen as an identity which arises from these individual collaborations. OER Hub has three key objectives:
- To build capacity in the OER research domain
- To conduct research into OER related issues
- To produce resources for the OER research community
Each of the separate projects addresses one or more of these aims, and is supplemented by the overall activity of the Hub as an overarching operation. There are benefits to research being conducted in this way by the Hub team as the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
We conduct research using a range of methods – both quantitative and qualitative – and have expertise across the open education spectrum including:
- Open Educational Resources
- Open Textbooks
- MOOCs
- Open Access
- Open Educational Practices
- Open Scholarship
- Open Pedagogy
We operate an open practice based approach, releasing data openly, publishing in open access journals and running open courses. We also use a range of social media to engage and grow the open education community. The OER Hub team have won several awards including the Open Research Award from OEGlobal (2014), the OU Engaging Research Award for the Open Researcher Course (2015) and Open MOOC award for the ExplOERer course from OEGlobal (2016). Martin Weller was also awarded a Professorial chair by the International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) in particular recognition of the OER Hub project.
About OER Hub
The team
