The Hub in Review 2016

With the end of 2016 fast approaching, the OER Hub team would like to both thank you for your support over the past year and wish you all a peaceful and enjoyable holiday season. Here’s to a great year ahead!

As we look forward we’re also taking a moment to reflect on some of our highlights over the past 12 months…

January

• We kicked off 2016 with the release of the co-authored Exploring the use and impact of OER in British Columbia report produced in collaboration with the BC Open Textbook project.
• Rob visited Cologne, Germany to meet with the OER World Map team to plan 2016 activities and milestones.
• Beck and Bea held a Thinking about Open workshop at The University of Glasgow as part of their research for the Opening Educational Practices in Scotland (OEPS) project.

February

• Rob keynoted at the Open Education Symposium at Utah Valley University before travelling to New Orleans, Louisiana to join Bea and Patrick at the annual meeting of grantees of the Hewlett Foundation.

March

• Rob gave a keynote presentation at the 3rd e-Learning and Distance Education Conference 2016 at Virtual University Pakistan, Lahore.
• The end of the month saw us host a visit from the awesome TJ Bliss, our programme officer at Hewlett.
• Bea and Beck ran a workshop on best practice in using OER at OEPS Forum 4 in Stirling, Scotland during Open Education week.

April

• The Hub team were go! April was a busy conference and meeting month with the OER World Map team meeting in Berlin, Germany, OER16: Open Culture in Edinburgh, Scotland and OE Global in Kraków, Poland. 
• As you might be aware the Hub administers the Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN).  April saw the major event of the GO-GN calendar – the annual seminar! Bringing together 9 students from across the globe prior to OE Global, participants shared their research as part of a two-day workshop. You can find out more about GO-GN and the nine researchers who participated in this set of videos and read more of their experiences on the GO-GN website.
• Congratulations were in order when the ExplOERer project course Learning to (Re)Use OER which was developed by Bea was awarded an Open Education Consortium ‘Open Course Award of Excellence’

May

• Bea headed to Scotland to visit Glasgow Caledonian University to conduct a Thinking about Open workshop on behalf of OEPS.
• Martin celebrated 10 years of his blog Edtechie!

June

• Throughout 2016 Rob has led the Open Research Agenda sessions at various conferences and events. This month Rob conducted the workshop at our annual Open University’s (UK) CALRG conference. 
• We hosted our first European OER research get together on the day of the EU Referendum (sigh).
• We announced closer collaboration with the ICDE Global Doctoral Consortium and GO-GN. Read more.
• The OER World Map team met Cologne, Germany.

July

• The JIME OER15 special collection edited by Rob and Bea was published.
• We began our collaborative research with OER Wales Cymru to analyse impact data from their OER Champions programmes.

August

• Want to see what GO-GN is about at a glance? August saw the release of a fab new infographic produced in conjunction with the OE Consortium.
• We formally launched our funky new website!

September

• We were pleased to see the launch of Becoming an Open Educator a community reviewed, open badged course developed as part of our work for OEPS.
• The Hub hosted visitors from Germany for a team meeting of OER World Map.  
• Beck and Bea hit the road to facilitate more OEPS Thinking about Open workshops at both the College Development Network (CDN), Stirling, Scotland and the University of Highlands and Islands (UHI) in Inverness, Scotland.
• Rob travelled to Budapest, Hungary as part of IET consultation for the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Training (CEPOL).
• Bea introduced GO-GN to conference participants at EADTU in Rome, Italy.

October

• More OEPS research related goodness this month with the release of both the college and Higher Education awareness of OER and open practices in Scotland survey findings reports and infographics by Bea.
• We conducted the first of our Open University (UK) workshops during Open Access week: Twitter 101
• Rob took a trip to Inverness, Scotland to participate in the 5th international meeting of OERu partners and the OERu Council of Chief Executive Officers, hosted by the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI).

November

• Beck was one of 236 participants selected to participate in #OpenCon16 in Washington, DC, which included an Advocacy Day where Beck was part of a visit to the US Department of Education on Capitol Hill. 
• Martin and Rob participated in the 13th annual open education conference #OpenEd16 in Richmond, Virginia, USA including facilitating the final of our Open Research Agenda workshops and present Hub research. Review Rob’s slides on this work and his live blog of the conference keynotes.
• To coincide with OpenEd we released our Open Research open textbook which was created using the Pressbooks platform.
• Rob spoke at the Society for Research into Higher Education in London, UK for a workshop entitled ‘Critical Perspectives on ‘Openness’ in Higher Education’ (part of the ‘Digital University’ series)
• Beck and Bea released their Thinking about Open reusable workshop pack as part of their work for OEPS.
• Congratulations were in order as the OER World Map team meeting in Cologne celebrated two additional years of funding.

December

• During the first phase of the Hub we made our research instruments and methodologies openly available for reuse. December saw the launch of our Open Researcher Toolkit open textbook, developed to help facilitate reuse by providing useful information on how we had developed and used these tools.
• We also released the PDF version of our Open Research open textbook!