 All right, with that thundering intro, we're ready to go with this next session. I'm Alan Levine, your host for this. And I'm really excited to have my colleague. You may have heard of this guy, Martin Weller. We'll be hearing about Care and Community and the Gojiya Network, which is the global OER graduate network, which is a really fascinating project. And so Martin is representing Rob Farrow, Beck Pitt, and Kako Anesthe. So welcome, Martin. Thanks, Alan. Good to see you. Good to see everyone. I've also got the stream going on the side. So if you see me looking down at the side, it's because I want to see what everyone else is seeing. Hi, it's good to be here. So I'm going to be talking about Care and Community in the Gojiya Network, some of you might be familiar of the Gojiya Network, but I'll explain it if not. So start to talk. I'll talk about, you know, what the Gojiya aim to do and what we usually do. We've been going for about eight years now, and then 2020 comes along and how we have to think completely differently and what that meant and then sort of think about how did that go, what was it like and any sort of lessons we can learn from that. I'm hoping not to talk for all the time because there might be some Gojiya people in the audience and perhaps I'd like to hand over to them to say how it's been for them as well. Because I can tell you it's fantastic and they might go, God is all. So the Gojiya Ends, the Global OER Graduate Network was set up in 2013, 24, I forget now, when OER was still quite an emerging field. And the idea was to try and grow the global research community. There were a lot of advocates, a lot of people saying OER is a good thing, but not an awful lot of kind of grounded research in it. And it's founded by Fred Mulder of the OE Netherlands and then we took it on shortly after that at the Open University. So usually it's aimed at doctoral students and students who are studying at doctoral level in roughly the area of open educational resources, open educational practice. Now usually we take them on an annual seminar, we've been together for two sort of intensive days and that's allied to a conference either OER or OE Global. And then during the year, we also run a number of webinars, we've got very active social media presence, we send out newsletters, we share resources. We try to create this kind of very supportive network. We also give out to awards every year for best paper and best open educational practice, which we've named after Fred Mulder. And we try to not just get people to research into open educational practice or open educational resources, but also to model that practice as well. And so we spend a lot of time on encouraging that. So really I put the seminar in sort of bold in the previous slide, because that's really the kind of heart of what we do really. So we get together about 10 or 15 students, we bring them all to one place, one location, so that's been Cape Town, Galway, Delft, Crackoff and Bank, I think. And they all present their work to each other and we try to get them from different stages of their PhD journey. So some will be, some will have finished, some will be coming up to the end, some will be just starting. We try to get a spread across countries and regions, topics and methodologies. So they're also learning from each other. They give each other feedback on their presentations. And that can be quite an honest thing to do. They sort of say to this group, I'm really stuck on my research questions. Can you help me in a way perhaps that they couldn't do in other formats? And we also run sessions perhaps on developing European practice or getting published, surviving the PhD or even life after a PhD. And we've registered all the students at the conference they're associated with and then often they go on to present as well. That's really kind of intensive two days and the people that come to that really sort of form good friendships, often they go on to collaborate with each other long afterwards and we work together on projects. So our plan was in 2020, we were going to ally this with OE Global, which was going to be in Taiwan in November. And then, oh dear, so like everything else, we had to perform an online pivot. And that's quite difficult when such a kind of intensive face-to-face activities really kind of heart what you do it. And we see like, when we look back over our Twitter traffic or hits the website or downloads or anything, we always get a peek around the seminars because the people who are attending it are tweeting about GoGN and it's kind of a very active thing that's going on. So it's really, we wanted to try and recreate that kind of buzz that would happen, but that's much more difficult without that kind of face-to-face setting. So what did we do? Some of this we sort of planned to do anyway, so it wasn't all just a pivot, but some of it I think really helped to recreate some of that activity that we wanted. So we produced three outputs, which were co-produced with GoGN members. We asked them to contribute, so I'm not sure if Rob's in the audience, but Rob's here. Well, Prowro sort of led on these. So the first was a methodology report. And I mentioned that we tried to get people to come together with, we could use different methods. And now our members have used all the method you want out there. And so we thought it would be really useful in together to put together all the methods that they've used and why they chose to use them and how they were applicable in OER and OER practice. And Brian Mathers, I think also in the audience, he did some excellent graphics for us in that. And it made it a very kind of approachable document, even though it's a very deep document in many ways. And that's had over 7,000 downloads and was a winner, very global. And then in the summer, we did a research review. So here, Rob culled together a number of papers around OER research and these were reviewed by members and this gave their views and summarized the papers. That kind of gives you a really nice overview of kind of current research in the field. And then in December, we produced an annual report. So you can see all those there. Another thing we did was launched fellowships this year and three of these people have spoken or are speaking at OER this year as well. So I won't sort of steal their thunder but they're covering quite different topics actually. They've been really