The course, which is openly licensed, contains video and audio footage created by the OER Research Hub team and uses Google Hangouts, Google docs and forums. It offers the opportunity to share experiences and ideas about open research. The OER Research Hub is planning to create a stand-alone version of the course enhanced by participant contributions in late 2016.

The OER Research Hub, P2PU and Creative Commons have collaborated since the Hub's inception, initially to examine the impact of School of Open courses. Concrete plans for a School of Open course focused on open research developed in late 2013 when Jane Park from Creative Commons visited the OER Research Hub as part of her linked fellowship. The course was co-written by the OER Research Hub team during the first half of 2014 and is aimed at anyone interested in open education, research skills and the impact of OER. The course represents the culmination and dissemination of the OER Research Hub project’s own open practices and the researcher toolkit developed during the project. The course was community reviewed and consultation and feedback from a variety of stakeholders was sought at key points in its development.

The first iteration in Fall 2014 saw 139 participants from at least 29 different countries across six continents engage with the course material. In February 2015, the course was awarded an Open University Engaging Research Award and “the judging panel was particularly impressed by the quality of the engaged research; a range of relevant stakeholders and publics were engaged meaningfully in this densely participative research.” A second facilitated iteration of the course took place 14 September – 11 October 2015 and in November 2016 a Pressbook open textbook based on the course and including participant contributions was published.</a>

Read more about the course’s development: http://oerresearchhub.org/2014/11/04/one-year-on-the-journey-of-open-research/ and http://oerresearchhub.org/2014/06/19/open-research-course-update/.