GO-GN’s 2019

As 2019 comes to a close, amidst the general gloom that seems to be everywhere, we can offer up a small dollop of goodness in reflecting on another great year for the GO-GN community.

In this year we held our 8th seminar in Galway in April. This was our first time to coincide with the OER conference, and it was a great success with GO-GN members past and present contributing a significant number of papers at the conference. This pattern of GO-GN presence was repeated at OEGlobal in Milan. It is evidence that the approach to build a community through supporting doctoral students is an effective and powerful one. 2019 also saw the rather sad demise of the OpenEd conference, at least in its current format, but from that new opportunities may arise.

The biggest news for us this year was that we successfully gained funding for a further three years from the Hewlett Foundation. This was a direct consequence of Hewlett seeing the value the GO-GN members bring to the OER research community. This led to a new look website, new graphics and the famous GO-GN penguin.

We saw nine GO-GNers gain their Doctor status this year, and there are at least 5 already lined up for next year with their theses submitted. The network continued to grow with new members, and we are seeking to find ways to recruit more members from the Global South. Now that the community has reached a reasonable size we hope to utilise that to produce resources for researchers, so look out next year for how you can contribute to an open textbook on OER Research Methodologies. We have also lined up Webinars for 2019 that feature almost exclusively GO-GN alumni (I’ll post dates for these in the new year).

Next year we have a seminar in Taiwan in November alongside the OEGlobal conference, and will run a smaller session at OER20 in London also. We will produce an OER Research Methodologies guide, and a GO-GN Research review, as well as our monthly webinar series.

The GO-GN team hope the end of 2019 provides you with some opportunity for rest, and we look forward to seeing many of you in person or online in 2020.