PROJECT EVENTS

3-5 May 2016 DECI-2 workshop presentation

by Sukaina Walji

The ROER4D team represented by PI Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams, Tess Cartmill, Sarah Goodier and Sukaina Walji attended the Developing Evaluation & Communication Capacity in Information Society Research (DECI-2) project workshop held in Cape Town 3-5 May 2016. Sarah and Sukaina presented on their experience and reflections on implementing evaluation and communications in the ROER4D project.
_______________________________________________________________

12-14 April 2016 ROER4D attend the OE Global Conference, Krakow Poland.

by Sukaina Walji

ROER4D network members Glenda Cox, Henry Trotter and Sukaina Walji attended the Open Education Global Conference held in Krakow, Poland 12-14 April. Glenda’s presentation titled ‘The OER Adoption Pyramid’ which introduced a new analytical framework for assessing OER adoption activities (and potential) in institutional contexts. They also collected an OE Award for Open Research on behalf of the project.
_______________________________________________________________

11-13 January 2016 Impact Studies workshop meet in Sri Lanka.

by Sukaina Walji

Lead researchers from six of the seven Impact Studies sub-projects met in Colombo, Sri Lanka to critically review methodologies, conceptual frameworks and project progress. The three-day event was organised by Wawasan Open University management team headed by Prof Gajaraj Dhanarajan and hosted by the Open University of Sri Lanka. ROER4D Network Hub team members Prof Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams, Prof Patricia Arinto, Tess Cartmill and Michelle Willmers and IDRC Program Officer Dr Matthew Smith joined the workshop.
_______________________________________________________________

4 September 2015 – Presentation on findings from the “Beyond the Digital Divide: Sharing Data Across Developing and Developed Countries” project.

by Michelle Willmers

Dr Louise Bezuidenhout and Dr Brian Rappert from the University of Exeter, UK, visited the ROER4D Network Hub to for a presentation and discussion on project findings. The Exeter project seeks to understand current data sharing practices (formal and informal) amongst communities of scientists in developing countries and to probe the protocols of collaborative research (North-South and South-South) in order to contribute towards a more nuanced, reflective global discussion on data sharing and open science. While the project focus is on open data as a component of open science, there are significant synergies with the ROER4D project in terms of investigating the access conditions and contextual factors which influence the contribution of developing-country scholars to the global knowledge commons.
_______________________________________________________________

1 September 2015 – Online session with DECI-2 team for a ROER4D communication and evaluation update.

by Sarah Goodier

Sukaina Walji and Sarah Goodier met with Ricardo Ramirez, Dal Brodhead and Charles Dhewa via Skype to discuss ROER4D communication and evaluation strategy progress. As a result of this call, Sukaina and Sarah will be summarising their work in the DECI-2 poster format, which is an easy-to-read visual format bringing the communication and evaluation work together in one representation.
_______________________________________________________________

31 August 2015 – Michelle Willmers joins Network Hub as Curation and Dissemination Manager.

by Thomas King

The Network Hub is pleased to announce the appointment of Michelle Willmers as ROER4D’s Curation and Dissemination Manager. As the project moves towards the final phase of the Adoption Studies, issues around the curation, publication and dissemination of project outputs and data become increasingly strategically important, and we welcome Michelle’s experience in the fields of open data and publication.
_______________________________________________________________

31 July 2015 – Seminar with Prof Yrjo Engestrom and Dr Annelisa Sannino in Cape Town.

by Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams

Members of the ROER4D team including Glenda Cox, Henry Trotter, Michael Glover and Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams were privileged to be invited to a seminar with Prof Yrjo Engestrom and Dr Annelisa Sannino from the Centre for Research on Activity, Development and Learning (CRADLE) at the University of Helsinki in Finland. The seminar hosted jointly by the School of Education at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and the Fundani Centre for Higher Education and the Work-Integrated Learning Research Unit and the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) brought together about 50 people all working with an Activity-Theoretical Approach in some kind of research or in development interventions. This was of particular interest to the ROER4D researchers as a number of their projects are using Activity Theory as an analytical framework to describe the changes in the activity systems that may be evidenced when open education (including open educational resources and MOOCs) are introduced in schooling and/or higher education environments. A longer blog post is planned for next week, so watch this space!
_______________________________________________________________

14 July 2015 – Meeting the Open Collaborative Science for Development Network (OCSDNet).

by Sukaina Walji

The ROER4D team comprising Tess Cartmill, Sarah Goodier, Thomas King and Sukaina Walji were pleased to meet Becky Hillyer (in person) and Leslie Chan (virtually via Skype) from the ‘open collaborative science’ means in developing country and Global South contexts and to challenge Northern approaches to understanding knowledge production. The OCSDNet programme, which commenced in January 2014, is funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), and comprises 12 different projects to run over 2 years. Becky Hillyer explained her role as being a contact person for the monitoring & evaluation and communications activities, and fruitful discussions followed with regards to synergies between ROER4D’s evaluation and communications work, which is supported by the Developing Evaluation and Communication Capacity in Information Society research (DECI-2), and OCSDNet’s current and planned activities in these areas. Follow-up action points were agreed between the two projects’ teams.
_______________________________________________________________

8 July 2015 – Qualitative data rendering webinar.

by Henry Trotter

With many of the ROER4D researchers busy preparing to analyse their recently gathered research data, Sub-project 4 researchers Glenda Cox and Henry Trotter presented a webinar on “Rendering interview data for qualitative analysis using Excel.” It focused on the researchers’ strategies to collate and make legible (“render”) the various sources of qualitative data that they had collected in the past months of research. Their main focus was on interview data, which comprises the bulk of their materials. After a discussion concerning the sub-project’s research questions, its Cultural Historical Activity Theory analytical approach and the different field sites that they covered, they shared the processes by which they are enhancing the legibility of their data to themselves. They are doing this through: transcribing of the interviews, annotating them according to themes, filtering them according to concepts, visualizing them in different formats, tabulating certain responses for quicker retrieval and selecting stand-out quotes for later reporting. After the presentation, a useful discussion followed with all participants.
_______________________________________________________________

