Category Archives: #GO_GN

What happened when we put 14 PhD researchers inside an IKEA hotel

1 Reply

This post was first published on GO-GN’s website on May 16th, 2018.

After Cape Town in 2013 and 2017, Ljubljana and Washington in 2014, Banff in 2015 and Kraków in 2016, in April 2018 fourteen GO-GN researchers, the OERHub team and a handful of GO-GN family members gathered in The Netherlands for the 7th GO-GN Seminar. This is the story of two days (in an IKEA hotel) in Delft.

Sorry, wrong tweet, let’s start again. Once upon a time on a hot day in Delft a bunch of lovely people from Canada, the US, Ireland, Uruguay, Sri Lanka, Israel, The Netherlands, France, UK, Brazil and Australia got together to talk about PhD research into open education…

Day 1 started with a quick look at where we are at; correction: it’s now 60 PhD researchers and 15 alumni.

After introductions, two of our alumnae took the floor (and the walls) to help their colleagues navigate common challenges…

We gave them cake, enthused by the overwhelming evidence put forward by rigorous research on the impact of sugar consumption on brain power…

And it worked! Oh dear me, those presentations! Jenni breezed through the difficult task of making sense of open education…

Judith is the go-to person for research on (O)ER use in African HE…

In Brazil teachers in K12 have been well looked after by Viviane (and she’s got guidelines!)…

Natascha’s research on open textbooks is a breath of fresh air (jeez, move on from cost savings and impact on scores, guys!)…

Virginia is a force of nature when it comes to fighting on the #opened frontline in Latin America…

And to cap the day, two encounters with MOOC research of the first kind: Dilrukshi’s on increasing the effectiveness of MOOCs…

And Eyal’s on predicting learner-centred outcomes…

Did we still have time for some VConnecting fun? You bet!

At the end of the day I worried we had given them too much cake stuff to think about…

Point taken: cut the sugar, provide them with notebooks. And so it was that Day 2 dawned with Marjon ready to lego-spice Dutch teachers’ adoption of OER…

Verena was brave to bring the group outside the safe confines of our IKEA hotel; she’s all about expanding learning environments you know?…

Nothing can go wrong with a linguist in the room. Give me an R! Give me an E! Give me an U! Give me an S! Give me and E! ReeeeeeUSE! That’s what Hélène explores with language teachers…

Oh Adrian, how could you bring in a platypus and not expect some controversy? Indeed we must understand open practice as a continuum…

Helen is still looking for hOERself in this mad mad world of academia (and when she shares her slides I’ll add a link)…

Leo worries deeply about how open is open. No, really, how open is it? …

And one awesome Aussie Penny explained how STEM teachers experience professional learning through open education (and when she shares her slides I’ll add a link)…

Then I got them to ditch abstract and think open in action. (Note: GO-GNers struggle counting words, specially up to one)…

And that was very much it. In the evening of Day 2 we headed to Bierfabriek (no, of course it’s not a drinking hole, what do you think we are?) to celebrate awards-winning, friends-hugging and cheese balls…

And shared some tuko pamoja love with Fred Mulder, founding father of GO-GN. In fact, speaking of love, I think next year we need to introduce a more explicit element of torture…

OK folks, that’s a wrap. Do a search for the #GO_GN hashtag on Twitter to see what happened when we let these fabulous #opened researchers loose in #OEGlobal18. Thank you all! Here’s the photo for the family album…

Oh wait, I nearly forgot. We got an award 🙂

Now, that’s a proper wrap!