interesting. So this is a small bit of funding but it really kind of helps bridge that gap between when you finish doing your PhD and before you kind of manage to get major funding in and sort of sometimes continue the work for your PhD or try something a bit different. So kind of quite diverse topics and for people all around the globe. And we really felt we needed to ramp up the communications in the absence of that face-to-face seminar. So we set up a WhatsApp group. Nothing if not late to the game but we set up a WhatsApp group and that's been really useful actually. There's a lot of kind of just informal chat in there sort of people sharing things and how they feel and that's kind of a really nice sort of back channel. We arranged a number of dropping sessions. So usually at the seminars, we ask people if they want to have a chat with sort of two or more members of the team individually for them just to talk about how their research is going. And so we tried to recreate those and schedule them at different times. Just so people could sort of speak frankly, you know, I'm stuck or have you got any ideas about this and those kind of things to arrange those. We carried on running webinars which often usually Goji and members presented about their research. And we had seminars, one day seminars associated with OER 20. There was a Goji and Gaster special at the Old Summer Summit and we had a seminar for OER Global. And we really sort of made extensive use of Twitter so we run a rotor system, sorry, where each of us sort of takes it in turns to run that's trying to keep going and we make a juice in the newsletter as well. And I think in some ways that there's a real danger of overcommunication, I think in the years. We've got so many things going on by sort of firing stuff at our members all the time and that that can sometimes be difficult to benefit. So one of the things we also wanted to do was try and give members real benefits for joining GoGM. So they're automatically members of Alt now so they can just sign up, become their members of Alt which means they can get discounts to lots of conferences. We've given them reclaimed hosting sites if they want so they can have their own site for two years from reclaimed hosting. And we've paid for conference attendance at Summer Summit and ORI Global last year as well. So one of the things we wanted to do is we realized we keep adding these extras and we weren't really communicating that well so we created a nice little membership pack which include all these things. And they include the fabulous Brian Mathers images as well. You can see all the penguins dancing here so people can download those that are created commons license obviously and use them in their own presentations and things. And these were the award winners this year so we had one winner for the paper and two runners up and Jordan winners for best open educational practice. And this is a timeline of our activities. You can see we've kind of been trying to keep a thread of activity going throughout the year just to kind of keep that momentum going I think and to provide people with a place to come to and talk about things. Because often obviously lots of people were in mid research and then the pandemic comes along and if you've been planning things like focus groups or things like that you can be here as well and lots of people feeling quite lost or often the people who are our members are the people who universities and institutions are turning to so how do you do this open education thing? So how did it go? How am I doing this one? Okay, we gained 14 new members and we've got about 115 members so that's pretty good, we're not because we're quite strict on who could join we have to be registered to be doing a doctoral study it has to be in the right sort of area and the reports have said proved very popular. Try to follow an increased reasonable attendance at webinars. The last two I don't claim to be things that we've done but I think it's just an indication of of how important the network is and the influence of the people who are in that network now so there are 45 peer-reviewed articles published by Goju members and an excellent giant special issue which was edited by Sarah Lambert and Laura Chernowitz and Sarah was a Goju member and lots of Goju members contributed articles that was on open education and social justice. So we conducted a survey and these are the top five activities so connecting with Goju on social media something that everyone did or a good portion attended a Goju webinar joined in discussions, joined alts and attended one of the seminars. Benefits, webinars came out top actually I think people really appreciated the support for attending conferences just that they didn't have to try and negotiate funding from wherever they were and I mentioned that WhatsApp group it's a very nice sort of informal group that they often share ideas from and a lot of the papers and things they've collaborated on have come through that and these were the most important so the community of peers I think was probably the most obvious one now. So I think that's important because I think when we set Goju up it was really kind of trying to develop people's research expertise and make them give them sort of somewhere to talk about research but actually the research things come out lower and actually it's much more the kind of emotional support I think that's important to people and often now a member say that they're the only person at their institution or sometimes in their region or their country is actually interested in open education so joining Goju is a real kind of like life for our team. So here are nice things that people have said about us. I really value the support that the team give there's active leadership that seeks new opportunities that create strong human bonds that's important one that we care for the network. So I think just in terms of lessons I think the other activities we created did overall replace the activity profile for what we did in the seminar. So the same sort of traffic same sort of number of sign ups and those kind of things. So we managed to replicate that kind of buzz I think of that that reputational work but it wasn't easy. It was probably hard work that I mean, bringing everyone together from a face to a center is really hard work. You've got people flying all over the world you're arranging hotel