It’s been a super September at the OER Research Hub: here’s an overview of what we’ve been up to over the past month:

Open Research Course 

We had 139 people sign-up for our School of Open course Open Research! This four-week community reviewed course explores the nature and practice of open research and takes a closer look at how to conduct ethical and open research, dissemination and the relationship between reflection/evaluation and openness. We are just over half way through the course at present: if you’ve missed some of the great discussions and our weekly Hangout sessions, or just want to watch some of our videos, head over to our YouTube playlist or to the Discourse forums. There’s an overview of everything course related also available here.

Out and About 

Earlier in the month, Martin and Rob headed up to the University of Warwick for ALT Conference. Rob showcased our Impact Map in his presentation Understanding patterns in OER impact: the role of mapping and curation. You can also read Rob’s liveblogs of Catherine Cronin’s keynote and other sessions at the conference. Rob is currently participating in the Creative Commons OER Policy workshop in Porto, Portugal. More to follow shortly!

OER Research Hub Spanish Language Poster (Bea de los Arcos, CC-BY)

OER Research Hub Spanish Language Poster (Bea de los Arcos, CC-BY)

Further afield, intrepid researcher Bea headed to Chile to participate in VI Congreso Iberoamericano de Pedagogía in Santiago de Chile. Presenting some of our research on OER and Flipped Learning (check out El impacto del uso de REA en la clase al revés) we also showcased a fabulous Spanish language version of our project poster at the conference. Look out for Bea’s forthcoming blog post about the conference.

Research and Data Update  

In early September we submitted our final reports to Hewlett and have begun planning dissemination of the overall research findings from our “Monster Dataset” and hypothesis review … Our research has shown that almost 80% of educators, informal and formal learners who have participated in our questionnaires have adapted OER in some way or another. Martin explores this finding in-depth in It’s not reuse, it’s adaptation.

As mentioned in last month’s review September also saw the release of our Writing for Change pre-course research findings.We had am amazing response to this survey with just under three quarter of the total course participants taking time out to complete our pre-course questionnaire. Highlights from the survey findings include data on motivation, community and badging and demographic data showing a high level of educational attainment by survey participants, with over 80% of respondents reporting an Associate degree or higher. Read more on the findings here.

Visitors

Towards the end of September we welcomed Sheila MacNeill back for the second of our internal evaluations, which focused on what we have achieved and future planning. You can read the first of Sheila’s blog posts on her visit, which looks at our agile working practise and use of sprints, in Where Sheila’s been this week – revisiting #OERRHub and the researcher as an API analogyYou can also read more about our evaluative framework here.

Other News 

Finally, we also said a “hello and goodbye” to our Fellowships and Collaborations Manager, Simone Arthur as she returned from maternity leave. Congratulations to Simone on the arrival of her son and her new position in the Equalities and Diversities team here at the Open University (UK).

Looking Forward 

So, what’s coming up in October? We are looking forward to welcoming our external evaluators Barbara and Lynda of SRI International and our Hewlett Programme Officer TJ Bliss to the Hub this month.

The team will also be participating in Open Access week and Mozilla Festival 2014. Beck and Martin will also be heading up to Scotland to participate in the Opening Educational Practices in Scotland (OEPS) Project’s Advisory Forum and Project Launch.