![]() I probably don’t have time to read an academic paper. For example, as a teacher I really want to know quickly and easily what people did with OER, where they found it, how it actually changed things for them in the classroom, the pragmatic stuff, not the “science bit” with all the statistics. ![]() I think Learning Design suffered a bit from this. Sharing effectively lessoned learned with actual teachers and at the same time producing the empirical data that qualified “proper” research requires is challenging and can actually create a gulf between research and practice. In any research based on teaching practice as is the case with the OER Research Hub, there is always (imho) a tension between research and practice. They need to be the hooks providing entry points into their research which create effective, interactive dissemination or more accurately communication (as described in this Is it time to ban the term ‘dissemination? post by Caroline Cassidy). I’m thinking of researchers seeing themselves as APIs. I noticed earlier this week a post from Brian Proffitt on readwrite talking about the need for personal APIs to help organise individuals interactions, but what I’m thinking of in this context is quite the reverse. A key part of SaS approaches are APIs, allowing hooks into all sorts of sites/ services so that they can in effect talk to each other. However implementing “proper” agile programming methodology to research is problematic.īut if we stick with the programming analogy and stop thinking in terms of products, and start thinking of research as a service (akin to software as a service) then maybe there is more milage. As does having some kind of structure, particularly for focusing “group minds” on potential outputs (products), adaptation of peer programming could be useful for peer review etc. Hypothesis are there more to be broken as well as to be proved, the unexpected is embraced.īringing researchers who form part of a globally distributed team together for set periods to focus on certain aspects of research project does make sense. Whereas academic research (particularly in the education domain) tends much more open ended. Agile programming tends to have very specific, pre-defined outputs, it’s actually often not the most creative of approaches. Any research based on actual teaching practice does need more than a few sessions to generate meaningful results. Typically educational research “products” don’t really lend themselves to anything particularly agile, particularly some peer reviewed journal outputs. Now, when I heard about this I was intrigued. One of the approaches the team has been experimenting with is taking the premise of agile programming and adapting it to a research project (see Patrick’s post about the first research sprint for a bit more detail). The project is taking a collaborative research approach which includes practitioners/teachers from a number of different educational sectors and countries as well as the “core” team of researchers based at the OU. Given the global spread of project fellows a key challenge for the project is to ensure that the team are able to share their findings and experiences between themselves effectively and provide the basis and data for the OER Research Evidence Hub. As I blogged about earlier this month, I’m currently working with the OER Research Hub team helping them to evaluate their progress, outputs and future developments.
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