 Well, folks, I think we'll get ourselves under way. Welcome to Eden's second webinar in our series Celebrating Open Education Week. We have another webinar later in the day for those of you who have enough time and energy to take in two in the one day. We're really delighted that you could join us. I'm looking forward to introducing you shortly to today's panel and hosting hopefully a lively discussion on finding open education nuggets. My name is Mark Brown. I'm Treasurer of Eden, but I also serve as the Director of the National Institute for Digital Learning at Dublin City University. Before I introduce my colleagues and the specific focus of today's discussion, this is just a reminder to you to post your questions and comments or even any links in the chat box. It's also helpful, though, if you're going to pose quite specific questions that you use the Q&A feature for that that just helps us to manage the questions and also to respond to them. Some of the panelists may be able to do that whilst others are talking. We're endeavour to certainly try to respond and take as many of your questions as possible during the next 45 minutes, 50 minutes or so. And remember, there's no such thing as a dumb question. You might like to start also by just letting us know where you're from in the chat box, if you like, and where you're joining us from today would be interesting. Without, I think, any further ado, it's my great pleasure to introduce Ines Vim and Merade, our panelists. Instead of embarrassing them by reading out their formal bios, they're actually on the website anyway, I'd rather hand over the mic as quickly as possible and give them the opportunity to briefly tell us a little about their background themselves. And I suppose, since I have some slides here for today's session, we might as well start in the order from starting with Ines. I'm going to hand over and ask you just to briefly give us a little intro. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. Hello, everybody. I'm very happy to join you this morning. I am Ines Gilhaurena, and I am here as editor of Openpraxis, which is an open access journal published by the International Council since 2012, so more than eight years now. And I'm also an associate professor at the Faculty of Education at the Spanish National Distance Education University, UNEF, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia. And in relation to Eden, I have been collaborating with Eden for some years and I am currently, I am a member of the Eden App Steering Committee. I think that's enough, Mark. Thank you very much and apologies for a little bit of distraction going on there in the background. Bim, do you want to give us a little introduction? Yeah, thank you, Mark. Yeah, my name is Bim Falpeitagham. I work at the University of Leuven in Belgium. I've been a member of the Eden community since the mid 90s, I think. And I'm here today as the chief editor of the EuroDL, the Journal of Eden. I have to say that I'm a recently appointed editor-in-chief and I step in the footsteps of Uli Bernard and Alan Tate, who were the previous chief editors. I think that's enough for as an introduction. Thank you for your map, Shane. My colleague, Meride. Hi, I'm Mark. Good to be here this morning. I'm delighted to be here. I'm here on behalf of the International Journal of Educational Technology and Higher Education. I'm an associate professor in Dublin City University. I lecture in IT. I'm also the head of the IDEA's lab at the National Institute of Digital Learning. I suppose another thing that I stress is that I also are a viewer for quite a number of other journals. And I think that's an important point that I wanted to put across today, is that I review for quite a number of journals across our field. And I think that's an important thing we'll talk about later on in the session. Well, thank you very much, all three panellists. I'm looking forward to hearing your gems and words of wisdom around your roles as editor-in-chief to use the correct terminology. I also skillfully managed to get around the difficulty of having to accurately pronounce correctly all of your surnames as well. So thanks for that. For those who are just joining us, or those who have already joined us, we've sort of got five things we'd like to achieve in the next period. We want to give you a sense of just how rich the open literature is since we're here to celebrate Open Learning and Open Education Week. We also want to give a little bit of a spotlight to the three journals in particular. All three journals have a strong European flavour. They have European editors-in-chief and are great sources of information and reading. So hopefully we'll give you a really good sense of the three journals. We also want to, on a more sort of personal note, share some of our own golden nuggets or good nuggets in terms of what we read. I'm going to sort of shift out a moderator role on a couple of occasions just to share some of the literature that we've identified last year, but I'll be also inviting the editors-in-chief to share their own picks. And then from an editor's perspective, perhaps even wearing two hats, we're going to hear a little bit about what it makes to have a really good article. Two perspectives, one as the editor, but I guess also we're all readers. We always look at the titles and maybe get as far as the abstracts. What is it that makes a good article? And the last part is really sharing our experience because there is such a wealth of literature. How do you navigate through that literature to identify those golden nuggets or open nuggets? What strategy should you use? And so we'll, towards the end, talk about some of the experiences. So I said there's a wealth of literature in the area. A publication from 2016 in AJET, the Australasian Journal of Education Technology, identified over 270 open access journals in the field. And there are more. And that's a bias towards English-speaking journals, I should also emphasise. So there is a wealth of literature. Apologies for a little bit of self-promotion here, but our own National Institute does keep a pretty comprehensive list of these journals if you're not familiar