1 – 3 July 2015 – ROER4D attends the 2nd International Conference of the African Virtual University.

by Thomas King

Between 1 – 3 July 2015 Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams, Stavros Xanthopoylos, Sarah Goodier and Thomas King attended the 2nd African Virtual University conference in Nairobi, Kenya. The theme for this year’s meeting was iterative engagement between curation and evaluation in an open research project.
_______________________________________________________________

3 June 2015 – Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams attends a meeting of the Africa Evidence Network meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa.

by Thomas King

Cheryl attended the ROER4D Blog.
_______________________________________________________________

29 May 2015 – Online session with DECI-2 team for a ROER4D communication and evaluation update.

by Sarah Goodier

Sarah Goodier and Sukaina Walji met with Dal Brodhead, Ricardo Ramirez, Julius Nyangaga and Charles Dhewa to discuss the progress with the ROER4D communication and evaluation strategy revision work. Subsequent to the Banff meeting, both Sukaina and Sarah have been working on updating their strategies to reflect the new phase the project is entering which focuses around outputs. The DECI-2 team gave some feedback on this work update.

_______________________________________________________________

20-22 May 2015 – Sukaina Walji attends eLearning Africa

by Thomas King

Communications Advisor Sukaina Walji attended eLearning Africa – the 10th International Conference for Development Training and Education. She presented blog post.
_______________________________________________________________

8th May – Meeting with Naser Faruqui

by Tess Cartmill

Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams and Tess Cartmill had the pleasure of going to lunch with Naser Faruqui, the IDRC’s Director of Science and Innovation, at the Vineyard Hotel in Cape Town. He was interested in getting to know the ROER4D project and we were able to give him some highlights and insights.
_______________________________________________________________

20 – 26 April 2015 – ROER4D meeting and Open Education Global Conference in Banff, Alberta, Canada.

by Tess Catmill

The ROER4D team (lead researchers from most of the 18 sub-projects, advisory group, mentors and network hub team) all attended a 2 day workshop in Banff prior to the Open Education Consortium’s global conference. We were privileged to meet and network. We also had a Research Track during the conference, where many of the researchers discussed their projects’ research to date. We participated in the conference and enjoyed some of the sights of Banff and surrounds. Cheryl’s blog gives more detail and all presentations can be found on the OEC’s website.
_______________________________________________________________

16 April 2015 – Meeting at DFID in London

by Tess Cartmill

At the invitation of Ed Barney and Harriet Macdonald-Walker from the Evidence into Action Team at the Department for International Development (DFID), PI Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams and Sukaina Walji met with a diverse team at DFID’s Whitehall offices in London, between attending the OER15 conference in Cardiff and going on to Banff for the ROER4D meeting and OE Global conference in Banff, Canada. Cheryl presented on the ROER4D project giving a background to the OER and open education movement as well as the necessity for evidence-based research into the use and impact of OER in the Global South.
_______________________________________________________________

16 April 2015 – Online meeting with Pressbooks Textbook team

by Thomas King

On 16 April Thomas King and Kyle Rother (from UCT Libraries) met with Brad Payne and Clint Lalonde over Skype to discuss Pressbooks focusing on co-authoring Open online textbooks. ROER4D began exploring Pressbooks Textbook in February as a publishing solution that would provide ROER4D with the ability to publish its research reports in a variety of open formats, ranging from ePub to .xml. Topics discussed during the Skype call included the granularity of the platform and its capacity to incorporate certain key research visualisation components, such as graphing and charting software. ROER4D intends to continue feeding back to the development team any insights we have as we begin to create open textbooks using the platform.
_______________________________________________________________

14-15 April 2015 – OER15 conference in Cardiff, Wales

by Thomas King

ROER4D PI Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams and Communications Advisor Sukaina Walji attended the blog post.
_______________________________________________________________

18 March 2015 (repeated 25 March 2015) – Working a Conference webinar

By Sukaina Walji

ROER4D Communications Advisor Sukaina Walji presented a webinar on ‘Working a Conference’ with a particular emphasis on how ROER4D researchers could make the most of their attendance and participation at the Open Education Conference in Banff, Canada in April 2015. Sukaina presented a ‘5 Ps’ framework, inviting participants to consider the following concepts as a way of thinking about their activities: Purpose, Preparation, Presence, Participation and Post conference. Each of these concepts has a number of corresponding questions and action points and lively discussion ensued from the diverse group of attendees, which included a number of researchers from the Google Doc for capturing thoughts.
_______________________________________________________________

18 March 2015 (repeated 25 March 2015) – Deliberating Impact webinar

By Sukaina Walji

Now that seven new projects focusing on “impact” have become part of the ROER4D project, PI Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams invited participants to join her in discussing what is meant by ‘impact’ in the context of OER impact research. As well as ROER4D researchers and mentors, a number of colleagues from the Google Doc which is publicly viewable. Cheryl looks forward to continuing conversations around impact research at the ROER4D workshop in Banff in April.
_______________________________________________________________

11 March 2015 – ROER4D meets with Dutch HBO-i

By Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams

On 11 March 2015 Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams was invited to provide an Hoger Beroepsonderwijs ICT Opleidingen (HBO-i) visiting the University of Cape Town (UCT). The Dutch group was drawn from 14 institutions in the Netherlands and seemed particularly interested in establishing international networks with like-minded ICT colleagues, exploring opportunities for students to become involved in international projects and/or participating in student exchange programmes. From the questions posed, the group revealed an interest in how ROER4D is both researching “openness” with respect to educational resources and engaging in “open research”. Chair of the HBO-I Board, Miranda Valkenburg from Rotterdam University, was particularly taken with the scale of the ROER4D project and the cross-cultural research engagement across the Global South. A number of colleagues are now following ROER4D on Twitter and downloaded the presentation that we uploaded to SlideShare before the presentation. They were clearly impressed at how we were endeavouring to “walk our open talk” but a little concerned about making the research process open!
_______________________________________________________________

