Project Update

It may seem a little quiet here at the Hub of late but rest assured we’re hard at work behind the scenes! Since the new year we’ve been particularly focused on writing up our research for journal publication.  Simultaneously, the team is also involved in a number of other OER projects. Rob is working with HBZ on the OER World Map project; which is currently focused on building the technical architecture. Beck and Bea are developing the research strand of the Opening Educational Practices in Scotland (OEPS) project and Bea is also collaborating with the ExplOERer Project to design of an open course to train teachers in OER reuse. The course will be available on the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) platform early next year.

Open Education Week 2015 (9-13 March 2015) 

There’s not long to go now until this year’s Open Education Week!

As you might be aware we’ve been collaborating with BCcampus and running a survey with educators using open textbooks as part of their Open Textbook Project. BCcampus were kind enough to invite us to participate in Distinguishing the dOERs: Faculty use of Open Educational Resources and on Tuesday you can hear more from Beck and Rajiv Jhangiani on the Hub’s overall educator findings and some preliminary findings from the BCcampus survey! Find out more about this and many other exciting BCcampus events next week here.

Athabasca University are also hosting a selection of great events for Open Education week, with a speakers every weekday at 12.00-13.00 MT including Paul Stacey (Creative Commons), George Siemens (Athabasca) and Janet Welch (Alberta). Martin will be talking about his recent book Battle for Open on Tuesday and you can join the call here.

Finally, we also have an exciting SURPRISE infographic that will be making an appearance during Open Education Week! Stay tuned for more and don’t forget you can check out our existing infographics in the meantime.

And of course head on over to Open Education Week to check out the complete schedule!

Out and About 

At the end of January, Bea travelled to Leicester to attend the OER Schools Conference organised by Josie Fraser from the DigiLit Leicester project. We don’t hear school teachers and OER mentioned in the same breadth often enough! Go ahead and read more about it, and download some truly useful resources from here.

But where can you hear all about the latest research from the Hub? We’ll be back out on the road again shortly participating in a number of events: Martin, Patrick and Rob will be heading to San Francisco in March to the Hewlett Grantees meeting.   The team will be in Cardiff in April for OER15 where we’ll be giving an update on our research findings, exploring open research and discussing ethics in the open. A week later, you will find us at OEC Global 2015 in Banff, Canada. Rob will be working there with the ROER4D project and the GO-GN PhD student network, as well as speaking on a panel about the challenges of mapping OER activity. The team will also be presenting our latest overall research findings at OEC Global. Check out our future and past presentations here.

Finally… catch up on our presentations and webinars!

We mentioned a couple of these webinars back in our previous update, but if you missed them fear not! They are now available online to watch at your convenience.

Check out Martin Weller and Martin Eve’s double book launch event and hear more about Battle for Open and Open Access and the Humanities… 

Hear Beck and Nicole Allen (SPARC) discuss OER Research on Open Textbooks and Librarians in December’s CCCOER webinar… Thanks to Una Daly for inviting us to participate!

And you can hear about lots of fantastic open education projects around the world (including ours!) in this exciting Open Education Working Group Call from back in January… Thanks to Marieke Guy for inviting us to take part!

Picture Credit: “Northam Burrows Country Park” (CC-BY 4.0 Beck Pitt)