with them all. They're not all there, but that's for a reason. We try to curate the ones that we think would be best reading. Before I turn to the panel, I'm going to just give you the opportunity in the chat box to, as we're talking over the next five or 10 minutes, to let us know what's your number one top source of good reading. What do you turn to to keep yourself up to date? So that's a question for our participants today. And if you want to publish a link at any point to your top read from last 2020, or at least even for the start of this year, then I encourage you to do that as well. You might want to explain the reason behind your selection. But at this point, what I'd like to do is now hand over to our editors to tell us a little bit about the scope of their journal, the type of publications it seeks and it publishes, its history, anything you would like to share with our participants just to let them know a little bit more about the publication. And there may be some people who are new to your publication. So I'm going to start with the same order. I'm sorry, it's a bit boring, but it just seems to make sense on this occasion. So, Ines. Yes, thank you. Sorry, I lost a bit of the connection, but just briefly about open praxis. Open praxis is focused on any research or innovation in open distance and e-learning, and mainly in higher education. We have published some papers related to other educational levels, but our focus is mainly in higher education. So we share the focus with many other general journals about distance education and e-learning. And our main type of papers are research-based. We also have innovative practice papers, which are really interesting, but most of the papers we receive are research diverse. The topics are very diverse. We have been covering a lot of issues in this field. In the first years, we published some specific dedicated issues about student support services, about assessment, about the concept of openness. But more recently, we have open issues, so we receive a very diverse type of paper with different topics. And one special characteristic we have is that we have partnered for some years with the Open Education Global Conference before it was the Open Education Consortium Conference. So we have a lot of papers related to, for instance, open educational resources, open educational practices, and this sort of a of papers. And specifically related to the conference, but for our open issues as well. So this would be the overview. Well, thank you very much, and apologies, folks, if you're getting a little bit of broadband disruption. I know that Merade is struggling at the moment from her location. Of course, Open Practice is the journal of the International Council for Open and Distance Education, ICDE. And you can subscribe to get a journal alert. A lot of people perhaps are unaware of that you can subscribe and get alerts when publications come out. And maybe I'm sharing one of the tips at the end of how you navigate the literature and keep on top of things. Tim, do you want to tell us a little bit the journal that you're now editor-in-chief of and perhaps this, in your cases, is as much about your plans for the future as well? Okay, thank you, Mark. Yes, the journal I'm representing here is EuroDL, the European Journal of Open Distance and eLearning. Let's say the home journal of Eden. Yeah, the journal itself is open for all kinds of research topics. And we are especially looking at papers that are dealing with open and distance learning in rather traditional contexts, but also in more advanced, more innovative contexts. So we are also looking at new technologies, new learning approaches, new concepts. We are of course also looking at things related to quality, quality issues, accreditation or not, badges, open badges, these kinds of things. And we are also looking at more general topics, especially also focusing on the European context and addressing the issue of cultural aspects related to open distance and eLearning. I think that this is a very important aspect of the journal. We also ask, for instance, to provide your abstract in a common language, which is English of course, but also in a second European language, well, European language, in a second language to just illustrate the point of these cultural differences. So that is a very particular aspect of our journal. Mark asked me to talk about the plans. Well, there is the issue of improvement of the quality of the journal. Although we are already having a history since 1995, we still believe that we could improve the quality of the journal. Quality also of the process in which you can submit and we can review the papers. Quality in dissemination about what has been published in the journal. So that is certainly something that we would like to work on. We would also like to work more on special issues or maybe special tracks in the journal as we now move to open publication format. You can publish your paper continuously during the year. So, but maybe we now have to also think about some special topics that we could raise and try to attract papers on these topics. And then there is some other issues that maybe I can tell later when we are answering the other questions that you have in mind, Mark. Well, thank you very much, Firm. And I can say for my Irish colleagues, that's not just Maread because I know from the participant list we do have some Irish colleagues here that we have published an article that has an Irish translation to meet the criteria of other European languages. I should also just call out a note in the chat from Leo, the Journal of Research and Learning Technology published by OLD. There wasn't really space to have more panellists today, but I'd be remiss if I didn't call that particular journal out as an open access publication because I know both Maread and myself serve on that editorial board. So, Maread, that's a handover to you now to tell us a little bit about the journal that you're co-editor and chief of. And Grant, thanks, Mark. And let's pause before I start it I should also say, as I'm co-editor and chief with Joseph Duarte and Irina Ballas-Sensei and Alvario Galvez, so we work together as