25 February 2015 – Introduction to Curation webinar

By Thomas King

ROER4D’s first webinar on document and data curation took place on 25 February, covering several important topics in the field of data curation in an open research project. For many in the project, including the Network Hub, the issues around document and data curation are relatively new, and we hope to be able to explore these issues together and ensure that ROER4D outputs are curated to the highest quality standards, ensuring their long-term security and accessibility. We were very pleased to meet Dr Yasira Waqar and Sana Shams from (the new) Subproject 10.5 Impact Studies strand to the session.

Future sessions on the topics of document and data curation, copyright clearance, data cleaning, coding and management, and other curation-related topics will be held later in the year and during the Banff conference. It would be greatly beneficial for the Network Hub team if sub-project researchers would take the time to fill in the Google Doc on workshop topics for Banff 2015.
_______________________________________________________________

20 January 2015 – ROER4D network team planning day

By Tess Cartmill

The ROER4D network coordination team, Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams, Sukaina Walji, Sarah Goodier, Thomas King, Henry Trotter and Tess Cartmill, met out of the office, in the lovely setting of the Andros Boutique Hotel in Newlands. We had a full day planned and each team member came well-prepared to discuss our various areas, linked to project objectives, of Knowledge Building, Research Capacity Building, Networking, Communication, Data Curation, Evaluation, and Project Management. We also allowed ourselves a bit of free-thinking-talking space. It was a very busy, productive day interspersed with tea-time treats and lovely lunch on the patio over-looking the lush green lawn and majestic old buildings. We came away with an Action Plan for 2015 (still growing) and an emerging vision of our ultimate goal.
_______________________________________________________________

15 January 2015 – Online session with DECI-2 team for a ROER4D evaluation update

By Sarah Goodier

Sarah Goodier, Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams, Sukaina Walji and Henry Trotter met with Dal Brodhead, Ricardo Ramirez, Julius Nyangaga and Charles Dhewa to discuss the progress on ROER4D’s utilization-focused evaluation (UFE) to date. Subsequent to the development of the key evaluation questions (KEQs), Sarah had been working with the network team to set up measures of data collection that would yield the best results to answer these KEQs. The DECI-2 team gave some feedback on this work and the methods. This included suggesting bringing in interviews with the ROER4D network in order to look at key moments related to the ROER4D objective of building a network of OER researchers. These suggestions were incorporated into the ROER4D evaluation plan and which will be discussed at the ROER4D network hub strategic planning day on 20 January 2015. Sarah and Sukaina also answered questions from DECI about the UFE and research communication processes as well as synergies between these two processes to feed into DECI-2’s reporting. It was arranged that Julius will be interviewing Sarah after the strategic planning day for additional feedback on the UFE process.
_______________________________________________________________

27 November 2014 – Online session with DECI-2 team for an update on Research Communications

By Sukaina Walji

The ROER4D Team comprising Sarah Goodier, Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams, Tess Cartmill and Sukaina Walji met with DECI-2’s Dal Brodhead, Ricardo Ramirez and Charles Dhewa to discuss progress on the implementation of the Research Communications (ResComm) process. ROER4D’s Communications Advisor Sukaina Walji discussed the development of the communications objectives, a crucial step in the process, and how the communications objectives helped Sarah Goodier, ROER4D’s Evaluation Advisor, develop measures and indicators to track progress. Sukaina and Cheryl also shared some of the surprises and achievements of ongoing communications activities including use of SlideShare for sharing presentations at conferences and as a way of garnering interest in forthcoming presentations and project. Further discussions centred around the integration of the communications and evaluation functions within the programme, with the DECI-2 team particularly interested in factors that facilitate this integration. The meeting concluded with an agreement that Sukaina and Sarah would develop the ResComm and UFE DECI-2 templates by January 2015 and that Ricardo would share examples of documenting the DECI-2 process through case studies.
_______________________________________________________________

27 October 2014 – Meeting with OER Research Hub

The ROER4D Network team – comprising Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams, Sarah Goodier, Tess Cartmill, Henry Trotter and Sukaina Walji – met online with Beck Pitt, Robert Farrow and Bea de Los Arcos as part of their bi-monthly catch-up sessions. We discussed meeting up at forthcoming conferences such as Open Ed 2014 (November 2014) and OEC 14 (April 2015). ROER4D also shared its recent work in formulating the project’s Communications and Evaluation approaches, to which the OER Research Hub was happy to give their input, while the Hub team also shared its experiences of curation and document management. The OER Research Hub also acknowledged the ROER4D team’s involvement in the recent evaluation of the Hub and participation in the Open Research course.
_______________________________________________________________

15 October 2014 – QH Session 15: ROER4D Communications Strategy & Audience Analysis feedback

QH15

Sukaina Walji, the ROER4D Communications Adviser, shared a presentation on the programme’s communications strategy, combined with a focused discussion of the results of an “audience analysis” she had carried out with the lead researchers of ROER4D’s various sub-projects. She started by situating the communications objectives within the broader remit of the programme, then shared how her work was being aided through an engagement with the DECI-2 (Developing Evaluation & Communication Capacity in Information Society Research) project, an IDRC-funded project that helps similarly-funded research projects evaluate their activities and increase their effectiveness. Sukaina revealed that this project promoted Utilization-Focused Evaluation (UFE), meaning that all evaluation activities were tied to the needs of actual users in the project, such as Sukaina who could use the evaluative information for improving her communications activities. She discussed the various ways (exercises, meetings, conversations, research) in which DECI-2 was helping her evaluate her work, such as in her use of ROER4D’s website, Twitter stream, Facebook page, SlideShare account, Scoop.it page and so forth. She then concluded with an insightful discussion of findings from an “audience analysis” she had carried out with the project researchers, going into useful detail on their thoughts as to “what is working well,” “what can be improved” and “what is the way forward”.

