As ever, there is a lot happening here at the Hub and Open Education Week 2017 provides a great opportunity to update everyone on what we’ve been up to.

• With our GO-GN hat on we recently returned from South Africa where we ran our annual workshop for PhD students.  You can read the full story over on the GO-GN blog, but suffice it to say that we had a pretty stimulating meeting with a great bunch and it’s encouraging to see discussions continuing online!
• While in Cape Town we also attended Open Education Global, where we got a welcome chance to catch up with colleagues from around the world.
• We were delighted to be given an ‘Honourable Mention’ in the Course/OCW/MOOC category of the annual Open Education Awards for Excellence for Becoming an Open Educator.  This open badged course was collaboratively developed as part of our research work for Opening Educational Practices in Scotland (OEPS).
• At the beginning of the month, we met with partners from the BizMOOC project to discuss the set-up, design and production of three MOOCs on ‘Learning to Learn’, ‘Entrepreneurship’, and ‘Creativity and Innovation’. We should be ready to roll at the end of the summer, so keep your eyes peeled.
• One important activity for Open Education Week that we are involved with (and would appreciate your contribution to!) is the development of a folksonomic tagging system for the OER World Map.  You can read the full blog post for more on the background, but it’s easy to get involved.  First and foremost, if you haven’t already done so, register your account on OER World Map. You will receive editing rights straight away, and you will be able to add and edit data relating to OER activity.  Alternatively, it’s possible to contribute on Twitter via the hashtag #taggingoer.  If you believe some information or tags are missing from the map then you can tweet the relevant information on this hashtag and the project team will pick it up.
• We continue to collect data on Open, Online, Flexible and Technology-Enhanced models of educational delivery.  Please complete the survey at https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/OOFATOERHUB if you haven’t already done so.
• Tomorrow some members of the OER Hub team will run a training workshop for staff and doctoral students at The Open University, UK on the theme of open research.  The session will draw on our experiences as researchers with the Hub as well as the course we developed for P2Pu and our researchers toolkit.
• This week sees the (open access) publication of a new edited volume on open education and the difference it is making.  We contributed a chapter and there are lots of good writers in there.  It’s on Ubiquity press and available for free online.  Check it out:  Jhangiani R. & Biswas-Diener R. (2017). Open: The Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science. London: Ubiquity Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/bbc.  Congratulations to all authors and to editors Rajiv and Robert for putting it together.
• We learned yesterday that we have been awarded funding by The Hewlett Foundation to pilot and research the impact of open textbooks in UK higher education – and we’re very pleased to be working with our co-grantees, including Vivien Rolfe (University of the West of England) and WonkHE.  We’ll be circulating more information about this next week, including a call to action for those who would like to be involved.

We are currently looking forward to OER17 next week where most of the team will be presenting research papers.  If you’re attending the conference and would like to meet up just drop us a line.  Similarly, we will have a presence at the meeting of Hewlett grantees in Toronto at the end of April and welcome the chance to catch up.   In the meantime, happy Open Education Week!