a great team looking at what comes in from us. And I suppose one of the distinctive features of the International Journal of Education and Technology and Higher Education, I suppose, is the international focus of us. We recently published some of the infographics of some of what we had done in the previous year and I think from that it's really clear to see the international flavour and the breadth, you know. So, I know that the focus of pretend that some of the journals here today could be particularly in Europe, but I like the way this journal has a really abroad international remit and we're publishing, and we are publishing authors from across the world and I think that's really, really good. As at the other journals, we are quite focused on digital learning and technology enhanced learning and higher education. We're looking at the theoretical application. We're looking at theoretical considerations and concepts. We're looking at applied practice. We're looking at innovation. We're looking at all of those things. I think, you know, Vim said there, one of the really interesting pieces and we'll potentially talk about this later, is looking beyond sort of the single application of a specific technology, but looking at more of the situated context and nuances on cultural practice of technology and enhanced learning and things like that. So, I think that really has, that really comes to the fore within the journal and going back to that infographic thing, I think one of the things that we really appreciate and we're trying to look at is that, you know, you'll see that we're trying to focus on in the journal is it being as representative and as diverse as possible, whether that's from, you know, a geographical diversity, but also from gender diversity and also from different practices and also with respect to looking at different topics in the area. And one of the key things that I think as a co-editorial board have brought us together is that we're looking at the development of a number of special issues in kiki areas. You know, for instance, we're going to have a special issue and we have a special issue called out for micro-quadentials and a little bit of self-public promotion here, as Mark would say, but we'd be grateful for those across the world who are interested in this topic and are working in this area to that. But we have other ones going and I just comes back also to something that Finn said, you know, the notion of being able to publish in a variety of languages and focusing. So we will have a special issue which will be regionally focused and my co-editorial chief Alvarro will look after that. So we're trying to do things to innovate even within the publishing sphere. We're also trying to innovate in different areas with regards to, you know, from our, you'll see from our stats if you look at them from and the infographic which is on our website, our Springer website is that we have a huge number, we will have, you know, we receive a huge number of submissions but we also have to reject quite a number and even before they get to the review process. So I think we're trying to work with authors and we're trying to put in place mechanisms to help the standard that comes into us to be that to be risen and we might have, we'll be announcing and hopefully have a few more things come out to help authors get by and to proceed along the publishing journey but I think that's enough said for myself and we can move on Mark. Well, thank you all three and I would also be in trouble with my Irish colleagues if I didn't acknowledge Tom Filey's link there to the Irish Journal of Technology and Homes Learning. I'll scroll up the chat and see if I've missed anyone else out but if there are publications that you go to, please do post them and share them with others. What I think we heard there was the wealth and the depth and breadth as well of the publications and I can speak and I'm just now sort of moving out a moderator role for a moment. I can speak with some confidence about just how much literature there is because our team for the last five years now at the end of each year or if we do this throughout the year but it comes to a head at the end of the year we identify what we call our 10 top reads. We do publish the criteria of what we mean by top reads. We're not making any claims when we do this to say they're the best. You can decide that for yourself but in the criteria we use since Maread mentioned it diversity is one of the features and I just thought I'd take couple of minutes to share with you some observations from our top 10 reads from last year. Actually we ended up doing two lists two lists of top 10 because we did a special COVID-19 issue selection. We felt that there was enough literature that had come through that it warranted a special list. So interestingly joint authorship is the norm. It's in the publications that we've looked at and when I say we've looked at we probably went through 500 different journal articles to refine it down to 100 to get it down to eventually 10. It's a pretty complex process. Unfortunately in some respects couldn't find enough that fit it into the European links or publications this year but on the other hand part of what we also in our selection of good reads we'd quite deliberately look for articles that people may not find in the mainstream. So just because the article doesn't come from one of the journals that we're talking about today doesn't mean it's not a good read but we're deliberately trying to get people to look elsewhere and constantly looking for Latin America places of course the English bias becomes quite a challenge. The Australasian Journal of Educational Technology for the first time after four years was not in the top place. So that wasn't by design necessarily but it certainly has taken that ranking over the previous periods and there were four new journals in the list in our top 10 this year. We'll put a link in the chat box if you aren't able to find it to the link to the list and but in part those four new journals were again by design because part of our criteria as I see was trying to look for things elsewhere out of the mainstream. Just to give you