 And I'd like to welcome Martin Weller, who will be talking about some of the lessons building an open research community with GoGN. Over to you, Martin. Thanks, Martin. Martin and I have many confusing meetings with people who refer to Martin. And I think, did I do that with it? And they mean he and vice versa. So we need to get better names or different names. So hi everyone, I'm going to talk about GoGN. I don't think you can see me on the video, but I'm actually fully branded up. GoGN T-shirt, GoGN Penguin. So you know, it's all about the merchandise. Good. So hi everyone, hope you're doing well. And what we'll talk about is what the aim of the GoGN network, what we do, some analysis from a survey that we've done and some feedback and kind of the lessons we've learned from trying to run this community. So the aim of the GoGN network is set up by Fred Molder who was at the OU Netherlands in 2012, I think, which seems a long time ago. And really, this is when Open Educational Resources were quite an emerging field. And although there was lots of advocacy around people saying, oh, we all will do this, we'll make learning better for students, they will, you know, decree costs, most kind of things, which I think we kind of all believed in the field. But there wasn't much research there to kind of back that up. Both are kind of quantitative and qualitative side to see how people are actually using them, what the barriers for use those kind of things. And so what Fred wanted to do was kind of grow that global research community. And particularly when you're doing research into something quite new like OER, then you might be the only person in your university, even in your country who's doing that research, a supervisor may not know about it. So these people often operate in isolation. And so we want to try to grow that research community to share the findings and support people to do that. And so it was funded by the Hewlett Foundation and still is. So how we work is, so it stands for, sorry, I should have said, the Global OER Graduate Network, that's what the GOGM stands for, or GOGANS, if you want to go with that. So we work with doctoral students, so people studying to get a PhD or an EDD and they have to apply to join and we look at their application. And so there are certain criteria. You have to be actually signed up to be doing a PhD, not thinking about doing one, and has to be roughly in the field of OER, so not everyone gets in. So we want to kind of keep the focus fairly tight. We have an annual seminar. This is all pre-COVID a case. We'll come on to that later. So the idea was every year we bring together about 10 to 15 students or researchers for a two-day seminar, which is kind of very intense. I should say, if there's any GOGM members in the audience, perhaps you could do a thumbs-up icon in the chat box. As you can see, there's some of our members here. So we bring people together for two days and they present about their research and we run some general sessions on how to be an open researcher, advice on completion of PhD, those kind of things. A lot of love for the GOGMers in the audience. And then it's often allied to a conference, usually the OER Global Conference. Although last year it was the OER Conference in Norway. So then the research didn't go on to present at the conference, so it's going to be a massive period. We also run monthly webinars, where we particularly like to get alumni coming in and present about their research. We have quite an active Twitter account. I send a newsletter, which not everyone reads. Leo, I'm looking at you. But generally, students like to read the newsletter where we share kind of what's happening. We share resources and create resources and I'll come on to that later. And we try to create a very supportive network, kind of peer support between people. For instance, last year Judith Pete, who was one of our researchers who graduated and got her PhD, that was in the Netherlands, although she's based in Kenya. People, members, flew in all around the world to kind of be with her for her defence and preparation. So it's kind of a very supportive network. We also give out two awards every year, which we've named after Fred, who sadly passed away a couple of years ago. And one for Best Research Paper, published in an open access journal. And one for Best Research Project or Open Practice. And another thing we like to do is not just to encourage, to support research into where we are, but to try to encourage open practice. So we have sessions on how to share your data, what you might be happy about sharing, trying to get people to use various forms of social media, blogging, those kind of things. So when people leave, go to jail, they're still part of the network. So in the seminar that we run, which is kind of like the meat of the go-to-gen practice, students present to each other. And we try to get students from different states and their PhDs to some right at the end, some right at the beginning, some in the middle, people from different countries, different topics, different methods. There's a kind of a range of practice there. And we ask students to give feedback to each other. And then we run these sessions on open practice or getting published, surviving your PhD, life after a PhD. And then some of them go on to present the conference. And sometimes it will be the same thing they've presented to us. So we kind of can give them feedback on what they want to do for the conference. And at times it will be related work. So this is probably a slightly out of date. So we have, this has gone up a bit since then. So probably about 120 members now. We've run four seminars, and there were some before we took over as well, which were from Krakow, Cape Town, Delft and Galway. And I'll come on to what might happen this year. And we've been doing 15 researches to each. We've hosted, this is probably about 25, 26 webinars now, and have quite a lot of publication from members. And it was interesting, I went through their program of OER 19 last year. And across all the different presentations, there were 31 sessions that were from Goji and members. I think kind of demonstrates a certain maturity and growth in the network. We conducted a survey last year of our members, just asking them a number of different things. We had 38 responses from 