 you start to reporting. All right, Rob the floor is yours. Thank you very much. Good morning everyone, good morning from Milton Keynes in the UK. It's good to connect with everyone and that's not quite the same as meeting in person but I'm very pleased to be able to talk to you today about some of the work that we've been doing in the Global OER Graduate Network. The co-authors for this presentation are Martin Weller, Paco Villiesto and Rebecca Pitts. But only my name's on here just for the sake of keeping it simple for anyone who doesn't know us. But as I think we'll become clear as I'm talking, the work that I'm going to be discussing is really a collective effort by the GOGM network. So without further ado, let's progress. I'm just going to give you a brief overview of what I'm going to be talking about. So first of all I'm going to say a bit about GOGM and the nature of the network and what we do. And then I'm going to talk about why we produced a handbook and a guide to research methods for researchers who are working in the open education field. I'm going to talk through how we put that together in terms of the sort of concept behind it and the practical steps that we took to actually produce it. And also the considerations we had around the style and accessibility of the handbook. And then I'm going to talk about the structure of what's in there and what you can use it for. I'm not going to go through the insights themselves because there's just quite a lot of them and it's not really enough time to do it justice. So this is really designed to be a sort of introduction to the handbook. I'll point you in the direction where you can go and kind of explore it yourself. So for those of you who don't know GOGM, GOGM is the Global OER Graduate Network and we were founded in 2013 by Fred Mulder and in 2017 I think management of the network came to our team at the Open University and we're funded by the ULA Foundation and we provide a network of support for doctoral researchers and postdoctoral researchers working in the open education field. And that includes OER MOOCs, open educational practices, the full range of stuff. And so we try to raise the profile of research that people are doing, support them while they're doing it and sort of encourage people to support each other and in sort of building capacity in open education research more generally. One of the things that's kind of particular to us is that we're also interested in openness as a sort of process or feature of research, openness as a function of what we do. So we explore openness as an approach as well as the sort of objective study if you like. We have currently more than 100 researchers within the network and more than 200 experts who are connected as an interested friend or as a mentor or as a PhD supervisor. So we have several hundred people in our community of practice and we have a particular interest in supporting researchers taking place in the global south, which historically has not had the same opportunity. So why did we produce a research methods handbook? So I think the place to start with this is what is a research method? And the kind of deceptively simple answer is, well that's just how you do research. It's the approach that you use, it's the way that you did a study, it's the way that you collected and analyzed your data. Often it's presented as a hypothesis that's tested so there's evidence for and against a particular hypothesis. But underlying all this is the idea that someone is claiming to produce some sort of new knowledge and so the research method is what provides the validity for that claim if you like. So because you followed a particular method, method is sound, the outcome of that method is valid. So I say deceptively simple because a lot hangs on this idea of validity I think. And so one way of thinking about this is the method that you used is just the sort of tip of the iceberg. And a lot of the time if you do research, for example, an undergraduate level, you might just have to say this is the method that I used. You don't really have to do much more to justify it than that. But at a doctoral level, you're required to do a bit more in terms of exploring what's underneath the surface of that. So at the sort of first juncture, there's the systemization of methodology, of methods as methodology, so comparing different methods. Then you kind of go to the next level and realize there's also different theories underlying these different approaches that don't always agree with each other. So there's a sort of job to be done to rationalize that and find a way through that. At the most sort of fundamental level, these considerations are philosophical. So part of the reason I think a lot of doctoral candidates find method challenging is because this could sometimes is their first experience of engaging with these kind of philosophical themes at this level. So the main examples you'll often find if you read literature about research methods ontology, so what there is, what's going to make up the kind of the world of your study. Epistemology, your theory of knowledge, your science of knowledge, how do you know things, what does it mean to know things. And axiology, which is not in every approach, but really refers to the values that you're bringing to research and the kind of ethical dimensions of what you're doing. So there's quite a lot of stuff in there to think about. Part of the way we ended up doing this work is that within OGM we often give people kind of one-to-one