A link to the recording of the online event can be found here.
_______________________________________________________________

6 October 2014 – Online session with DECI-2 team about ROER4D Communications and Audience Analysis

Sukaina Walji, Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams and Sarah Goodier met with Dal Brodhead and Ricardo Ramirez to discuss fine-tuning ROER4D’s Communications strategy following Sukaina’s work on audience analysis, and in particular looking at developing objectives to support the project’s main communications purposes. Sukaina had shared an initial audience analysis report with the DECI-2 team, and Ricardo and Dal gave feedback on suggestions on how to develop the findings and recommended activities into specific communications objectives. They suggested that for each major purpose Sukaina develop objectives that either measured reach, feedback on quality (of materials for example) or measured usage of communications outputs, depending on what was feasible. The teams agreed action points and next steps. DECI-2’s particular interest is how the Research Communications steps align with Utilisation-Focussed Evaluation (UFE), so they are keen on how synergies are developing between these two functions in the ROER4D project.
_______________________________________________________________

6 October 2014 – Online session with SRI for evaluation of OER Research Hub

Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams, Tess Cartmill & Sukaina Walji met with Barbara Means and Linda Shear from SRI in a virtual call. SRI are conducting an evaluation of the Hewlett funded OER Research Hub, and the purpose of the call was to give feedback to the team at SRI about our interactions with the OER Research Hub. Barbara and Linda asked open questions that enabled them to collect evidence and feedback for their evaluation. The very enjoyable conversations covered topics such as what’s been working well in ROER4D’s interactions with the team at the OER Research Hub, how the Hub has assisted our project in developing a global presence and how we have shared and used the various resources the OER Research hub has released, such as research instrument questions. Our relationship with the team at the OER Research Hub is very valuable, and we were delighted to give positive and constructive feedback and comments to the evaluators.
_______________________________________________________________

1 October 2014 – Question Harmonisation Session 14: Teachers’ attitudes toward OER in India

QH14

Sanjaya Mishra, Meenu Sharma and Atul Thakur shared a presentation on their research into teachers’ attitudes, motivations and conceptions of quality and barriers to OER in India. Sanjaya – the lead researcher of the project (and also the head of the Maulana Azad National Urdu University (MANUU), but also to host Glenda Cox and Henry Trotter of sub-project 4 who will observe their work so as to replicate aspects of it during their research/workshops in South Africa next year.
_______________________________________________________________

17 September 2014 – Question Harmonisation Session 13: OER at schools in Colombia

QH13

Pilar Saenz, Marcela Hernandez and Ulises Hernandez shared a presentation on their research into the co-creation of OER by teachers and teacher educators in Colombia. Pilar – the lead researcher of the project (and also a member of the Karisma Foundation along with Ulises and Marcela) – started by discussing the K-12 education system in Colombia, followed by a short explanation of what they hoped to achieve through their research. They highlighted the research objective, questions and methodology of their project, then they discussed the various research engagements that they have already enjoyed with school teachers in Colombia, interviewing them about their use of digital content in the classroom (both open and closed content). One of the fascinating things they learned was that most schoolteachers in Colombia were not aware of the various copyright implications of their use of online digital materials. In fact, when confronted with this reality, they first reacted with resentment and anger that any online materials might be off-limits to them. But then they wanted to know more, to understand copyright and Creative Commons licensing. And then they wanted to spread the word, to share what they had learned with others so that they as schoolteachers could share openly in a legal, licensed way. It was an insightful presentation due, in part, to the fact that this project has already made good progress with their research.
_______________________________________________________________

9 September 2014 – Skype interview by Katherine Reilly and Rob McMahon

Sukaina Walji, Tess Cartmill and Sarah Goodier (in Cheryl’s absence) were interviewed by Katherine Reilly and Rob McMahon from Simon Fraser University, who are contracted by the IDRC to do a summative and formative evaluation of the I&N’s (Information and Networks section of the IDRC) work in the area of open development. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss ROER4D and get our insights about IDRC’s work in this area. They are developing a model for comparative research on open development and have been charged with exploring ways to facilitate research on the ‘quality of openness’ (the ability of openness to impact outcomes). They are also conducting evaluation of project outcomes and might be able to give the ROER4D team some pointers with regards to monitoring outcomes.
_______________________________________________________________

8 September 2014 – Lunch meeting with IDRC leadership

A high level IDRC delegation comprised of the President Jean Lebel; Acting Chairperson Monte Solberg; Governor; Gordon Houlden; Vice President Programs and Partnerships Stephen McGurk, and Regional Director for sub-Saharan Africa Simon Cartervisited Cape Town and invited previous and current grantees to lunch at the Vineyard hotel. ROER4D Project Manager Tess Cartmill attended in Cheryl’s absence, along with Laura Czerniewicz (Director, Centre for Innovation in Learning & Teaching, UCT). Interesting conversations flowed around challenges faced by researchers doing research for development and questions about what the IDRC were doing well or what might be improved.
_______________________________________________________________