a sense this was the top article that we identified. It may not resonate with all but it resonated with us in particular because it mentioned are really about the importance of there being a much stronger nexus between research and teaching. It's no good for the research community to sit isolated and just publish and make comments on what's going on research needs that actually have impact on practice and of course practice back again on research. I won't spend time sharing and talking about the others but the list on our website does create and explain the selections for each of them. So for those of you who haven't come across this it may be useful to be aware of. Just a couple from the list that I said that we had selected for our top 10 COVID-19 reads we didn't list these in any kind of rank order because we felt that would be quite inappropriate very hard to make such a judgment but again if you haven't come across this we invite you to have a look at the list of articles that were selected and I note already this year several special issues have come out with more reflections on our COVID experience. So apologies for that kind of interruption and moderator role to being a little bit of a presenter there for a minute but I want to return to our editors and chief and put them on the spot a little bit now and ask what was your top read last year and why is there something and I'm not referring here to the ones that we've identified is there something from your own journal that really stood out for you or something that you think people should look at whether it's your top read but something that you think people should read for whatever reason. I'm going to go on a reverse order this time to be a bit unkind without having prompted my panelists so Marae do you have anything that you want to share that sort of is in your bucket list? It might be something you still have to read but it's there sitting to read. I actually have two and it's actually one of the ones that didn't make one of the top 10 for ours and I would even though I lobbied and canvasted for it but it was one of the ones I think this is this article for me really well it's in an area that I'm quite interested in anyway but also I think from structurally and from how it's presented and also how and how it's and how it's sort of formulated is really really interesting for those who want to sort of are interested in about submitting journals and learning how what's a great example of one. So that one this one is negotiating growth of online education in higher education. Neil Morris was the principal author but there was other authors there as well Marae Ivanskva Taran Koop Radamoglachy and Bronwyn Swinerton and it was published in our journal actually and last year I didn't particularly I didn't focus on it in particular particularly because they came from our journal but actually for me it was the structure of it is just a really really well done it's really well it's a simple question the way that they have approached the study and the design of it they don't make exaggerated you know they don't make exaggerated sort of claims within it they position their research really really well the literature review is so so strong you know it's on point it's not it's a type of literature review that you read it easily if you know what I mean and you're reading it and it's informative it's flows it's you know and it gets you to question your own sort of principle so I think your own sort of standpoint so I really enjoyed it from that perspective the study is really a simple simple design you know it's an engagement with top strategic leaders and in a number of institutions a small number of institutions and I think that's an important point because sometimes you know a lot of authors believe that they have to have huge numbers involved if they're going to publish research on but actually it's a small number the design of it is really really simple but it's presented really really well and presented really really well I really enjoyed this article in particular because I've just it was engaging it's finding very relevant and it was also positioned so so well within the literature and it brought the literature forward and it was clear from me from the outset how they were adding to the literature in this area and this is the area of you know the bundling of higher education and the market forces that are influencing how the strategic positioning of universities etc so this one to me was a winner and definitely it didn't appear in our top 10 for the NIDL but absolutely one of those ones that it was just so easy to read get engaged with and critique and it was one that I've gone back to and reread a few times and taken thoughts from it and critique and that's always for me is a sort of a sign of a good journal when you go back to it and you think about something that the authors have said and it's easy to reflect on so yeah that would be my favourite one of last year Mark All right you said you had two but if you do want a second one come back in after the others I did want to hug the floor so I let the others come in but I do have a second one which I'm a bit of an advocate for but I let the other editors go and then I might come back in at the end Mark and if it's possible to share the link in the chat box do any of the articles that would be great we can follow up once we get into sort of the Q&A folks if you're waiting for some of those links so Vim you're in the middle still so handing over to you thank you Mark yeah when I was reading the question what was your top read from 2020 it's difficult to just mention one article and I've chosen a book if you don't mind an open access book I've put already the link in the chat it's a book yeah of course in this specific year of Covid-19 there is many more publications about the pandemic and how higher education reacts but this one is particular for me it's describing the situation in South Africa it also illustrates my interest in development corporation and in working together with colleagues in different continents especially also in Africa and Latin America and yeah the book is written by colleagues I know very well in