29 institutions across 14 different countries. And although, you know, survey, all the questions that you should know as researchers and caveats about surveys, I think there's probably a representative of the network as a whole, I think. Oh, somebody needs to have better use of fonts and colour. This is where the countries were. So quite a lot of Canadians, those Canadians pop up everywhere. Quite a lot based in the UK, US. It's interesting, so there's four in the Netherlands, for instance, and one of the things we see is the difference between where you're registered for your degree, your PhD, and where you're actually doing the studies. Some of those people are registered in the Netherlands, or those in the UK, the EU Netherlands are actually like people like Judith who are in Kenya. So there's a slight difference there. But I think what they definitely do is improve some of our participation from the Global South and we've been looking at ways to try and do that. We ask people their research area and put them mapping into these four categories. So the smaller blue chunk is MOOCs. We do allow some MOOC research in, I think when it particularly relates to open practice. But Judith were quite clear with us. They didn't want it to be, particularly when MOOCs were hot. They didn't want the network to be swamped by MOOC research. They wanted to retain some of the practice around OER. So the gray chunk is OER in various formats or come onto that. ODL has open distance learning, so particularly use of OER in open practice with open universities. And I think a shift we've seen recently is towards that orange section which is more an open educational practice. And that becomes a bit of a gray area, or an orange area, because what counts as open educational practice? We have some applications that are about academic use of social media, for instance, those kind of things. So I think sometimes we sort of discuss amongst ourselves, does this fit in with GoGN or not? So that can be a bit very rare. But I think it's interesting because my sense is also that this is where Hewlett Foundation are also moving their focus of interest less around the things, the kind of content and more around the kind of practice. So I think GoGN was ahead of the curve, as always. We asked people what activities they had done, and I think as you expect most people who tend to respond to the survey, the more kind of engaged people. So most of them had been to a conference, but pretty much, you know, discussed activity across all our tasks. I'm asking what's most useful. I think no surprise that the workshops that face to face was the most useful part for most students, most members. We asked them to rate the features of what we do and how useful they find them on a look at scale. And you can see that actually they're all pretty highly rated. It's only the Facebook pages doesn't get much laugh and I think we don't use it much. But I think it shows kind of across a range of things we do. Actually, they're all useful to our members at different times and for different things. I think that kind of indicates you need this kind of, this breadth of activity, I think, to maintain a community. We asked people about methodologies, what methodology they'd used, and we sort of grew together. And it's interesting because our research is often used mixed methods. They might use a survey and focus group or survey and structure interviews, for instance. But as you can see, there's quite a range there of methods and I'll come on to a handbook we'll produce about this later. So it's, and interestingly, this is not true of any pre-selection on our part, but a lot of Go Jim members tend to be more on the kind of qualitative side, I think, of research. And that's probably in common contrast to those of you who know it, the Open Fellows programme, by John Hilton in the U.S. where that tends to be, that's often kind of post-doc people, a bit of funding to do specifically research. And that tends to be quite quantitative. So I think it's quite a nice kind of complementarity between those two. We asked people about their kind of conceptual frameworks they use. And as you can see again, a lot, basically, there's a lot. And I'll come on to this again as well. But I think it's interesting that people are applying a lot of different kind of frameworks and ways of thinking to open education. And that in itself demonstrates a kind of maturity in the field, I think. We asked people for feedback on the seminar. They all say nice things about the seminar. But I think that this kind of gets to the point of why it's valuable. It's impacted their research immediately. They met someone there. They kind of protected where they went back to kind of change their practice. And certainly they found it really galvanising. So I think often, members who are kind of caught in the middle of their PhD, they've kind of got over that first year and they're kind of in that mid-PhD slump. They can be a real kind of like boomer. This one said, like, they feel, now, SIDA, since few are interested in the same things that they are, their institution, meeting others for such similar research part was kind of really uplifting. That goes back to that kind of sharing practice. And I think that's kind of one of the key issues of this overcome and isolation, really. So this member said, they're so far away and isolated in a broken institution. They're ever thankful for the community. My brag about how friendly it is to people in other research fields. This person said, you know, it's a face-to-face impact on me and my faculty. I'm the only researcher. I'm a non-techie researcher. I feel lonely and isolated. So I think it's kind of this idea of building things, particularly in a new discipline where it doesn't fit as neatly into some of the existing discipline and silos. We asked people what they might want to be interested in doing in the future. People would like to do more informal support and offer advice of possibly mentor PhDs, whether we can help people finding teach opportunities or observing PhD candidates. I think that now that we've reached a kind of certain stage in a certain size of the Gaugin community, there's quite a lot of alumni who feel they would sort of give something back to the network and so we can sort of shift about, we can shift our focus a bit, I