The IGDORE Education Working Group recently completed a SWOT analysis at our Monday, September 26th meeting. We brainstormed our internal strengths and weaknesses as well as external opportunities and threats to better understand our purpose and capabilities.
We see the main area of strength that differentiates us from other open science initiatives to be our relative freedom from any single institution while also being made up of members engaged with a variety of other open science networks and organizations. These existing connections provide a variety of resources that working group members hope to use to support future work on this project.
We identified two main areas of opportunity:
Developing and delivering open science educational material specifically for independent researchers and independent research institutes like IGDORE and Ronin.
Developing, promoting, and providing training on platforms for creating open educational resources (OER) for open science.
The main addressable weakness we see is a lack of focused time to work together. The group is interested in identifying resources that could provide that type of focused time for productive collaboration.
You can see the full SWOT analysis here, and we welcome your further thoughts (please add them as a comment, email them to education@igdore.org, or message a Working Group member directly).
IGDORE members Stefaniia Ivaschenko (@sivashchenko), Paola Masuzzo (@pcmasuzzo) and Gavin Taylor (@Gavin) participated in the analysis, along with working group members Chris Erdmann (@cerdmann), Jennifer Miller (@JMMaok), and Jadranka Stojanovski (@jadranka). Thanks to Jennifer Miller for facilitating the session and drafting this summary!
[The IGDORE Education Working Group has been meeting monthly since March. Summaries and notes from future meetings that discuss topics that may be of interest to other IGDORE affiliates and the broader community will be shared in this thread.]
Great work, out of interest, I did not receive any notification about this meeting/WG set up - I see you used the Easyretro board- look forward to development
I would like to contribute lessons to an IGDORE open science curriculum. and possibly other topics from my teaching portfolio (based on new research) the problem is that many curricula become outdated too quickly, or when they are updated, they lose the historical perspective on the subject
Thanks for your interest in the project @paoladm! I will DM you with details about the joining the meetings.
Yes, this is a problem that we noted in relation to the existing principles module of the Open Science Mooc (@JMMaok). Iām not sure if there is much that can be done besides regularly revisions to keep the material current. I hope that this will be facilitated by creating open course content (provide the community is active and makes the necessary updates).
Keeping materials current is a challenge and an area where open science will benefit from working hand-in-hand with the open education movement. Coming out of the SWOT, I would say that we are interested in making space for and finding resources for updating the OS MOOC.
As another example or perspective, the open syllabus I created to teach open science through the lens of the UNESCO Recommendation makes use of community and renewable assignments like annotated bibliographies to provide a built-in way to keep a course current: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/UNESCO_Recommendation_on_Open_Science
A lot of what is being developed now for open science seems to have a heavy component of vocational training on platforms. This seems to be in part from competition for market share (even if the market is not always a literal market with firms and consumers). It will always be especially hard to keep training current when it is tied to a specific technology. And technical training easily becomes repetitive, because knowledge of how to use software generalizes fairly easily from one product to another. That makes me personally more interested in education around principles, an interest it sounds like you may share.
You may also be interested in work being done now by the Creative Commons Open Education Digital Literacies Working Group. Below are the purpose and goals of the working group:
Purpose: Define what digital literacy skills related to OER are and identify means of acquiring those skills.
Goal: develop support services for municipalities or govts who want to implement the OER recommendations related to digital literacy. Take it as a framework on how to develop that part of the recommendation. Audience: municipality to train future users.We will work together, with CC HQ, UNESCO and with NGO partners to help governments and education institutions implement the UNESCO recommendation on OER. We will prioritize our work with national governments and educational institutions.
The Creative Commons working group is taking it as our goal to prepare interested parties around the world to Adopt (Includes finding, evaluate), Adapt, and Create (Includes share & disseminate) Open Educational Resources. These OER could be on any topic, not just Open Science, of course, but this global initiative is organizing an amazing collection of resources to prepare people to create and use OER.