Stelibosch I know that Stelibosch wants to profile itself as a research-based university and so they invited different people from their own university but also a bit larger community to reflect on the changes the rapid changes that had to be implemented very quickly in different universities and especially in a country like South Africa you can imagine that this had a lot of impact on what happened in higher education so it's rather a bundling of different reflections I know in South Africa these reflections are also very much based on action research in the universities and so that's also part of the let's say the common ground that you can find in reading these articles in the book so I think that I already started reading the book Mark you mentioned that you could also mention something that you still have to read well I could only read part of the book yet but it gives a lot of inspiration and it gives a warm feeling let's say when you're reading the stories and the way that people in a country like South Africa have dealt with the pandemic there so that's my top read I was hoping to go away from today with at least one or two extra articles to read but you've given us a book so it's a bit more time required Ines, do you have a particular pick that stands out for you whether it be from your own journal or somewhere else? Yeah, well I in fact I'm going to talk about all the practice because I misunderstood the question and I didn't think about my personal top readings but the most read papers in open practices from last year so we had more than 30 papers published and the I have the top three most visited ones and I tried to guess why people like those papers or visited those papers and it makes sense to me I will tell you the titles One is about the e-learning readiness as a predictor of academic achievement in higher education and this was published before the pandemic but I think currently it makes a lot of sense that people are interested in learning about e-learning readiness and self-regulated learning self-directed learning motivation and these type of issues because the e-learning has become so mainstream or blended learning or online learning due to the pandemic that I think it makes sense that this isn't one of the top reads Second one is an evaluation of the on- in the list you made in Ireland not in the top 10 but also as a recommended reading and of course it's a very hot topic proctoring and online assessments so this is one our second most visited paper last year and the third one is about student satisfaction in online learning during the pandemic and I think this is also another very relevant issue it's about students' perception of how they are living the pandemic and the transition to e-learning all the wellness and support the student support services aspect so these are the top three in open practice and thinking about me it's hard to say one reference but I just would like to mention that because I'm also with literature that is not published in English but of course in this forum an international forum publications in English are on top but there are also other quite relevant publications in Spanish particularly that I also like to read and I strongly recommend your list this year list and previous year list it's very interesting to to check that at the end of the year and then have a look to all your selection so thank you well thanks for also alerting us to what will come up towards the end of the conversation strategies for how you manage your choices and what it is you choose to read and not to read by identifying the articles out of the top downloads that's certainly one of the strategies that I use when I'm looking to see in a journal what is it that I should be noting not always a good predictor and I wonder the readiness article may have been particularly timely because the European Commission had a funding round that had a focus on readiness so that may have added another dimension I'm going to come to a question in a minute that we have in the chat in the Q&A from Tom because it's relevant to our next sort of series of questions to our editors what it is that makes a good journal article and what Tom asks is kind of related in that we said at the outset we're serving two purposes as both editors here but also as scholars and readers and practitioners ourselves so you can answer that a question that's there particularly the first one in both of those modes if you like but Tom also goes and asks what is it that gets an article past the first Hort Hurdle so I think what he's referring to there is a submission what does a submission need to have in it to get past the first Hurdle to even be understood or thought of as potentially a good article so there's a couple of questions thrown in the mix there who would like to go first I don't feel the need to single anyone out so jump in if you have a comment I'm happy to give a comment just to keep the conversation so I think one of the things that is really really important is a clear alignment with the journal's objectives sometimes it's really clear it's really clear when that happens and as I said before it's an easy read you know immediately sometimes you feel that there hasn't been enough consideration of the focus of the journal so that when the article was written it was written in a vortex and potentially that the author or author hadn't sort of aligned their article with what the journal is about because at the end of the day independent of whichever journal you're coming from and that we represent on others we have particular focus and it's important that it is aligned the other thing is is that the abstract or the initial elements of the paper that is submitted really position what the paper is about and you know sometimes you can go through a whole paper and not really really understand what the authors were trying to achieve and that so again it's really having a clear proposition on the research question that might seem superbly basic but actually it's critical it's central I think from my perspective anyway I don't know what the other editors might think Mark can I continue that I think what you just said is also very important