The Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN) [1] is a network of doctoral students from around the world, whose research focuses on open education topics. GO-GN raises the profile of member research, connects and supports the membership and promotes openness as a form of research. Diversity, equity and inclusion are central to GO-GN’s work.
During the pandemic, GO-GN increased the range of activity and support it offered its membership, with the 2020 survey revealing 71% of respondents felt the network had supported them “very well” over the year [2]. New activity over this period included collaborative publications, online mini-seminars to replace previously planned face-to-face activity and increased support for members to participate in conferences and other initiatives. Outputs such as the Research Methods Handbook, for example, received acknowledgement and positive feedback from the wider open education community and has been downloaded more than 8500 times.
The GO-GN community is broad and includes experts, supervisors, students and others with an interest in the network’s work and open education more broadly. Whilst the GO-GN community is viewed by members as the most important feature of the network [3] and our work during the pandemic developed this connection further, there exists further scope for deepening the network’s relationship to the wider open education community.
To both highlight the work of our membership and further develop our relationship to the wider open education community, we are proposing an interactive session for the Open Education conference. The session comprises three parts. The first is an interactive Gasta style session [4] showcasing a diverse range of GO-GN doctoral student research in the form of 5 minute presentations (25 minutes).
The second will focus on collaborative activity to help shape a forthcoming GO-GN collaborative output (15 minutes). Finally, the third part of our session will give the wider community the opportunity to help shape the next phase of GO-GN (15 minutes). As we approach our 10 year anniversary , and begin to develop plans for our next phase, we will be undertaking a series of activities with both GO-GN members and the wider open education community to gather feedback on how GO-GN can best serve its membership and the open education community going forward.
The session will produce a number of collaborative outputs and actions that will be taken forward by GO-GN with the wider community and GO-GN network during 2022 and beyond.
After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:
- Have gained insight into the latest international doctoral research on open education topics
- Have the opportunity to help shape how GO-GN can best serve its membership and the wider community going forward
- Have the opportunity to contribute to both a collaborative output and get involved in the network
