Announcements

The GO-GN 2018 Year

It’s been an eventful year all round, including for our lovely GO-GN community. We held the GO-GN seminar in Delft to accompany the OE Global conference. Every year this seminar develops and provides a rich experience for all those who participate. Next year we are off to Galway and the OER19 conference.

This year, the wonderful GO-GN leader, Bea de los Arcos, moved on to pastures new at Delft (you see what happens when you go for a conference there). I want to reiterate my thanks to her on behalf of the team and all the students for the marvellous work she has done in developing this community. It was also a sad year as we lost our dear colleague and GO-GN founder, Fred Mulder, who is sorely missed.

This year saw many of the GO-GN researchers successfully gain their PhDs. One of the aims when we took over the project was to develop a vibrant alumni community and we are now seeing this come to realisation, so my congratulations to all those who became DOCTORs this year, and my gratitude for their continued support and involvement in the community.

The aim of the GO-GN project, generously funded by the Hewlett Foundation, was to raise the profile of OER research globally. This is not a quick, or easy, task with a relatively new domain. But I feel that we are now seeing the impact of this approach, with many GO-GN researchers becoming respected and prominent names in the field. For example, Catherine Cronin is co-chair of OER19, and Judith Pete and Caroline Kuhn are amongst the keynotes, while Michael Paskevicius recently gained the Award for Excellence in Open Education from BC Campus. There are many more such examples, and they demonstrate the growing influence of the GO-GN researchers.

We continued our First Wednesday of the Month webinar series with nine presentations this year. The YouTube playlist of these webinars is now a very useful resource for researchers.

And so as the year ends, I wish all our researchers and broader community happy holidays, and a productive/fun/awesome 2019 (delete as you prefer). Thankyou for your continued support and engagement, and I look forward to seeing you online or face to face next year.

Martin and the GO-GN team

Martin Weller

I am the Director of the GO-GN project, based at the Open University.

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