I think from my point of view what I usually find important is the story that is told in the paper and that starts with the title the title should be attractive attract your attention as a reader and of course the title should also cover then the contents of the paper but the title is the first thing that you see when a paper is submitted or when you see a paper published so the title should spark your interest let's say interest as a reader but also as a reviewer as an editor and then you go further after the title you read the abstract and the abstract should also be very well formulated it should give you a good overview of what are you going to read in the paper so and that should like has been said it should be very well aligned with the contents of the topics and the focus of the journal but it should also add something extra something that you haven't seen before let's say so that should also made clear in the abstract what is the why should the reader read your paper and I think that this is important for me the title the abstract and then of course you continue the story that is told in the paper should be well structured should be organized in a proper scientific way and you should sort of immediately see from the layout of the paper that the person that the authors that they yeah that they know what they are talking about that they know to sell their subject their paper and yeah a good structure helps a good yeah a few pictures maybe some some graphics the statistics the tables the the yeah the layout should also be sort of appealing to the reader and the reviewer I think it's maybe of course the science and the research is very important the contents is maybe the most important aspect but I also think the other things are quite important a good title a good abstract a nice layout a good structure something that immediately triggers your attention and that you think yes that's a paper that I want to delve into well that's a great answer I have to say I love your metaphor of storytelling as well and some of the sort of criteria if you like you list there and it's not just similar to what we look at in the NIDL annual list something that just stands out and I just personally couldn't emphasize enough that title you have to be careful you don't get too clever I've had that challenge myself but Ines do you have any words of wisdom that you can share with our participants yeah thank you Mark I well I agree of course with my my colleagues about the general characteristics of a paper to be accepted and for the question in the in the chat about why some papers get rejected before the peer review I think that was the question on my experience it's because they are out of topic so as my Mayric said they don't adhere to the journal scope and focus and sometimes you get submissions totally out of topic from chemistry or pharmacology so totally what's this it doesn't unusual but it happens sometimes but also here it's different it depends on the size of the journal and I think EuroDL and open practices are more or less similar size so we get similar number of submissions per year less than 100 so we don't need it to be so selective as other journals that get 1000 submissions so in that case in those cases they can reject the paper only because it doesn't adhere to the APA style for references despite the content in our case we could be or in open practices I mean I can be more not so demanded at that first stage about the references but it has to be mended by the by the end if it gets accepted but some gaps that are some common in the papers that get rejected not a clear enough about the objectives or the methodology it's not clearly explained or there is not any theoretical or conceptual background section so these are very relevant gaps that can make a paper not be sent to peer review and also about format I strongly recommend the authors to check the journal guidelines for instance we sometimes get papers which are four times longer than we recommend so really long long papers so we can we have to say okay the topic is interesting but you need to adhere to the guidelines and shorten the paper so or the opposite very short papers for five pages which are not enough so maybe they look that they come from conferences and they have not been developed enough to for to peer review and can get accepted and good articles as you said in your question I can I well adding to what being my previous my colleagues said previously I think in especially international journals it's very important to explain to give some contextual information or local information because there are different ways of naming the institution the degrees the courses the gradings and this needs an explanation so the authors have to be aware that the readers may be from anywhere in the world not local so some contextual information about acronyms or specific characteristics of the context I think that's very important and the a clear structure of the paper I think people can really understand the arguments follow the paper so I think those are some key aspects once again some excellent advice there I note there was a question in the Q&A that Marade answered from someone about how you formulate a good title is it a question or a statement there could also be a metaphor of some kind but mindful of my previous observation about being careful not to be too clever I recently with a couple of colleagues presented a paper on Fufu the Snoo I'll leave you to look up my bio page to see what that was about moving on and we've sort of covered some of these questions already so I don't think we want to go over old ground and in the intros to your journals you also indicated interests and special issues in the like so I'm just wondering wearing your editor-in-chief's role what is it that you would really like to publish this year and I guess COVID is going to be part of that but at the same time there's lots of health still going on and beyond COVID so I'm going to hand over again to whoever wants to come in first with these sort of questions here and in particular you know where you see gaps and what it is you would invite a publication on Can I start Mark? Yes go for it and