3 September 2014 – Question Harmonisation Session 12: OER in Mongolia

QH12
Batbold Z., the Lead Researcher for sub-project 8 (SP8), and David Porter, the SP8 Mentor based in British Columbia, Canada, shared the interview and survey questions that Batbold plans to employ for his research during our 12th question harmonisation session. The presentation first clarified the Mongolian higher education context in which Batbold’s research will take place, one that is unique given the various progressive OER policies that are being explored by the national government. David then explained how the research design is shaped and informed by Activity Theory, the lens through with SP8’s research data will be analyzed. Then Batbold shared the actual interview questions he will ask Mongolian higher education practitioners, along with the survey questions he plans to use, most based on the corpus of questions determined through the ROER4D question harmonisation process (but adapted appropriately to his local context). The timing of the presentation was fortuitous because it allowed the broader ROER4D community to give SP8 feedback before it had finalized its questions for research engagement.
_______________________________________________________________

27 August 2014 – First Technical Report submitted

The ROER4D team submitted the first technical report to the IDRC containing summaries from all the sub-projects’ technical reports and gave us an opportunity to review our project progress thus far. The researchers are all involved in the initial stages of their projects and the network coordination team is growing skills in communication, evaluation and research capacity building. While this was a time consuming and ardorous exercise, it allowed us to acknowledge the ROER4D project teams’ achievements thus far and identified areas needing attention. We will share the link when the report is published on the IDRC website.
_______________________________________________________________

22 August 2014 – Introductory online meeting with DECI-2 team for overview of Utilization Focused Evaluation support and activity

Ricardo Ramirez, Dal Brodhead and Julius Nyangaga of the DECI-2 team met with Cheryl-Hodgkinson-Williams and Sarah Goodier, who joins ROER4D as an Evaluation Advisor from 1 September. This meeting introduced Sarah to their Utilization Focused Evaluation (UFE) work and the mentoring support they offer to research projects, such as ROER4D, in the implementation of UFE. As a next step, Sarah will be working through the current ROER4D evaluation plan and the Key Evaluation Questions to build on this work going forward.
_______________________________________________________________

20 August 2014 – Question Harmonisation Session 11: OER Differentiation Survey

QH11

Dutra de Oliveira Neto, the Lead Researcher for sub-project 2 (SP2), shared a presentation on his project’s “OER Differentiation” research survey during our 11th question harmonisation session. The presentation focused on SP2’s question development process, which has included harmonisation, piloting and validation activities. Considering the scope and scale of SP2’s survey – seeking 720 academic staff respondents and 7,200 university student respondents across 36 tertiary institutions in 12 countries in the Global South – the project team of Dutra, Judith Pete and Daryono has had to develop a sophisticated methodology and framework for handling this large-scale data collection effort. Dutra also used the session as an opportunity to discuss the results of a feedback survey that he had recently asked the ROER4D network to complete which helped him to sharpen up the focus of some of the survey’s questions. The timing of the presentation was fortuitous because it allowed the broader ROER4D community to give SP2 feedback before it had finalized its survey for research dissemination.
_______________________________________________________________

6 August 2014 – Question Harmonisation Session 10: Collaboration and Co-Creation of OER in India

QH10-edited

For the project’s 10th question harmonisation session, Ranjani Ranganathan (the ROER4D researcher for sub-project 5) shared with the network the survey questions that she and Guru Kasinathan (the project leader for SP5) have developed for their study which focuses on collaborative co-creation of OER by teacher educators and teachers in India. Ranjani discussed the strategy, design, rationale and purpose of her sub-project’s survey instrument which aims to yield quantitative data which complements the information obtained through their qualitative participatory action research methodology. The session also introduced an important differentiation in our question harmonisation process (which had thus far focused on higher education academics) by looking at the practices of teachers and teacher educators, two crucial stakeholders in the development and use of OER.
_______________________________________________________________

4 August 2014 – Online meeting with OERHub

The ROER4D network team of Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams, Tess Cartmill, Henry Trotter, Sukaina Walji and Thomas King met again online with the OER Research Hub team of Martin Weller, Beck Pitt, Bea de los Arcos and Rob Farrow to share developments in their respective projects. In particular, the UK team discussed the forthcoming GO-GN. The ROER4D team discussed recent work concerning various research capacity development efforts as well as opportunities for future interactions in person (e.g. the next Open Education Consortium conference in Banff, Canada in 2015).
_______________________________________________________________

31 July 2014 – ROER4D attends the launch of OpenUCT

Our ROER4D team was excited to attend the OpenUCT repository launch at 4pm on Thursday 31 July 2014. A great day for openness at UCT. Please also see our upcoming blog post on the launch.
_______________________________________________________________

23 July 2014 – Question Harmonisation Session 9: Survey Results

Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams and Henry Trotter led the project’s ninth research question harmonisation session via Adobe Connect, focusing on the results of the ROER4D Draft Academics Research Survey (Version 1). The discussion highlighted which questions worked well in yielding appropriate data while at the same time illuminating those that required some editing to perform better. Though the survey was conducted with people who are, for the most part, users and/or creators of OER (which means that it was likely not a representative sample of the respondents who will be profiled in later surveys amongst university academics, students and administrators), their responses were still quite useful in helping identify where the strong and weak elements of the survey are. The feedback from this discussion about the results will be incorporated in the update made to version 2 of the survey.
_______________________________________________________________

8 July 2014 – Question Harmonisation Session 8: Survey Feedback

QH8_edited

Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams and Henry Trotter led the project’s eighth research question harmonisation session via Adobe Connect, assessing feedback given by respondents to the ROER4D Draft Academics Research Survey (Version 1). This pilot survey – comprising the questions determined over the past few months through the ROER4D question harmonisation process – was completed by 45 of the 58 people that it was sent to (a 78% response rate). Respondents were drawn from the ROER4D project, the OER Research Hub and various higher education institutions in Brazil and South Africa. Through their responses, we were able to analyze the performance of the questions and the survey design. In this session, we focused on discussing the various feedback to the survey that respondents offered after having taken it, helping sharpen it up for an updated Version 2 (which will be shared with ROER4D team members for informing the questions that they ask in their surveys and interviews).
_______________________________________________________________

