We are proud to work in partnership with the following organisations and projects to make the conference a success.
Global OER Graduate Network
The Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN) is a network of PhD candidates around the world whose research projects include a focus on open education (i.e. OER, OEP, MOOC). These doctoral researchers are at the core of the network; around them, over two hundred experts, supervisors, mentors and interested parties connect to form a community of practice.
GO-GN is currently funded through the OER programme of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and administered by the Open Education Research Hub from the Institute of Educational Technology at The Open University, UK.
Reclaim Hosting
Reclaim Hosting is a higher ed web hosting company focused on providing institutions, educators, and students with flexible web hosting space and intentional community support
Founded in 2013, Reclaim Hosting set out to make web hosting tools easy to work with in a classroom setting. In short, this means we want to empower the academic community to have an authentic and personal relationship with the technology they use. Fast forward almost 10 years later, we’re continuing to drive that mission by creating a niche support hub and learning community for curious minds and creative tinkerers, whether they have a background in Instructional Design, advanced IT Support, or sit somewhere in between.
Kaltura
Kaltura powers real-time, live and on-demand video for virtual and in-person learning. Founded in 2006 and now serving more than 700 educational institutions globally, including KCL, Edinburgh, Durham, Nottingham, and Sheffield, its products include virtual classroom, LMS video, campus video portal, lecture capture, video messaging, virtual events, and more.
Universities choose Kaltura’s technology to create engaging, personalised, and accessible experiences inside and outside the classroom. This helps them drive interaction, build community, boost creativity, extend reach, and improve learning outcomes.
In 2023, higher education institutions are engaging Kaltura primarily for its flexibility in supporting both synchronous and asynchronous learning, and breadth of coverage, since it powers video experiences for prospective students, current students, alumni, staff and the wider university community.
University of the Highlands and Islands
Originally founded in 2001 as UHI Millenium Institute, the University of the Highlands and Islands was established in 2011 as the UK’s first tertiary university offering FE courses, taught undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, and postgraduate research degrees.
UHI has a network of campuses and regional study centres located across the Highlands and Islands region. Mainland campuses range from the city of Perth located just above the central belt of Scotland to Thurso in the far North, and from Elgin on the Moray Firth to the east of the region to west coast locations including Oban and Fort William. Northern Isles locations include campuses on Orkney and Shetland, with Western Isles campuses including those on Skye and Lewis. UHI offers a wide range of courses and programmes of study, including those that are linked to the history, culture and industries of the region.
Due to the geographically distributed nature of UHI, digitally-enabled education practices have always been central to learning, teaching and student support. UHI has a particular model for networked programmes that allows students to undertake programmes of study from wherever they are located, regardless of where within the UHI partnership that programme is delivered from. Blended, online and what we would now recognise as ‘hybrid’ pedagogies and modes of engagement are widely used across the university, alongside specialist site-specific education (including archaeology and marine science).
UHI was a key contributor to the Open Educational Practices in Scotland (OEPS) project that ran between 2014-2017 to foster the further development of open education in Scotland. The university also has a close involvement in the open access Journal of Perspectives in Applied Academic Practice. UHI was one of the first universities in Scotland to publish on the Open Monograph Press platform that is now also underpinning the open Scottish Universities Press initiative of which UHI is a member. In relation to open education within UHI, the university’s Framework for the Development of Open Educational Practices is underpinning current developments to further embrace and enhance open practices in learning, teaching and scholarship, and in developing institutional tools, platforms and policies to underpin and further enable open education.