“Individual OEGlobal Membership For Life” and Sustaining an Ongoing Relationship

At the May-2022 Open Education Global (OEGlobal) 2022 conference in Nantes, France the OEGlobal Board of Directors gave a public presentation celebrating my five years as Executive Director at OEGlobal. It is moving to hear others list my accomplishments and say I lead with heart, compassion, enthusiasm and a deep dedication to the growth and expansion of open education worldwide. I confess to a certain awkwardness and not knowing how to respond to such thanks except with thanks of my own. I know full well the work I have done is a team effort and am more comfortable with the collective effort being acknowledged than my own individual one, but still, it is wonderful to be acknowledged and thanked.

Paul listening to Martin Dougiamas on behalf of the OEGlobal Board of Directors, give a public presentation celebrating my five years as Executive Director.

As part of that ceremony I was given an honourary “Individual OEGlobal Membership For Life”. What a gift! Although I am stepping down from the OEGlobal Executive Director role at the end of 2022 I intend to continue to be involved in the global open education effort as a consultant at paulstacey.global. Over the years OEGlobal staff and the global open education community have come to feel  like “family” to me and as such I’m keen to sustain an ongoing relationship. I see the Individual OEGlobal Membership For Life as an invitation to do just that.

In fact sustaining an ongoing relationship is an integral part of the Leader Succession Plan I developed at the end of 2021. That plan lists the following guiding principles / goals:

• Do transition in a way that enhances the caring culture of OEGlobal.

• Proactively define a process that has care as a goal.

• Own the narrative. Define the timing and process. Control leaks and speculation.

• Anticipate and manage emotion and anxiety.

• Provide opportunities for expression of appreciation and care.

• Create a timeline and phased approach that is good for organization, Board, staff, outgoing Executive Director incoming Executive Director, members, etc.. A kind of win, win, win all around. 

• Include culture of care approach in announcement and invite Board, staff, and community to come up with additional ways to integrate a culture of care into the process.

• Ensure all Board and staff are involved and have a say.

• Sustain high performance and continuation of OEGlobal existing plans and initiatives.

• Ensure there is an overlap with outgoing and incoming ED for handoff and knowledge transfer.

• Sustain an ongoing relationship 

Paul expressing thanks for his Individual OEGlobal Membership for Life!

I am very grateful.

Another opportunity to sustain an ongoing relationship emerged not long after, through the wonderful work of my colleague Alan Levine, OEGlobals Director of Strategy and Engagement. Alan has been encouraging all of us to create a voice and presence in OEG Connect - a community space for open educators around the world. He asked us to pick a topic and lead global discussion around it. Alan took the step of creating an OEG Connect Idea Corner, a place for starting a new topic around a specific open education issue or interest area, that can be used as a blogging and discussion platform. I like the way the Idea Corner is inspired by the well known Speakers Corner at Hyde Park in London, UK.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Alan’s call to action. As I transition to an opening education consultant role, I intend to write and blog more, something I did for eight years (2010 to 2018) at https://edtechfrontier.com/. I really like the way blogging lets me share my own analysis of the field and do thought experiments. While I intend to post blogs here at paulstacey.global I want to also be an active voice out on the open web in other open education communities and spaces. It occurred to me that hosting an ongoing discussion with the global open education community around a topic on OEGlobal’s OEG Connect space provides a means for reinvigorating my blogging and sustaining an ongoing relationship with OEGlobal and its community.

There are lots of topics I’d like to explore and dialogue with others about. I decided to start with the topic “Quality Open Education”. Here is an introductory post I wrote in OEG Connect describing my interest in Quality Open Education. To kickoff discussion I wrote a more extensive post I’ve called “The Elastic Triangle”. I’m going to also post The Elastic Triangle here as part of the paulstacey.global blog but if you’d like to engage in discussion around this topic please post a reply in OEG Connect. Your comments, questions and observations are welcome.

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