2 July 2014 – Online meeting with DECI-2 team for progress update on ROER4D Evaluation activities

DECI-2’s team Ricardo Ramirez, Dal Brodhead, Julius Nyangaga and Wendy Quarry met with Cheryl-Hodgkinson-Williams, Tess Cartmill, Sukaina Walji and Mthunzi Nxawe to discuss ROER4D’s evaluation planning. As the DECI-2 team are providing mentoring support in the implementation of Utilisation Focussed Evaluation, the meeting focussed on reviewing the Evaluation plan produced by Cheryl-Hodgkinson-Williams and Tess Cartmill. Julius and Ricardo gave feedback on the planned Key Evaluation Questions and the ROER4D Team agreed some next steps to make the questions more specific, develop a timeline for the Evaluation plan and to progress developing data collection instruments.
_______________________________________________________________

24-27 June 2014 – Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams presents keynote speech at OER Asia 2nd Regional Symposium on OER

Cheryl-Hodgkinson-Williams presented a keynote address entitled ‘Degrees of Ease: Adoption of OER, Open Textbooks and MOOCs in the Global South’ at the 2nd Regional Symposium on Open Educational Resources: Beyond Advocacy, Research and Policy in Penang, Malaysia. Her supporting paper offered a definition of these forms of teaching provision and learning support within the context of Open Education and identified the key activities underlying OER, OpenTextbooks and MOOCs. In presenting a conceptual framework – the 10 ‘C’s Open Education Adoption Cycle – she interrogated the factors that seem to influence the ease with which educators and students in the Global South adopt OER.

During the time of the conference, Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams and Maria Ng along with participants from Malaysia, India and Sri Lanka, attended part of the OER Workshop facilitated by Prof Mohan Menon of Wawasan Open University as part of the project activities of ROER4D Sub-Project 7.

To read more about OER Asia 2014, please visit our blog.

_______________________________________________________________

21-24 June Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams meets with Maria Ng, Vivien Chang and Prof Raj Dhanarajan

On route to OER Asia, Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams met with Ms Maria Ng (Adjunct Research Fellow) and Ms Vivien Chang (Research Assistant) of the ROER4D Impact Study (ROER4D-IS) team in Singapore 21-22 June 2014. She also had meetings with Prof Raj Dhanarajan of the ROER4D Impact Study (ROER4D-IS) team at the Wawasan Open University (WOU) in Penang on 23 June and morning of 24 June.
_______________________________________________________________

18-20 June 2014 – Patricia Arinto presents at ICOdel 2014 in Manila

ROER4D’s Deputy Principal Investigator Patricia Arinto presented at the 2nd International Conference on Open Distance Learning eLearning (ICOdel 2014) in Manila. As well as providing an overview of the ROER4D project, she focussed on explaining the research strategies adopted to optimize opportunities for comparison across the three regions, and the research capacity-building strategies employed as part of the project’s goal of building a network of OER scholars in the Global South.

_______________________________________________________________

11 June 2014 – Question Harmonisation Session 7: Concept Clarification (Part 2)

QH7_edited

Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams and Henry Trotter led the project’s seventh research question harmonisation session via Adobe Connect, focusing on clarifying and harmonising project members’ understandings of key concepts and terms that are crucial to our research, primarily: circulation, sharing, distributing, redistributing, use, re-use, revise, remix and retain. All of these terms play a role in our OER research, each with its own history, meanings and synonyms. But because they have been used in different ways by scholars, and these terms mean different things to the respondents we will engage, it is important that we in the team are clear about what they mean for us analytically.

The session was attended by 10 participants from Brazil, Colombia, India, Mongolia and South Africa. Drawing on definitions and suggestions from a number of global scholars and texts (including those by Wiley, Green & Soares 2012), the session focused on clarifying operational definitions that we could use across all of our sub-projects for the sake of increasing the consistency and comparability of our research.
_______________________________________________________________

5 June 2014 – Meeting with Siyavula – Emerging technologies for collaborative e-book authorship

5 June 2014

On 5 June 2014 Mark Horner and Megan Beckett from OpenUCT to discuss which tools and workflows were best suited to the the development of a dynamic, collaborative ebook. ROER4D’s ambition is to create a constantly-evolving document that provides new evidence for OER while also serving as a model for Open Research, illustrating research ‘as-it-happens’.

Among the new platforms and tools discussed during the meeting were OERPub’s OER Textbook editor

*At the time of writing, some of these tools are under development and may not be stable on all browsers.
_______________________________________________________________

2 June 2014 – Virutal Meeting with the OER Research Hub

Building on our previous interaction on 18 March 2014, on 2 June Martin Weller, Beck Pitt, Bea de los Arcos and Rob Farrow from the OER Hub met virtually with Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams, Tess Cartmill, Thomas King, Henry Trotter, Mthunzi Nxawe and Sukaina Walji from the ROER4D Network team to share developments in their respective projects. In particular ROER4D agreed to experiment with adding data to the Open Research course, the development of which the ROER4D team was invited to comment on and to invite researchers from the ROER4D network to participate in.
_______________________________________________________________

30 May 2014 – Judith Pete presents at e-Learning Africa 2014

On 30 June 2014 Judith Pete represented the ROER4D project in the e-Learning Africa conference track “OERs and the Future of Education in Africa”, alongside Sarah Kiden from Uganda Christian University, and her presentation:
“Is Open Source Software a Viable Solution to Better ICT Infrastructure in Academic Institutions?”


_______________________________________________________________

28 May 2014 – Question Harmonisation Session 6: Concept Clarification (Part 1)

QH6_edited

Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams and Henry Trotter led the project’s sixth research question harmonisation session via Adobe Connect, focusing on clarifying and harmonising project members’ understandings of key concepts and terms that are crucial to our research, such as: open educational resources, educational materials, adoption, access, awareness and creation. All of these terms play a role in our OER research, each with its own history, meanings and synonyms. But because they have been used in different ways by scholars, and these terms mean different things to the respondents we will engage, it is important that we in the team are clear about what they mean for us analytically.

