In this blog series on teaching Open Science in the field of linguistics, I report on my experience in the project “Grammar and School” in the winter term 2020-2021 and the summer 2021.
I reflect on my learning process and the challenges and joys I faced when I decided to publish my teaching material as Open Educational Resources and to foster Open Science in my seminar. I plead for more openness, both in science and in the ways we address our vulnerability and hesitations through this journey.
I structured my thoughts in a series of blog posts that can be read independently or one after another:
- Motivations & Apprehensions When Putting Your Stuff Online (1/4) (co-written with Dennis Dressel, see bio below), in which we emphasize the importance of intermediary steps prior to the release of the end product;
- All or nothing? Ideas to foster Open Science in Higher Education (2/4), in which I show how I fostered a learning atmosphere receptive to Open Science in the seminar;
- Teaching Open Science in passing: Fostering a culture of collaboration (3/4), in which I show how to raise awareness for Open Science without Open Science being a central component of the class;
- Experimenting with Open Science Together: A Critical Reflection (4/4), in which I highlight the key messages of the qualitative analysis of the students’ positionings and what I could have done differently.
If you’re interested in our background, here are some short bios revolving around our familiarity and commitment to Open Science before the project started.
Naomi
The lecturer, Naomi Truan, has in-depth experience with Open Science in her research but she is implementing it for the first time in her teaching during the fellowship Freies Wissen in 2020-2021.
On the one hand, she is familiar with Open Data, as she shared manually annotated corpora on the open repository ORTOLANG (Open Resources and TOols for LANGuage) in an early research phase (Truan 2016a; Truan 2016b; Truan 2016c).
On the other hand, she advocates for Open Access through the publication of preprints and published research papers on the open platform (HAL-SHS), and has given some workshops on the topic to other academics in English and French. She has never, however, published Open Educational Resources before.
Dennis
Dennis Dressel joined Naomi’s team as a student assistant. At the beginning of the seminar, Dennis Dressel’s experience with Open Science was limited to Open Access publications and corpus design.
Our collaboration
In her application for the fellowship, Naomi made very clear that the project serves the implementation of Open Science practices both from the point of view of the lecturer and research’s assistant (own professional development) and from the perspective of the students, who are encouraged to discover Open Science principles during the seminar.