accommodation, all that kind of stuff. Actually we're gonna try and conduct this stuff throughout the year to kind of keep that momentum going it's quite hard. I still think face to face is important. I think when we can get back together we probably will go back to that model but I think we've learned a lot from this as well. I worry that it's maybe more difficult for new members to break into a group online whereas if you bring, we always try to bring some new people to the seminars and once they meet other people they're then part of the GOGM massive. But one thing I would say is I think GOGM had always been a very caring network. So when the pandemic hit it wasn't difficult for us to know what we needed to do because care was kind of already ingrained in what we do. And I think that's very different but I think I saw lots of organizations last year who really based themselves around the kind of neoliberal model of selling services. When the pandemic hit it was like, they were confused or they didn't know what to do. It's like, how do we sell you something to this and some that then have gone to try and mercilessly try and sell people things. But I think you know, it was almost like they didn't know how to react in this time when people weren't interested in what they wanted was care and support. And for those of you who've been following the story I think you can see that with the European Super League and football teams in the UK recently. It's like those companies, that those football teams were so used to treating their fans as consumers that they were shocked then to find out that people actually wanted to be thought about and cared about and they don't know how to act that manner. Whereas I think we had that built in from the start. So just quickly looking forward, we've put our call already for us. We did the methodological handbook last year and Rob's even on a conceptual framework handbook this year. So I think those two combined will be really powerful tools. We're obviously running this workshop and we've launched a new fellowship scheme. In summer, there'll be the summer summer and we'll sponsor people to go to that if they want. And there'll be a second research review called for participation and hope to publish the conceptual framework by then and then also we'll run the survey again. And well, there's the GOGM seminar will be allied with Open Educational Global which is currently general to be in non-France but I think we still need to think about whether people could travel to that as it's still up in the air. And then at the end until we run the awards and publish the annual review. So that's that. Please get in touch and chat to us. Thanks, Brian, for the graphics as always. If we have time, I don't know if we have time, Meredith Allen, then we could ask if there are any GOGM members in the audience who want to speak to their experience of the past year? Yeah, they've been actively peppering the stream so we can see a lot of GOGM members and some new people and the care there is obvious. No major questions coming in but I can certainly see that, thinking about that, you have 100 plus members now that that's a benefit itself that will replicate as we can see as people are welcoming and expressing the care coming in. And I would say, when you do face to face like coming through this period, it's going to add even more to that. Yeah, Bec is... Bec's reminded me, quick plugs. We've got a webinar on the 5th of May which is from new members presenting about their work. So that's a good point. It's one of the things we had to do was one of the things we did was to try I think to overcome that kind of barrier for new members was to specifically target them and say, would you like to present about your work and send it kind of individually? And I think that kind of really helped them. So if you just say, would anyone like to present? Often if you're new, you might not want to speak up. So I think kind of making it better for it easier for them to come in. We have a red herring question from Rob. Is ice hockey better than football? It is, and that's why in the UK you'll stop going to football and go so fast. But, you know, you can see that this is obviously... The whole networking effect has gone beyond being about necessarily open education, as you mentioned. And so I think there's a lot that folks can learn about creating and supporting this kind of network. And so I just respect it's a nice balance between trying to run a program and then giving the latitude to people in the network to give it direction. Yeah, that's right. And I think it's really changed over the years. To be honest, you don't have that many PhDs which are really about OERs, shifted much more to kind of social justice and open educational practice, much like the OER conference, I think, in a way. But there's very few presentations here that are... Here's a resource I've created. It's much more about care and the community. And I think, and that's been really important to the other thing, just being in this project, you kind of see how much, as I mentioned earlier, the kind of emotional support is really important. And that's, I think it's interesting because when you produce project proposals, giving emotional support is really something you build into the proposal, you know, but what's the KPI? What was the metric for emotional support? The number of hugs you've given, you know, you haven't had to count the stuff, but actually it's really important, you know. There's a good question from Laura about how people who aren't necessarily not PhD... Yeah, so thanks, Laura. So we have two categorizations. So we have members who are the PhD doctoral students and we have GoGN friends. So you can join as a friend and then you'll get a lot of the newsletter and the updates and things we're doing. Oh, that's fantastic. I would expect you'll get a lot more friend requests right now. We can definitely be friends, Laura. Oh, well, this has been fantastic. It's a taste, you know, and I'm sure, you know, there's what we see publicly and I bet there's a whole kind of different level of care that you see when you're within the network too. So... Yeah, the WhatsApp groups are a good place as well. Oh, great. Let's, like the chat says, let's give Martin up and everybody in GoGN, Rob and Beck and Paco, a round of applause for sharing this program. Thanks, Alan. Thanks everyone. Om nom nom.