The session was attended by 7 participants from Brazil, Colombia, India, Mongolia and South Africa. Drawing on definitions and suggestions from a number of global scholars and texts (including those by Wiley, Green & Soares 2012), the session focused on clarifying operational definitions that we could use across all of our sub-projects for the sake of increasing the consistency and comparability of our research.
_______________________________________________________________

22 May 2014 – CILT Brown Bag 2: Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams presents on the OCWC Global 2014 conference

Second Brown Bag 3 Second Brown Bag 1 Second Brown Bag 3

PI Cheryl-Hodgkinson-Williams shared her experience of attending and presenting at the OCWC Global 2014 Conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia. As well as giving an overview of the purpose of her attendance – to represent ROER4D and to network with colleagues in the OER community globally – Cheryl shared her views on the nature of conferences such as these and how the conference organisers had used tools such as ‘Eventifer’ and were planning a video blog of the Conference to promote the individual presentations and projects. She also talked about how the use of Twitter by the ROER4D team back in Cape Town during the course of the conference has succeeded in getting the word out about ROER4D and amplified her presence at the Conference.

See our first 20 March 2014 event for more information on CILT’s Brown Bag sessions.


_______________________________________________________________

16 May 2014  – Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams presents seminar on OER

chemeng1

PI of ROER4D, Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams and colleague, Andrew Deacon, from the Centre for Innovation for Learning and Teaching (CILT), which hosts the ROER4D project were invited to present a short seminar for the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of Cape Town. Their presentation provided some examples of OER for Chemical Engineering and encouraged the 30 or so members of the Department to

  • Reuse – use “as is” or copy verbatim
  • Revise – adapt and improve the OER so it better meets your needs by re-authoring, contextualising, re-designing, summarising, repurposing, translating, personalising, re-sequencing the content
  • Remix – combine or “mashup” the OER with other OER to produce new materials by decomposing, re-mixing and/or assembling content to meet your requirements
  • Redistribute – make copies and share the original OER or your new version with others … on UCT Open Content

and added a 5th R – “Research OER”, drawing their attention to the new ROER4D project.


_______________________________________________________________

15 May 2014 – Brown Bag 2: Project Managing a research project: Creation

ROER4D’s Project Manager Tess Cartmill was asked to share her project management expertise and experience with colleagues from the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT). As well as covering some basic project management principles, she pointed to her experiences of ROER4D that managing a research project in an academic context has its own particular challenges especially around the work required at a pre-proposal stage and dissemination, all of which needs to be built into the project planning process. Productive discussions ensued around defining a project in an academic context and how project management processes could become more integrated into academic contexts.


_______________________________________________________________

14 May 2014 – Question Harmonisation online session 5: Use

QH5

Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams and Henry Trotter led the project’s fifth research question harmonisation session via Adobe Connect, focusing on OER “use” questions (i.e. whether, why and how scholars from the Global South reuse “as is”, revise, remix, redistribute OER that others have played a part in creating). The session was attended by 8 participants from Brazil, Colombia, Mongolia and South Africa. Drawing on questions from a number of global OER surveys (especially those suggested by the OER Research Hub), the session focused on clarifying operational definitions (of reuse, revise, remix, etc.) and getting researchers to consider how they might be able to utilise or adapt some of the questions for their particular projects.
_______________________________________________________________

30 April 2014 – Question Harmonisation online session 4: Awareness

QH4

Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams and Henry Trotter led the project’s fourth research question harmonisation session via Adobe Connect, focusing on OER “awareness” questions (i.e. whether and how scholars from the Global South are aware of OER). The session was attended by 8 participants from Brazil, Colombia, Mongolia and South Africa. Drawing on questions from a number of global OER surveys (especially those suggested by the OER Research Hub), the session engaged with one of the key research issues in OER scholarship, hoping to inspire ROER4D’s researchers in determining how these awareness questions could be utilised or adapted for their particular projects.
_______________________________________________________________

21-25 April 2014 – Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams presents at OCWC conference

Iconic Ljubljana Apr 2014

Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams, Principal Investigator of the ROER4D Project presented an Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN) which met on the 22 and 22 April for a PhD seminar preceding the OCWC 2014 conference.

_______________________________________________________________

9 April 2014 – Question Harmonisation online session 3: Creation

QH3

Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams and Henry Trotter led the project’s third research question harmonisation session via Adobe Connect, focusing on OER “creation” questions (i.e. whether, why and how scholars from the Global South create OER for others to use). The session was attended by 12 participants from Brazil, Colombia, India, Malaysia and South Africa. Drawing on questions from a number of global OER surveys (especially those suggested by the OER Research Hub), the session aimed at encouraging researchers to see how various questions could be utilised or adapted for their particular projects.
_______________________________________________________________

26 March 2014 – Question harmonisation online session 2: Access

QH2

Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams and Henry Trotter led the project’s second research question harmonisation session via Adobe Connect, focusing on OER “access” questions (i.e. how and whether educators from the Global South have access to OER materials). The session was attended by 8 participants from Brazil, Colombia, India and South Africa. Drawing on questions from a number of global OER surveys (especially those suggested by the OER Research Hub), Cheryl and Henry prompted the researchers to discuss how various questions could be adapted for their particular projects.
_______________________________________________________________

20 March 2014 – Brown Bag session introducing ROER4D to CILT

Brown bag Brown bag 3 Brown bag2

On the 20th of March 2014 the project coordination team held a departmental ‘Brown-bag’ session to inform other members of UCT’s Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT) of the purpose and goals of the ROER4D project. CILT’s ‘Brown Bag’ sessions are a place for the different units within the department to explain their activities to a broader audience in an informal manner, while providing a light lunch – thus, the ‘Brown bags’.

