Team Hub wishes all its supporters, collaborators and friends all the very best for the forthcoming festivities and 2015! It’s been an amazing year and thank you for your continued support; we couldn’t do it without you all.
We’ve had a busy November and December (as ultra observant readers of our blog may have noticed, there was no monthly review for last month!)… so, where has the team been and what have we been up to?
Conferences, workshops and travel
November began with researcher Bea participating in this year’s International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL) Blended and Online Symposium. Read Bea’s review of the conference and check out her slides on the impact of OER in the K12 classroom here.
Beck headed over to Washington DC early to carry out some visits and conduct interviews as part of case study work for OpenStax College, before heading to the student and early career researcher conference on open access, open data and open education: OpenCon 2014.
The weekend of 15/16 November saw the rest of team Hub descend on DC for OpenEd 2014! We launched our OER Evidence Report 2013-2014 at OpenEd 2014 and had not one, two or three papers but SIX at the conference! An amazing opportunity for us to present on the range of work that we do: from exploring open research, the latest research from our overall dataset to ethics in the open and agile project management, it was great to be part of what was an amazing conference. It was wonderful to see so many of our collaborators and friends there too. Thank you. If you weren’t able to make it, and would like to check out our presentations, head on over to our Slideshare.
Meanwhile, whilst we were in DC, our Director Martin was in Bali for an International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) meeting. Early December then saw researcher Rob head to Penang, Malaysia to lead the 5-day ROER4D impact studies workshop.
Tess Cartmill (ROER4D) and Rob Farrow (OER Research Hub) chill out post-impact studies workshop (Photo Credit: CC-BY ROER4D)
New Publications and Webinars
Hot on the heels of our OER Evidence report was the publication of Martin’s long awaited book: Battle for Open. Martin also held a joint webinar with Martin Eve (who has also just published Open Access and the Humanities) to launch both publications: check out the webinar recording here.
Earlier in December, Beck also participated in an Open Education Consortium / CCCOER webinar with Nicole Allen (SPARC) on OER Research on Open Textbook Adoption and Librarians. A recording of the webinar will shortly be available here but in the meantime head over to our Slideshare to view the slide deck.
Rob also helped launch the Open Education Handbook with Marieke Guy (Open Knowledge Foundation) on 11 December. You can read more about the event here or watch the Google Hangout.
Research News
Open Fellow Billy Meinke (Creative Commons) posted the second part of his research on the TAACCCT OER Community during November. Find out more about how TAACCCT grantees are using OER and proprietary materials in his post.
The past month or so has also seen the release of three more surveys: we’ve been collaborating with the team at BCcampus Open Textbooks Project to work up a survey to examine the impact open textbooks and OER are having in British Columbia, Canada. Read more on the background to the survey and its launch on the BCcampus blog. Clint Lalonde also kindly gave us a great shoutout in his blog (thank, Clint!)
During November we also launched a new educator and student survey with OpenStax College to find out more about how people are using OpenStax open textbooks and gather their feedback.
Finally…
If you haven’t yet had the opportunity, don’t forget to take a break from the hectic holiday season to read our OER Evidence Report 2013-2014. Guaranteed to bring seasonal cheer!
Thank you and Happy Hoidays! (CC-BY 4.0 OER Research Hub)
Reblogged this on methylated-orange.