I would not give the evident answer related to COVID I think what I'm thinking more and more nowadays is that and it's about interdisciplinary research one of the things that that I find very difficult is yeah finding good papers that start from from an interdisciplinary approach it's not just bringing two disciplines together for instance engineering education is I'm an engineer but I forgot to mention that in the introduction but it's more than just bringing two disciplines into one paper how do you educate engineering students and how do you do that in an open or distance way like we are now doing in pandemic times I think it's really trying to understand let's say the different ways the different frameworks that exist in research and education in research in engineering which is yeah sometimes a totally different world and bringing that together into one paper that that is good enough for the engineers and at the same time good enough for the educators for the educational scientists that is that is a very hard hard thing to do and so if we talk about where do I see gaps in the literature or in the possibilities to publish your research I think that the whole issue of interdisciplinary research is something that I would like to to to emphasise here and how can we yeah foster people foster yeah a genuine interest in trying to understand the other sides trying to understand the other discipline and trying to convince the reviewers for instance educational scientists that an engineering approach is maybe from a totally different nature than their approach and that there is value in that and vice versa how can we try to yeah to find ways to combine these two worlds and not just two if we talk about interdisciplinary it might be even more than two disciplines working together so I would like to just to see more on that an element of sort of border crossing there the mind I hear that of course to answer that question about what makes a good article where it should be making a contribution to new knowledge and so bringing together different disciplines different areas Enes, do you have any thoughts at all? Yes I really don't want to go into content or what what gaps I see in the literature because I think well people are doing research and innovation in different fields so I would put the focus on providing or writing papers with a strong background and with a strong methodology regardless the type of methodology and that is correlation qualitative studies cases studies but the articles I would like to publish are with a strong methodology and rigorous methodology and a strong background and with a strong background I especially would like to refer to the big amount of papers that we are receiving nowadays about the impact of the COVID because I think there especially authors or researchers who come from face-to-face universities that have to move to remote learning the background or the literature review and previous research they consult sometimes is not enough so I think there if I open and this is an interpretation and Eden and ICD are two representatives of this work and this long story so I would put the stress on that and also on highlighting the what you just mentioned which is the contribution of the paper and originality or innovation and one thing I would like to well if I can to promote in open practice is the publication of innovative practice I think it's very relevant to to test different methodologies or technologies or innovation and then do a proper evaluation of that and publish it as a case study I think this is a very useful also for practitioners and it is a research but very practice-based research I think that's maybe a gap well thank you again so I'm really interesting and maybe in the paper which is strong in background and methodology and rigorous it's welcome I think and apologies and as you just cut out for a minute so I popped in thinking that you'd finished there so what I took from one of the statements is don't misinterpret storytelling for weak methodology the balance of maintaining the two it's not an easy thing at the same time is contributing new knowledge Maread do you have anything to add to the conversation? Yeah Mark just to pick up on some of the points but also I think you know gaps in the literature I think if you know there's some clear gaps obviously out there I think what Vim has highlighted is one of the things it's a bugbearer of mine in one way it's that when potentially authors will come into the field or start out in the field they will presume that it's novel a novel theory that only relates in within educational technology and they won't or digital learning and they won't have loved around potentially at those other disciplines which are on the it's was which are on the board or an intersect with our own discipline and that sometimes for me is a weakness it's a massive weakness and I think there's some lovely I think that's where we cover authors just to dig a little bit deeper and to go outside out of the discipline area and to do that notion of interdisciplinarity I think one of the things also I think that Nyez mentioned was you know this notion of really really strong research design independence the types of literature the types of sort of articles we want to are really strong research design as I said you know in my own favourite one the research design was super strong it was you know one of those things were they really called out on the strength of qualitative research they didn't try to dress it up and put it out into some other form of research to make it appear more scientific in that type of way I think that's sometimes some of the problems that we'll get and the absence of context is another issue that I would think is a really a contextualised critique you know in and around some of the studies that are presented sometimes you can find findings which are quite limited in their breadth because actually the authors haven't thought to contextualise if they haven't placed if well their study well within the literature and that's really disappointing because their study may indeed have good substance but actually it doesn't allow the reader to build it doesn't