1st Workshop on the “Profession” in Technology-Enhanced Learning: Open Science, ECTEL 2018

1st EATEL/ECTEL Workshop on the “Profession” in Technology-Enhanced Learning: Open Science

4th Sep. 2018, afternoon (see within ECTEL schedule)

Workshop Organizers

Dr. Davinia Hernández-Leo, Universitat Pompeu Fabra Barcelona, Spain

Dr. Stian Håklev, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland

as an inititive of EATEL, the European Association of Technology-Enhanced Learning

see also EATEL Webinars – Series “The Profession”: Webinar 1 “Open Science in Technology-Enhanced Learning”

The European Association of Technology-Enhanced Learning (EATEL) seeks to drive community discussion that can help to maintain high standards of research quality and professionalism in the domain of TEL. In this line, EATEL has initiated a Webinar series on “The Profession” (http://ea-tel.eu/). This workshop complements this online initiative, offering a face-to-face space for knowledge and experience sharing around overarching aspects related to the TEL research profession. These overarching aspects will consider important challenges for our field that are derived from its own nature (e.g. interdisciplinarity) and from key issues in Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) (Strand et al, 2015). These RRI issues go from gender and diversity equality and inclusion, to public engagement, sustainability, ethics, and open science. The topic chosen for the first edition of the Webinar series and workshop is “Open Science as it applies to TEL”. Open Science is a critical issue considered by the research community at large, including our TEL community (see Statement of Open Science by EC-TEL this year, following the lead of other conferences of the community).

Open Science goes beyond Open Access, which focuses on access to and preservation of scientific information. The ongoing phenomenon of Open Science promotes on the one hand, transparent and frequent updates of research progress; and other other hand, reproducible, accurate and verifiable research (Winfield, 2014), bringing benefits for the individual researchers, the research community and the society.

Like other fields, TEL research suffers from problems such as challenges to replicate (Beardsley et al, 2018), validity, publication bias, and high costs of access to publications (van der Zee & Reich, 2018). There are several initiatives that aim to change closed and nontransparent approaches to research. van der Zee & Reich (2018) discuss that it is possible to engage in “Open Educational Science” by making more transparent and accessible each stage of the scientific cycle (research design, data collection, analysis, and publication) with open approaches to science, such as pre-registration, data sharing, transparent analyses, and open access publication. The Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/) offers a space to report pre-registered and exploratory analyses to be reviewed by other researchers before running the interventions. There are now several specialized Web platforms (e.g. Zenodo, Figshare, LearnSphere, GitHub) where researchers can share datasets and software used in studies so that other researchers can reproduce or extend the analysis. However, the use of these initiatives is in its early days and despite there starts to be some remarkable open science practices in our domain, they are not broadly known, documented and shared within the community for widespread adoption.

This workshop invites 1-2 page submissions that present Open Science practices in our domain and discuss the benefits and challenges of Open Science as it applies to TEL. For example, submissions can explain successful cases of doing Open Science in their research (research groups and labs, PhD work, research project, etc.) and discuss obstacles they are facing, strategies they have developed, etc. Obstacles and challenges that may be discussed can be of different nature, from data sharing, privacy and ethical issues to contextual aspects, to data formats and tools.

Workshop Format

The workshop will be structured in two parts. The first part of the workshop is a panel discussion based on the received submission. The panel will discuss benefits, challenges and cases of Open Science in TEL. The second part of the workshop comprises group activities and looks towards the future building on the discussed cases and challenges to identify best practices and recommendations for a broader adoption of Open Science in our domain.

Workshop goals

• Provide a forum to discuss overarching challenges in the TEL domain as it refers to Open Science.
• Identify best practices of Open Science as it applies to TEL.
• Gather feedback to EATEL about how we as a community and through the association can promote Open Science in TEL.
• Consolidate the new EATEL initiative about “The Profession” seeking to share experience and maintain high standards of research quality and responsible professionalism in the domain of TEL.

Workshop outcomes

• Articulating a EATEL white paper that includes a compilation of the contributions to the workshop. The white paper will be published in the EATEL website.
• The possibility of writing a journal publication with the analysis of the Open Science cases, benefits and challenges will be considered and discussed with the workshop participants.

Submissions

Workshop participants are encouraged to submit at least one contribution (one or two pages long, ECTEL submission format) that present Open Science practices in our domain and discuss the benefits and challenges of Open Science as it applies to TEL. There is no restriction on the number of papers submitted by the same author. Submissions will be handled by EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=telprofession18

Important Dates

Submissions deadline: June 20, 2018, July 2nd (extended)

Notifications and programme publication: July 15, 2018

Revised submissions: July 30, 2018

Workshop: September 4, 2018