Parallel Session & Workshops

Date: Wednesday 27 September 2023

Time: 10:45 - 12:45 CEST

Session:

Panel Discussion on Emerging publishing models

Details and speakers TBC.

Workshop:

What do you need? A collaborative approach to understanding OER requirements across all stakeholders

[Organizer: University of Vienna, Austria]

Analogous to activities in the area of Open Access and Open Data in research which are largely already institutionally anchored, Open Educational Resources (OER) are beginning to establish themselves in European higher education. These are meeting with increasing interest among teaching staff, students and management levels. In addition to building up competence in the use and creation of OER, their availability is of central importance to ensure the acceptance of OER. Thus, in addition to publications and research data, there is an increasing demand from policy makers concerning sustainability to make teaching content available long term and for everybody. Furthermore, university staff itself also make demands on OER and their infrastructure as well as the accessibility of OER.

Therefore this workshop aims to start bridging the gap between users, producers, infrastructure managers and policy makers to make their individual requirements and perspectives visible to decide on possible next steps for the institutions to turn Open Education into practice.

Important to note in this process of building OER infrastructure and services is the diverse affiliation of the involved stakeholders (e.g. staff of e-learning centres, central IT services or libraries) among their higher education institution. In order to successfully support research and teaching staff in the sense of Open Education and Open Science the interdisciplinary cooperation of these departments is required.

Draft agenda (120 minutes):

Kicking off the session with a short input on the institutional anchoring of OER and building infrastructure and services for OER in the higher education sector with focus on the potential of the interdisciplinary cooperation of e-learning centres, central IT services and libraries and overview of Open Education Austria Advanced as an example of a current working project in this context (20 min)
Participants will then divide into groups of either OER users and content producers or service providers, infrastructure managers and policy makers. The groups will then discuss in a world café format what their individual needs and requirements for an infrastructure and services for OER are. During this world café I will support each groups by asking questions to kick off discussions and get the participants to reflect on the different OER requirements across all stakeholders. (40 min)
Then there is a short break planned to take a step back from the findings and the discussion and regain ideas for the final group discussion. (10 min)
After that follows a presentation of the world café results to consult the collected requirements and to summarise the different perspectives. (20 min)
Finally there will be a group discussion in order to find next steps in the future of Open Education and how identified synergies will make it possible to turn Open Education into practice at universities. The potential of the cooperation between e-learning centres, central IT services and libraries for the establishment of open practices in the higher education sector is exploited. Overall aim is to start bridging the gap between users, producers, infrastructure managers and policy makers regarding the different OER requirements when it comes to building an OER infrastructure or services to support researchers and teaching faculty in the long run. (30 min)

Audience:

This interdisciplinary workshop aims at the target audience of researchers and teaching faculty in their role as OER users and content producers, but also members of e-learning centres, central IT services and libraries, such as research infrastructure and repository managers, policy makers from these institutions in their role as service providers. Therefore a diverse group discussion is made possible, to not only state the individual needs and requirements for an infrastructure and services for OER from the user-point of view but also from the service provider perspective.

The workshop can be attended by a maximum of 25 participants in order to ensure enough space and speaking time, if the workshop room / space is making it possible.

Learning outcomes:

Participants will:

understand the importance of OER and the need for institutional anchoring and infrastructure development to ensure their availability in higher education.
gain insight into successful interdisciplinary cooperations between e-learning centres, central IT services and libraries, and how this collaboration can generate synergies between Open Education and Open Science.
be able to identify the diverse requirements and perspectives on OER from different stakeholders, including users, producers, infrastructure managers, and policy makers.
engage in discussions and exchange ideas on the development of infrastructure and services for OER to support university teaching and research in the long run.
be able to generate synergies between Open Education and Open Science and to decide on possible next steps for their institutions to turn Open Education into practice.

Workshop:

Open Science Game: Open Up Your Research [Organizer: UZH, Switzerland]

We propose a 45-minute workshop in which we take people through an interactive game that we developed to educate people about Open Science. We will take people through the questions (they answer on their phones and whatever the majority decides, will be the decision the researcher in our game will take). After every turn the interactive game takes, we discuss the question and the implication the answer has. Seeing the game is developed for a more junior audience, the actual answering of the questions will be less important, rather, we will spend time to discuss the game on a meta level: is gamification a good way to introduce Open Science to a wider audience?

The game explores what open science entails, how open science practices can be applied, and how an open approach differs from a more traditional research. In the game we follow Emma, a young researcher, on her way to a doctorate and have to explore precisely these questions. Should I write a data management plan? Pre-register my thesis? What is the advantage of making my data and code FAIR? Can’t I put this off until later? And where should I publish? At each stage of the research process, Emma must decide whether to practice an open science approach or go the traditional route.

The initial idea for this interactive game was developed because of the lack of suitable media that coherently presented open science practices in the research process from the perspective of the researchers.