Open Research course needs reviewers!

[Beck Pitt]

Hi there

My name is Beck Pitt from the OER Research Hub project (http://oerresearchhub.org & http://oermap.org) and we are looking for reviewers to look at our School of Open course on Open Research. 

The course is available to view here: 

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B4g__4hGKq04SGloaWZYdW9QR0k&usp=sharing

In this folder you will see a course outline document (with some notes) which gives the overview of the course and its sections. There is a description of the course which be used at sign-up (we are hoping to host this course on P2PU) and then four files containing each of the four weeks of the course (Open Research, Ethics, Dissemination and Reflection). 

We would be really grateful for any feedback that you may have. So we can incorporate any changes into the course beforehand, it would be really useful to receive feedback by the end of the month (31 May 2014). 

Thanks so much for your attention and I look forward to hearing from you. In the meantime, please don't hesitate to drop me a line with any questions : -) 

Best wishes

Beck

[Billy Meinke]

Hey Beck-

Straight away, props to you for putting together such a comprehensive course on open research. For a self-motivated researcher, this course is a gold mine.

Some thoughts:

• The high-level themes of ** Open Research / Ethics in the Open / Open Dissemination / Reflecting in the Open ** are well-balanced and build an understanding of the process. Looks great.
• Regarding the 4 Google Hangouts, would you be willing to do a pre-course (1 week ahead of start) office hour or session explaining what the course is about and who might want to take part? It could also serve as an opportunity for questions about the week 1 topics and readings being discussed the following week, which the first week of a course doesn't typically provide. Totally depends on your time commitments.
• The Open Dissemination and Reflecting in the Open sections are especially interesting to me. Great reading lists, too.

The course does assume that participants have a basic understanding of research, and that they are willing to engage in active discourse around doing research openly. I might include a blurb that welcomes all participants, and makes it clear that while anyone is welcome, the activities are aimed at participants who are interested in designing and carrying out research. That said, I'm interested in taking part in the course :)

How are you proposing to structure the live Hangout sessions? At any rate, hope the above thoughts are useful.

Billy

[Beck Pitt]

Hi Billy

Thanks so much for your comments and feedback - that's awesome and really useful for us. 

Great idea re: pre-course hangout and making it a bit clearer re: course activities having a research focus in the course introduction. Thanks for these suggestions! 

RE: live hangouts, at the moment our plan is to use some of the time to discuss various themes/questions/issues arising from particular activities and get a discussion going between everyone on the call (in the "course outline" document some sections/activities have things like "[Google doc] [Google Hangout]" next to them and these are the activities we've chosen to focus on for that week). Some of our anticipated points of discussion/exploration are also indicated in this document (e.g. see Week 4's "Themes to bring up for discussion")  I think the Hangouts will also be partly informed by what we see participants are focusing on, their interests, ideas, experiences etc. so we'll be keeping it fairly flexible. 

Thanks so much again for taking the time out to review the course : -) 

Beck

[Jane Park]

Hi Beck!

Here is my detailed feedback, attached in comments for each section of the course.

I also had a few overarching comments, scattered through the docs. Here are the ones I remember:

One idea is to come up with and feature one hypothetical researcher named __ that we follow through each section of the course in these different scenarios as a (fun) comparison point.

Another is that this is a really jam-packed course, which may or may not work. I encourage you (as we discussed) to reach out in advance to potential participants in the field to gauge their schedules and when might be an optimal time to do a 4 week crash course all together.

Also, since this course involves so much material contribution from participants that will likely make it into the next iteration of the course, I might devote a section to explaining that all contributions will default under the CC BY-SA license policy and why/how this relates back to researching in the open. This is p2pu's default I know but worth making explicit in this course given the meta focus of sharing research and that such contributions will enhance future versions of the course (just like research does).

This is a really strong course and fascinating subject. I also look forward to taking this course with the OERRH when it runs!

Best,
Jane

--
http://schoolofopen.org
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "School of Open" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to school-of-ope...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to school-...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/school-of-open.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/school-of-open/35181e87-1bfa-4d9d-808e-b370839cf18c%40googlegroups.com.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--

Jane Park
Project Manager
Creative Commons

the School of Open, a collaboration with P2PU: http://schoolofopen.org/

Like what we do? Donate: https://creativecommons.net/donate/

[Robert Farrow]

Thanks for the feedback, it's very useful.

I think Jane's suggestion about following a hypothetical researcher through the course is one to which we should give serious consideration - it might make things a bit more tangible for people who are completely unfamiliar with this material.  

I also like the idea of foregrounding the CC licence at the start to set up the reflections on dissemination - again, it helps this stuff to seem less abstract, I think.

Best,
Rob

[Robert Farrow]

Hi all, and thanks for the great feedback.  I think Jane makes some interesting suggestions and I think it is worth looking at integrating the following:

- tracking a hypothetical researcher at each stage of the course could help to make it all a bit less abstract for those who are less familiar with the concepts

- foregrounding CC licensing is a good way of setting up the reflections on dissemination/openness 

[apologies if this appears twice, the first one seemed to disappear!]

Best,
Rob

[Beck Pitt]

Hi Jane, Billy and Rob 

Thanks so much for your emails and Billy and Jane for your extremely useful feedback. I know we've subsequently been corresponding off-list but I wanted to echo Rob's sentiments and publicly acknowledge how useful this feedback and the community review process has been. 

Thanks also to Joe Corneli for giving me feedback via Skype last week.

More very soon! In the meantime, sending all best wishes from us here at the Hub

Beck

[Beck Pitt]

Hi everyone

Just to let you all know that the Open Research course is about to open for sign-up on Monday 25 August 2014. For all the latest on the course, please see my post on the new P2PU list here. 

Thanks so much

Beck