Meet our first GO-GN fellows!

After the selection process from our fellowships call at the beginning of the summer, it is now public! We are proud to introduce our first four GO-GN fellows. Starting in October they will have six months to develop their proposals, and the winners with their fellowships’ summary are:

Johanna Funk

This fellowship offers structure and support to continue my post doc research plans,  with application to systematically inform larger pedagogical reviews and innovation both in the University and other organisations across my existing networks that want to recover from Covid and online learning  pivots with a sense o cultural capability.   Using criteria and general information available from students and staff, I will create a developmental Evaluation of learning and OEP in core Humanities Curriculum units.  This can identify the best ways to parcel OEP into foundational curriculum and unit learning design and have it impact students in a whole-of-university approach. This enables some humanities-based skills to be embedded via OEP in units which students across the university will take and enable them to apply it to their field of study specifically.  This is supported at a college and Institution level via CDU Open Strategy ‘s goals.  Given ongoing Covid ‘recovery’ and response, implications for workforce development in the future, and humanities funding crises in HE, I can see an opportunity to embed these knowledge, skills, and understandings alongside the OEP design of learning.   I will apply what I have learned to directly impact on learners’ experience. The current agenda privileges ‘work readiness’ without centring the range of skills and understanding towards said ‘work readiness’ which our units and OEP design can support. Involving students as partners and priorities in this experience can offer exemplify alternatives to staff with more conventional teaching approaches.  Based on student feedback over the past year, I anticipate this will impact positively on students’ employability skills and workforce readiness; a focus of current HE agendas and funding. Open pedagogy embeds these skills as learning tools for students and staff to transform power relations and open learning to increased student agency and transferable skills.

Judith Pete

As one of the pioneer beneficiary of GO-GN Network and a former student to the founder of this network (late Prof. Fred Mulder), I strongly believe that I have a role to play in the growth and development of GO-GN, especially in the Global South. In my new role as the Regional Coordinator to Service Learning project at our university, I have an opportunity to interact and connect with many students, faculty and researches in different capacities at different universities within African region and beyond. With such an opportunity, I would wish to promote GO-GN at different levels in my interaction with the proposed 20 universities in Africa and eventually to the world. This will involve face to face interactions in seminars and conferences (after Covid-19) and through online events that should commence by August, 2020 and are under my coordination. From the DEI-project suggestions, a project which I coordinated, I am aware of some of the barriers to candidates willing to join the network. I can use that background to turn around the approach to various candidate from the region and recruit them to the network.

Chrissi Nerantzi

I would love to combine my passion for open education, creativity and storytelling and create a collaborative open picture book about open education to be shared across the world and raise awareness of the values of open education to the next generation and their families and careers. We, I feel, too often focus our efforts of open education in higher education,  but I think there is a huge opportunity and a need to focus some of our efforts on helping children understand the important role open education can play for all in order to create a more inclusive world. So, the plan would be to work with a core group of diverse individuals, also students and children in primary schools and co-author a story that would form the basis of the picture book story. The story would then be illustrated and made available as an open digital publication and there would be the potential to translate the story into different languages and print the book, if the funds would allow this. We live our lives through stories. Stories can indeed be very powerful for learning too. I would like us to explore their potential to spread the benefits of open education for all through creating an open collaborative picture book about open education that can be used by individuals and groups to raise awareness and responsibility about open education and the benefits it can bring to create a better future for all.   

Virginia Rodés

Adoption of Open Educational Resources and Repositories in overcoming the educational crisis during COVID-19 pandemic by K12 teachers in Uruguay.   The national health emergency declaration for COVID-19 pandemic took place on March 13, 2020, this coincided with the start of the school year in Uruguay on March 2.  Uruguay has an important technological infrastructure and a wide and strong public and free education sector that has allowed the country to continue education.   Schools in Uruguay were in a privileged situation to face the pandemic, due to the investment in infrastructure and national capacities made in the last 15 years. In turn, once the national emergency was declared, the “Programa Ceibal en Casa” (Ceibal at home program) was deployed, a contingency plan implemented by the Uruguayan government to improve the continuity of education during the Coronavirus crisis. This reconfigured the operation of the Plan Ceibal to the situation generated by the pandemic, taking advantage of robust pre-existing digital infrastructure, educational resources, generalized access and data collection.  Although Uruguay has not laws, recommendations or approved national policies regarding Open Education, there are ongoing policy design initiatives that lay the groundwork for their realization in the near future, and there is also a number of national OER repositories oriented to K12 education.  During the COVID19 pivot, this repository showed an increase in the use and adoption by K12 teachers.  The Fellowship proposal is aimed at investigating the experiences of teachers from two public primary schools in Uruguay in relation to the creation, use and reuse of OER and national repositories during the COVID19 emergency, identifying the drivers that led to an increase in the adoption in this particular scenario.   

Come to hear more about our fellows and their awarded fellowships during the first of our Autumn seminars on Wednesday 14 October