support sessions and we have kind of discussions about people's research and stuff like that. And consistently something that always comes up is research methods and methodologies. And so in a way this is a response to that. If you're a PhD supervisor or a DC supervisor or a student you probably also encounter this kind of thing. There's something that gets people outside their comfort zone with research methods and this can actually have quite a big effect on your ability to complete a research project. If you feel like your confidence is undermined because you don't understand every research method or how it all fits together. And the idea is also how can it be that I'm a doctoral candidate and I don't understand these research methods. Interestingly a lot of the time people were more comfortable raising this in a one-to-one situation rather than in a group. And I think that reflects that. So there's one element to this which is just we were trying to meet a need that people had spoken about. And alongside that there's also this interest in openness. How is openness affecting the way people do research? Are people using different methods? Are they using existing methods in new ways and what's the kind of implication of that? So we're trying to address people's insecurity and confusion around this stuff. Contextualize research methods within open education. But we're also interested in leveraging the people who are in the network and they're sort of embodied knowledge if you like. Their experience of doing research in different contexts. And sharing that widely. So in a way this is a kind of open practice. Share what worked and what didn't work about a particular method for your research. And we were very keen to make it an accessible resource and a good entry point for people so that new people coming into the network who maybe are just starting out on a PhD or an EDD have a resource which is built by people who've just been through that process. So the authenticity of it is also considered important. So we went about it in a kind of crowdsourcing way. Back in January, you first announced all this work. Webinar in February where we kind of got input from members into the scope of what we were doing, what kind of things people might want to see in there. Then we did a survey where we collected data from members. And the original idea was that in April, around April 20, we were going to have a face-to-face workshop to collectively work on this stuff. 2020 had other ideas of course. So a lot of that moved online. We had a sort of shorter scale down process. Over the summer, we drafted the handbook and in June we opened it up to sort of open editorial reviews. So people in the network who'd contributed to go to the Google Doc and just contributed to the editing process. Published it in July. Over the autumn, we've been doing conference presentations. And I'm pleased to say this week we are getting the Open Education Award for Excellence or research for this, which is a nice outcome. Nice place to get to with it. So when I say we're trying to make it accessible, I think this is very much part of how we kind of approach GoGN. And when we started this phase of GoGN, we went through a kind of branding identity kind of refresh, working with Brian Mathis from Visual Thinkery. And a lot of the kind of stuff that went into there is stuff that came out of our face-to-face meetings and various input from various members. So you can see some of the things that I won't go into, all of them. We ended up with this concept of a kind of golden age of travel motif and the idea of bringing people to our face-to-face sessions as well as online, but also the idea of an intellectual journey being supported. And again, 2020 had some other things in mind for the face-to-face side of things. But we kept the idea of a journey and the idea of the journey through these kind of ideas and materials. So we start off the handbook with this image that you saw at the start, the penguin on the iceberg, only seeing a bit of it, if you like. And then we take that penguin on a journey, if you like. So using the travel motif again, there's passport stamps for these philosophical categories, ontology and epistemology and axiology, to sort of present the idea that it's something that you just kind of have to get your books down. You have to do this stuff. You have to know this stuff at some level. You have to be a specialist in it, but you have to kind of make it part of your journey. And then there's various different kind of graphics to sort of ease the complexity and the jargon of some of this stuff. I want to show you this one because it's the most complicated one in there. And we tried to make it something very complicated, a bit more easy to understand. So this graphic shows you a spectrum of different philosophical approaches actually to science, from scientific realism at one end of the spectrum to relativism at the other. And tries to sort of map how within that spectrum there are different approaches to what truth means, what the objective of research is, and even sort of metaphysical differences, which if anyone cares a lot about, you can talk to me separately maybe. But I think it's really important to understand how it all fits together, if you're going to be a researcher, you're going to be kind of doing work at that level. And at the bottom of this, you can see that each of the sort of positions there is associated with different sort of paradigmatic research methods. We also did some