_______________________________________________________________

18 March 2014 – OER Hub online meeting

oerhub_onlinemeeting

On the 18th of March, the ROER4D Network team had an online meeting with members of the OER Research Hub’s Impact map as a means of disseminating ROER4D’s research findings, giving input into and taking part in OER Hub’s planned MOOC for OER Researchers, sharing research instruments and survey questions and making plans to meet at the forthcoming OpenCourseWare Consortium Conference.
_______________________________________________________________

12 March 2014 – Question harmonisation online session 1: Demographics

QH1

Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams and Henry Trotter led the project’s inaugural research question harmonisation (QH) session via Adobe Connect (a virtual conferencing tool). The QH sessions were established to help the project’s researchers align their survey and interview questions with each other (across ROER4D’s 12 sub-projects) and with other global OER surveys. Cheryl and Henry facilitated the process by identifying useful questions from the global literature, then prompting the researchers to discuss their various merits for their particular projects. In this session, we focused on “demographic” questions. While this process has been aimed at not only conforming to social science research best practices, it also seeks to enhance research capacity and communal support across the project. (To deal with the fact that participants are spread across 16 time zones, we created a handy time zone guide to help us decide when to have our online meetings.)
_______________________________________________________________

18-19 February 2014 – DECI-2 & ROER4D Evaluation and Communication workshop

DECI 2 c DECI 2 b DECI 2 a

The Newlands Sun Hotel in Cape Town was the setting was for the first DECI-2 (Developing Evaluation & Communication Capacity For Information Society Research) and ROER4D Evaluation and Communications mentoring workshop. The ROER4D Network team comprising Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams, Henry Trotter, Sukaina Walji, Tess Cartmill, and Mthunzi Nxawe met with Charles Dhewa, Julius Nyangaga, Ricardo Ramirez and Wendy Quarry (who joined on day two) from DECI-2. Advisory Group members Maria Ng and Matthew Smith also participated as did Laurent Elder from the IDRC while  Ed Barney and Harriet MacDonald-Walker from the Department for International Development (DFID) joined for the first day.

First, Cheryl presented an overview of the ROER4D project after which the DECI-2 team lead by Ricardo introduced the Research Communication were also identified, in line with the UFE process. Sukaina presented the team’s initial thoughts around ROER4D’s communication strategy, which was followed by Charles’ facilitation on the communication process. The group developed a draft strategy highlighting the purposes and objectives, identified stakeholders and  possible communication methods and media. Next, Julius and Ricardo facilitated the evaluation process, which drafted the purpose of evaluation in the project, identified possible users and key evaluation questions. The workshop ended with agreement on further actions for the teams to work together on communications and evaluation strategies for the project.

______________________________________________________________

31 January 2014 – DECI-2 Online pre-workshop preparation session

DECI-2

The ROER4D Network Hub team comprising Tess Cartmill, Mthunzi Nxawe and Sukaina Walji met Ricardo Ramirez, Dal Broadhead and Julius Nyanga from the IDRC-funded DECI -2 (Developing Evaluation & Communication Capacity For Information Society Research) project in a virtual conferencing session. IDRC Programme Officer Matthew Smith also joined the meeting from Canada. The purpose of the meeting was to initiate ‘Step 0’ of DECI-2’s engagement with ROER4D, primarily to prepare Sukaina Walji (ROER4D Communication Advisor) and Mthunzi Nxawe (Evaluation Advisor) for the formal face to face workshop to be held in Cape Town the following month. DECI-2 facilitators Ricardo Ramirez, Dal Broadhead and Julius Nyanga led the session giving an overview of both the processes of Utilisation Focussed Evaluation (UFE) and Research Communications.

The DECI-2 team outlined their role: DECI-2 are supporting ROER4D in designing an evaluation process for its project, although while the DECI team will be involved in this formal evaluation process of ROER4D, it will do so primarily as facilitators. DECI-2 will provide briefings, mentoring, face-to-face sessions, lesson sharing and documentation. This means that ROER4D will learn by doing evaluation and communication at its own pace and will take control of its own evaluation efforts while being part of the the DECI-2 research and mentoring project. ROER4D will participate in a Research Communication process whereby ROER4D’s Research Communication services the different outreach and networking functions of projects combining active listening with targeted dissemination action. Following the presentation, the ROER4D team asked questions concerning timing of evaluations, the scope of research communication and how sub-projects could be supported for both evaluation and communication and agreed a list of action points for further discussions.

Evaluation and Communication in Practice website.
______________________________________________________________

9 December 2013 – ROER4D Research Workshop 1

ROER4D 9 December 3 ROER4D 9 December 2 ROER 9 December 1

The full contingent of ROER4D participants met in Cape Town, South Africa, for the project’s first research workshop. The event – which was held at the beautiful Waterfront – comprised four days of extensive engagement and discussion concerning the project’s aims, the sub-projects’ research foci, various theoretical and methodological concerns as well as survey harmonisation opportunities and intellectual property issues. The workshop offered the project’s researchers, mentors and administrators (who hail from 15 countries in five continents) a chance to connect with each other for the sake of exploring crucial research questions, facilitating concrete research commitments and forging stronger supportive and collaborative linkages.

______________________________________________________________

24-30 May 2013 – Final preparations of proposal in Bali

Final proposal Bali Cheryl HW Bali hotel

On the 24 May 2013 the ROER4D team submitted the final proposal for the Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) in the Global South project to the Canadian Emeritus Professor Gajaraj Dhanarajan of the Wawasan Open University, Malaysia. This proposal had been under development from after the first meeting in Chiang Mai, Thailand from 23-25 May 2012. The proposal sets out the ambitious aim to establish in what ways, and under what circumstances the adoption of OER can address the increasing demand for accessible, relevant, high-quality and affordable education and what its impact is in the Global South.

Navigation
×