The meeting of the network was hosted by The Open University in conjunction with OpenTEL last Wednesday.
The international research event gathered a total of 39 people, including researchers, PhD students, course developers, educators and practitioners who were interested in learning about five presentations on the following themes:
Supporting people who are learning at scale
Training and supporting educators working at scale
Assuring the quality of MOOCs and microcredentials
Academics, researchers, and PhD students have to search, select, and submit their work to peer review journals and conferences to disseminate their research to the world. “Think of your audience”,—they say, but how often do they think of making their research projects and findings more accessible to the targeted audience? Regardless of their disciplinary specialisms, they forget to play with how they share their work beyond academia. “It’s okay to play” were the words Dr Martin Glynn told us during his seminar last Wednesday hosted by OpenTEL. Before scrolling down to find the recording of his talk, allow me to give you an intro of Martin’s background and how he ended up writing a book on ‘Data Verbalisation for Researchers’.
Martin came to academia late. In the beginning, he did not harmonise with academics because he did not understand their world. Working with prisoners and the community was his reality. Nevertheless, he pursued a PhD because, as many academics, he saw in education an opportunity to make a difference. “When are you going to publish your findings?” —people used to ask him. Well, the truth was that he was never comfortable with the subtle pressure around attending x number of conferences or having his work published in academic journals.