think. We're going to start producing some outputs as well. So we've just got another three years funding at the end of last year. What we agreed to do was produce a number of outputs which are co-produced with our members, which are useful for everyone in the area of research field, not just us. So the first of these coming up very soon, probably by May, is a methodology report. So we asked members to fill out a survey form that sort of outlines their methodologies and we're just putting that together and trying to group all those different aspects and sort of top and tail it with some introduction and some conclusions. And I think that will be a really useful report then for any researchers coming into the field or starting research in this area. What methodologies did people use? Why did they use them and how are they useful? We're going to produce an annual OER research review report. There's not necessarily a kind of systematic synthesis, but rather between the team and our members. What are the interesting areas we think that are going on in OER research at the moment? And we'll produce one of those every year. Next year, we're going to produce a kind of conceptual framework report. So I listed a lot of conceptual frameworks. Similar to the methodology after people, what frameworks did they use? How are they useful and how did they apply to them? So again, you could... So anyone new comes to the field can then do a kind of pick and mix from... I'll take that methodology and that conceptual framework and offer that. And I also have some... I was recently appointed a Commonwealth Learning Chair which comes with a small bit of money that we can spend on some fellowships with people in Commonwealth countries. So what we're going to try and do with those and what we've agreed is to ask people to submit proposals to conduct regional analysis of their region and how is the kind of OER use going on there, but only Commonwealth countries. That's five minutes. Five minutes, OK, thanks, Mike. So our lessons, I think probably is the most important one. Emotional support is actually really important and often we underplay it. I think you can underestimate how valuable it is. And I think as much as it's useful for people to come in and get advice on methodologies and frameworks and have chats about how they should do their analysis or something, that is really important. It's actually the emotional support they get from finding other people who are doing similar things. And often depth graphs in the... I think we talk to depth about this, it's actually a really difficult thing to measure. When you put in reports, proposals for research, you're asked to kind of say, what are your outputs going to be? We're going to have these many reports and we'll have this many views and this many Twitter followers. There are nice metrics for that. What's your metric for emotional support? And as I often joke, is it a number of hugs given, but we can't even give hugs anymore in a post-COVID world. So I think post-COVID as well, what we need to shift and actually emotional support is even more important, I think. So we were supposed to run a seminar, a mini-seminar before the conference, if we shifted to all online. And actually that worked very well, I think. Actually, there's more people coming. One of the first things we did as soon as the crisis broke was to set up a WhatsApp group for our members. And it's not really a kind of chatting about research. It's sharing app memes and funny jokes and those kind of things. It's just going to allow people to have that sense of connection with other people. And we do need to think about... So our plan was to run the seminar in November with OE Global in Taiwan. I don't think that's going to happen, so we need to think about what we do with that. So how do we measure that kind of emotional support for people? Sorry. Face-to-face online mix, I thought worked well, but maybe we need to do that as well. But people do bond a lot with those kind of intense two days. They then got to form friendships that last for years. And people like to make connections, and that's the important thing. I feel like part of my job was really just to facilitate that. Really, the network evolves through the action of the participants, so it's up to us to follow that lead. So I wanted to quickly just say, if you were in another field that was kind of new, then I think there's some lessons you can draw from going to in. And one of those is that it takes effort to get our sustainable community. There's a small team at the OEU. We have very active members and those kind of things. But you can't just do this stuff for nothing. And I think, long ago, we were talking about kind of invisible labor yesterday. So trying to do this without money would be very difficult. Just organizing things like webinars just takes ages. So, you know, thankful we get funded by Hewlett's do-it-it. I'm not sure we can do it just on the side on the periphery of our time. And actually, I think doctoral students are a really good place to start. They go on to become very big names in their field often. And they're kind of the passionate people and enthusiastic. So that's it. So if you want to get in touch, if you are a PhD student in the OER area or know of one, come to gogn.net and there's a little application form you can fill out. Follow us on Twitter. And that's it. All of our graphics were by the lovely Brian Mathis, of course. Okay. That's it. Thank you. Thank you, Marvin. So the result of love for GoGN. I think you have a lot of GoGNers in the audience. So I think we have time for one question. So Martina was asking, do doctoral students, do you know if they stay in touch after graduating? Yeah, but we're not streaming or with each other. But the answer to that is both, yeah. So we've got some graduates in the audience here, I think. But also with each other. So a lot of them kind of form, for instance, when we're at Cape Town, a little group formed around a certain methodology and that's it. They've kept in touch with that. So people like Katherine Cronin, one of our alumni stuff. So yeah, they'll be very much keep in touch. Fulls are a ongoing network, I think. That's great. Thank you, Martin. So I'm sure people can put questions in the chat if they want to follow up with anything. I'll switch off.