OpenTEL SIG launch ((Bart Rienties, Gerald Evans, Mark Williams and Natasha Huckle, OU UK)

Please join us for our first OpenTEL SIG session, we’ll be bringing together a few like-minded people with a view to sharing the work we’re undertaking at the moment in the field of TEL and Learning Design and helping to make connections across teams and institutions. For this first one some of the work on our initial list includes assessment, sustainability, learning analytics and staff CPD but there are no doubt other areas people are working on and we’ll be setting this up for informal sharing to ensure we get to hear about the breadth of activity. In later sessions, we may focus in more on specific areas, but for this first one it’ll be a broad snapshot we’ll be bringing together.

Open Education Research: Celebrating 10 years of the Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN) (Rob Farrow, Martin Weller, Beck Pitt and Carina Bossu, OU UK)

The Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN, n.d.) supports doctoral research in open education around the world and currently has several hundred members who are doctoral/post-doctoral researchers and interested expert practitioners.  In this presentation we offer some analysis of trends in research into open education, drawing on the data generated by GO-GN as well as other expert research.

Bozkurt, Koseglu & Singh (2019) found in their review of trends that openness can be understood as a cluster of related concepts (e.g. open education; open learning; open educational resources (OER); open educational practices (OEP)) where there is increasing interest.  Bozkurt & Zawacki-Richter (2021) similarly found that open approaches have provided distance learning institutions with fresh purpose.  Research into open education thus builds on a rich heritage but most work done in this area is focused at the ‘micro’ level of implementation in teaching and learning (Zawacki-Richter & Bozkurt, 2022) and arguably more needs to be done to synthesize research across clustered topics (Weller et al., 2018).

The global perspective of GO-GN researchers offers a snapshot of cutting-edge trends in open education research areas. In this presentation, we provide an analysis of network activity and identify core areas for contemporary open education research, including open practice, OER as a discipline area, making connections between research clusters and the application of OER in non-traditional learning contexts.  We also offer some reflections on the evolving nature of discourse around open education and the relation between research and practice, particularly around the themes of social justice and equity, diversity and inclusion.

References

 Bozkurt, A., Koseoglu, S., & Singh, L. (2019). An analysis of peer reviewed publications on openness in education in half a century: Trends and patterns in the open hemisphere. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 35(4). https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.4252

Bozkurt, A., & Zawacki-Richter, O. (2021). Trends and Patterns in Distance Education (2014–2019): A Synthesis of Scholarly Publications and a Visualization of the Intellectual Landscape. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 22(2), 19-45. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v22i2.5381

GO-GN (n.d.). Global OER Graduate Network. https://go-gn.net/

Weller, M., Jordan, K., DeVries, I. and Rolfe, V. (2018). Mapping the open education landscape: citation network analysis of historical open and distance education research. Open Praxis, 10(2) pp. 109–126. https://doi.org/10.5944/openpraxis.10.2.822

Zawacki-Richter, O., and Bozkurt, A. (2022). Research Trends in Open, Distance, and Digital Education. In: Handbook of Open, Distance and Digital Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0351-9_12-1

A call for open science to become inclusive science (Garron Hillaire, AERDF)

This presentation, I will share some initial results on the registration of pre-funded research ideas in conjunction with highlighting key points and concerns raised during a conversation I facilitated on the same topic at the Metascience 2023 conference. The motivation to explore registering early stage ideas is to move the openness of scientific research to the earliest stage of the cycle. Pre-registration promotes discoverability, reduces waste, and fosters collaboration – so why not explore those benefits for pre-funded ideas? Shifting towards early sharing has the potential to create a more equitable scientific landscape through the incorporation of diverse stakeholder input. In my recent work on registering pre-funded ideas, the effort explored a simplified publication format designed to communicate to a wide audience to pursue diversifying stakeholder engagement. In this presentation, I will share the new publication format called an ‘Opportunity Study’, highlight the results from supporting six research teams that created six opportunity studies, and compare the merits of this approach with the related notion of registering entire grant applications. Finally, I will highlight how registering pre-funded ideas creates a need for potential revision to standards such as the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines. Effectively, open science needs to become inclusive science.

Deep viewpoints: Using citizen curation to address the museum participation gap (Paul Mullholland, OU UK)

The UK Warwick Commission Report highlights a disparity in rates of cultural engagement which tend to be lower among the BAME community, people with disabilities and young people. It is suggested that this participation gap is due to many public cultural institutions having a perceived lack of relevance to many of their potential audiences.

This presentation describes an initiative developed with the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) to help address the participation gap by enabling a broad range of communities to share their personal responses to the IMMA collection and exhibitions, as well as curating the museum experience of other visitors in a way that reflects their concerns and interests. The initiative made use of a custom-designed web application called Deep Viewpoints, inspired by the process of Slow Looking in which museum visitors are guided to observe artworks and develop their own response. Within Deep Viewpoints, the processes of observing and responding to artworks are guided by a script comprising stages containing artworks, statements, and prompts or questions to which the follower of the script can respond. Communities were not only involved in interpreting artworks with the guidance of the scripts but also creating new scripts, mediating how others observe and think about art.

Participating communities included asylum seekers, young men in custody, an advocacy group for black and mixed-race people, young people living with long-term illnesses and a black LGBTQ+ community group. Feedback from participating groups was overwhelmingly positive. Analysis of the community authored scripts showed that they combined episodes of giving a perspective to their audience and episodes of inviting their audience to respond to issues raised by the artworks. Issues addressed in the scripts included how to look at artworks, symbolism, the artist’s intent, personal feelings, the perspective of others and broader societal issues such as racism and the effects of war.