make those bridges for them and it doesn't contribute in the way that it should for the reader so I think those are the type of things that I would like to see embraced by embraced by authors but also the journals and I think some of the things that we're looking at you know instead of just and this goes to some of the COVID work is that instead of you know about the simple narratives and actually I'm quite a strong advocate of narratives as a research method is to move on from that and to think about of it the situated and the social interactive that that type of research allows to bring in that it brings into it and the richness of the methodology that can bring to the to the article as well so for me another thing I think another one is is that and this goes back to what are you looking for in an article it's sometimes it's the burning question the burning question of the researcher and that really comes true and you can see a lot of the articles that have been published across our journals and in other journals you really get the feeling that a lot of those authors are totally immersed in what they're doing and therefore it comes across quite simply in their writing Thanks Marae sorry I just needed to check my my mic was on folks we're coming to the end we haven't had a huge number of questions but I think the conversation has been very informative I'm just going to ask the panel in wrapping up in no more than a minute each just to give us perhaps one piece of advice in terms of what you might do to ensure that you're engaging that literature you're finding the literature something is a tip I shared the one previously about looking to see what ones have been downloaded on a personal note if I just start off the one thing I commit myself to do as a scholarly professional is I make sure I read one journal article every single day so then I know that I'm going to at least cover a small size of that literature without putting anyone on the spot is there anyone who wants to start off with one piece of advice one tip to wrap up go ahead Wim Wim go ahead Yeah sorry this is better it's a bit the same sort of remark as you just gave Mark and that is something that helps me as an academic scholar is reserve one day in the week for reading and writing and so especially now while we are working from home and there is almost no difference between mornings and evenings between weekdays and weekends there is so many meetings happening that you maybe tend to forget that your real work is reading and writing well real work part of your real work is reading and writing and so the only way that I could make it happen for me is that I reserved one day in the week where and I announce it it's my agenda reading and writing and that helps thank you because I think that just underscores that to engage in the literature to be a scholarly professional you do have to be reading Ines do you have anything to share just very briefly we're right on time now Yeah just briefly I well I recommend to to to read and to to look to different sources to different journals and use the library use the directory of open access journals but always choose a how to say serious serious journals and serious publications and there is a lot of literature about on e-learning so I recommend to have your eyes in different places because you can find interesting things anywhere it will depend of course of your personal interest of the topic but here also interdisciplinary that has been was mentioning you can have interesting input from journals from engineering or computer science from education social science so have a diverse diverse an open mind Excellent point and Meraine final word from you Yeah so quickly some of those things that have been said already I think read with an objective is really really important so be clear about what objectives that you have in your reading style I have generated a favourite authors list for myself they're the people that I really get something from which is also linked into you know in and around of what my peers are reading so I'll regularly ask those that I engage with and collaborate with what are you reading and I think that's important because you know you'll always find something that somebody else has happened upon and that's you know it's something that can broaden your own horizon as you say and that's the open mind part that it is I think the one of the things that we should do and I think this is important this is important not only from open standards but we should expect high standards when we read our literature and we should always have them in mind so that when we're reading we're thinking about the quality of the article the research design the findings and how they're positioned and enjoy what you're reading I suppose as well as there is the final thing I would say well thank you very much all three panelists apologies for my Eden Admin team that we are a couple of minutes over if anyone ever gets interviewed by me for a job one of the questions I sometimes ask prospective candidates or candidates for the position is what's the most interesting thing you've read in the last three months and why and you'd be surprised just how that completely stumps many professionals so on that note thank you very much I hope it's been an informative conversation you now know three editors and chief that if you want to follow up with even I'm sure you will find that if you follow up with an idea that you're working on they might even be able to tell you whether it's a suitable for the journal what we will find from past experiences if you engage with the editors actually and build a rapport they will work very constructively with you no one is there to try to block a publication they want to steer it in the right direction sometimes that's pointing you to a different publication but I'm over time so thank you very much to our panellists I need to also thank Diana for organising in particular this week and none of this would be possible without the Eden admin team so hopefully we'll see some of you back later this afternoon for the second webinar of the day but in the meantime have a good afternoon cheers bye bye everyone thank you