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Open Research has the potential to advance the scientific process by improving the transparency, rigour, scope and reach of research, but choosing to experiment with Open Research carries with it a set of ideological, legal, technical and operational considerations. Researchers, especially those in resource-constrained situations, may not be aware of the complex interrelations between these different domains of open practice, the additional resources required, or how Open Research can support traditional research practices. Using the Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) project as an example, this paper attempts to demonstrate the interrelation between ideological, legal, technical and operational openness; the resources that conducting Open Research requires; and the benefits of an iterative, strategic approach to one's own Open Research practice. In this paper we discuss the value of a critical approach towards Open Research to ensure better coherence between "open" ideology (embodied in strategic intention) and "open" practice (the everyday operationalisation of open principles). [This paper was presented at the "Open Education Consortium Global Conference," Krakow, Poland, April 12-14, 2016.]

Research suggests numerous cognitive benefits of authentic learning experiences. Beyond cognition, there are additional dimensions for learners who engage in authentic learning experiences. In education, the affective experiences of authentic learning and the role of students' social interactions remain largely unexplored. This paper examines students' affective and social experiences derived from blog posts published on the YouthMappers website. YouthMappers is an international network of university students who create open map data for humanitarian and development programming. In an analysis of two years (2016-2017) of 82 blogs from the YouthMappers network, students from the U.S. and abroad report motivating experiences fueled by social events and gatherings. The participants also find value in communicating with, encouraging, educating, and supporting their peers. Geographic region and gender also play a part in their accounts. This paper seeks to advance research in student affect and social interactions during authentic learning experiences. Positive affective and social experiences may be employed to create authentic learning experiences, building impactful social and emotional experiences for globally-diverse students.

The COVID-19 pandemic has attracted a plethora of research from medical-related disciplines other than sociological and migration disciplines . While a significant number of research papers have considered the impacts of the COVID-19 lockdowns and school closures on students, their observations are not directly applicable to the over 5.3 million international students across the globe. The purpose of this study is to understand how African Student Migrants (ASMs) used technologies for social services during the COVID-19 pandemic in Moscow. This study adopted a qualitative research approach to understand the use of digital technologies for social services among 40 ASMs sampled through purposive and snowballing techniques. The findings established that, the use of digital technologies by ASMs played an instrumental role in social services such as accommodation, learning and purchasing patterns rather than social communication, religious or cultural practices, psychological and physical health, and dieting during the COVID-19 pandemic. For policy-level recommendations, tech-savvy developers, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the United Nations Educational Science and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the African Union (AU) should collaborate and create digital technologies that are suitable for social services; devise an information platform to capture basic information about ASMs that will enable them to streamline welfare stimulus packages essential to their survival in times of pandemics. This will also serve as a coping mechanism for society to prepare for new social emergencies and use digital technologies to calibrate international education and inform future policies on public health, school closures and mobility beyond borders.

Distributed Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are based on the premise that online learning occurs through a network of interconnected learners. The teachers' role in distributed courses extends to forming such a network by facilitating communication that connects learners and their separate personal learning environments scattered around the Internet. The study reported in this paper examined who fulfilled such an influential role in a particular distributed MOOC--a connectivist course (cMOOC) offered in 2011. Social network analysis was conducted over a socio-technical network of the Twitter-based course interactions, comprising both human course participants and hashtags; where the latter represented technological affordances for scaling course communication. The results of the week-by-week analysis of the network of interactions suggest that the teaching function becomes distributed among influential actors in the network. As the course progressed, both human and technological actors comprising the network subsumed the teaching functions, and exerted influence over the network formation. Regardless, the official course facilitators preserved a high level of influence over the flow of information in the investigated cMOOC.

This paper examines the evolving relationship between Canada and the African academic research community through the promotion of a concept known as Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) and with an eye to its implications for increasing the circulation of research through such means as open access (OA) publishing models. We analyze the programmatic discourse of Canada's International Development Research Centre's (IDRC) African research initiatives, and report on an IDRC research and development project assessing the means of increasing access to African scholarly journals through the use of open source software platforms and open access publishing and archiving models. Consistent with IDRC's multi-year effort to contribute directly to university-based research capacities by investing in ICT infrastructure in Africa, our survey of African editors, librarians, and faculty from five African nations reveals a similar interest in developing those capacities, despite numerous challenges, through the use of online publishing systems and OA publishing models, which hold some promise of increasing access to research published in Africa. (Contains 2 figures, 2 tables, and 8 endnotes.)

The purpose of this paper is to review the trends in electronic journal publication in Africa in relation to geographical representation, subject spread and language of publication and number of open access journals. The approach adopted for this study was to download the list of journals from the African Journal Online (AJOL) database. These journals were analyzed using tables and charts in relationship to the objectives of the study. This study shows that medical journals are more represented in the database than any other discipline and equally have more open access journals. More than ninety percent of the journals are published in English language while very few journals are published in African languages. Findings from the study reveal that there are very few African countries represented in the AJOL database. Only twenty-six African countries have their journals in the database with so many of them having not more than two journals. Nigeria and South Africa dominate the list of journals in the database. When African sub-region is considered West Africa contributes slightly more than half of all the other regions put together. Medical journals are more represented. In the present electronic environment, it is critical that African journal publishers respond to the need of publishing their scholarly outputs electronically to improve access and impact of their authors. The paper recommends that in order to enhance the visibility of African research outputs more journals publishers should be encouraged to join AJOL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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