redrawing of existing diagrams. So this particular presentation of the research design process comes from an Open University course that's no longer in presentation at the moment. And here is presented like a map, like a navigational map that's been unfolded to help guide you where you need to go. So you can move from an initial question, a research kind of proposal, if you like, through the philosophical elements, but narrowing it down to something practical. So how do I base a research design in a particular paradigm? Similarly, this one is taken from someone else's recent publication. This is from a medical paper, so a paper to teach medicine students about research paradigms. And here you have positivism, constructivism, post-positivism and critical theory presented as part of a research process. And again, trying to sort of show how the differences emerge, but also what's consistent about the research process across them. So I think the artwork goes a long way to making this stuff a bit more accessible. And we have Brian Mathers to thank for that. Brian and I wrote a paper which was published recently in the International Journal of Management and Applied Research. And if you want to know more about the kind of artistic style and what we were sort of going for with it, then the link's just in there. So going through the actual handbook itself and what you might find within. So we devote some discussion to these philosophical foundations and also go through the idea of a research paradigm and what it means to have a research paradigm. And then from the idea of paradigms, showing which methods are considered to be kind of quite common or consistent with particular paradigms. Five minutes left. Thank you. So positivism, interpretivism, critical approaches, pragmatism, and talking a bit about interdisciplinarity, which is quite common actually in educational research using mixed methods and triangulation. We don't try to say there's a definitive approach to all this, but we do try to sort of map out the terrain and be sort of supportive in that way. We also do a bit of an exploration of open research and what it means to be doing research openly. So we go through the early open research cycle. And we also have some discussion of the practicalities of doing research, which again, you often don't encounter as a doctoral student. Don't necessarily get told how to plan stuff or manage risk and so on, how to manage yourself. So there's some stuff in there about that as well. On that sort of subject, I think we have an embryonic idea of what open practice and research might look like. This comes from quite a small amount of data, really, but it's consistent in terms that it presents a particular idea about how people are working. For instance, a common interest in social justice, being quite transparent, using open ways of collecting and sharing materials and so on. So we're still kind of exploring that, but I think it's quite an interesting thing to reflect on. So what will you find in the other half of the handbook? Well, these are the particular methods where we've got people within the network to write about their own experience of using them. So action research, case studies, thematic analysis, design-based research, discourse analysis, ethnography, evaluation research, experimental and quasi-experimental research, rounded theory, interviews and focus groups, systematic literature reviews, mixed methods research, narrative research, observation, phenomenography, phenomenology, social network analysis and surveys. I think we also add a bit at the end where we encourage people to reflect on their own practice and it's kind of a little bit meta, thinking a little bit about how can we add value to what we do from being open and what's the end goal of what we're doing and how can we kind of support each other in doing that. It's been a very popular resource. We've had something like 6,000 downloads and we've only got a few hundred members so and we know from Twitter that people have been sharing it quite widely and I think it really reflects a need not just in our own community but in wider communities with this sort of support and so we're thinking about doing future editions. I think it'd be quite nice to have some open textbook impact research stuff like that in there and I think we're out of time. I just wanted to say thank you to all the people that contributed. I don't think I can read all your names out but they're all in the report and I'm just putting their names up on the screen now. Some of them are here today I think. So yeah it's been a very good project, good output and thanks everyone. Thank you very much Rob. We have time for one question and the last one I see is from Bea, will there be a research matters part two? There is so as I say we're probably going to do a second edition of this book in the summer. We can do another survey, get some people, more people to contribute but maybe also ask some people to write stuff specifically for us but we have another companion volume planned anyway for next year which would be based more on theories. So particular theoretical frameworks and how they relate to open education but done in some detail. So a bit sort of less practical in one level but a very good compliment to what we've already done. That's the idea. Great, thank you very much and I see a lot of positive feedback in the chat and I shared the link to the Connect website where there's the slides available and more links so thank you very much and