Recognized for Open Collaboration
From the nominator:
The top reason this nomination deserves to be recognised with a 2025 Open Education Award for Excellence is its creation of an open and inclusive global community for educational researchers. Through honest dialogue across career stages, #TELresearchers & #HEresearchers diversifies research development, providing personal insights into individual journeys to inspire others. It openly champions authentic reflection and drives equity, connection, and growth for educational researchers worldwide.
#TELresearchers & #HEresearchers was founded in Jan 2022 by Puiyin Wong, a PhD candidate at Lancaster University and a digital education leader at Buckinghamshire New University (UK). It is now a thriving global community of nearly 1,000 researchers and scholars from around 50 countries.
At its heart is a distinctive practice: Established educational researchers and scholars (our speakers) share personal stories, not research findings through open, informal conversations. This promotes equity and inclusions across career stages, connecting peers across disciplinary and institutionally created hierarchical boundaries. These free, online conversations are co-created with speakers and tailored to their interests, resulting in engaging formats such as “life chapter” storytelling, ask me anything sessions, pub quizzes, and deep dives into topics like failure, discrimination, and identity. With over 40 speakers of diverse cultural heritage, such as British, American, Japanese, Korean, Emaswati and Italian, from institutions worldwide including Lancaster University, King’s College London, University of Edinburgh, University of Sydney, and University of Windsor, the community has become a space where hierarchies dissolve and meaningful exchange thrives.
This initiative has wonderful creativity, inclusivity, and sustainability (and without funding!). There’s a unique network that uses alternative means to connect as opposed to typical academic gatekeeping. Its openness make it a great model for open collaboration in research development.
Award Reviewer
This is a truly community-led initiative, bringing together 1,000 education researchers from 50 countries, in Conversations (not lectures) which are fully open, and available as recordings after events.
Award Reviewer
Senior researchers connect with and inspire PhD students and peer-level colleagues with their own lived-experience learnings, and exchange ideas live, with over 21,000 views of the Substack where recordings are accessible.
This is a grass-roots, fully free initiative, run by one inspirational leader with no costs support in his spare time – the reach it has achieved is testament to the need in the community for such a resource and exchange space.
Learn More
- #TELresearchers & #HEresearchers (Substack)
- #TELresearchers & #HEresearchers (National Teaching Repository)
- Webinar archive (YouTube)
