WHAT AN OER JOURNEY!

CA7000: “Research Integrity and Impact in an Open Scholarship Era”, a compulsory module for all PhDs and Research Doctorate incoming students, was launched in Trinity College Dublin in 2018. However, thanks to the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education , in 2021 the module was redesigned from a pedagogical perspective and rebuilt from the ground up, making it applicable across multiple disciplines and contexts.

In partnership with students and faculty stakeholders, the new mandatory online 5 ECTS module was designed to be contextually embedded while maximising the value of shared disciplinary good practice. Enhanced with relevant content and inclusive, interactive assessment practices, the module has radically transformed the student user experience. The module has been designed to be applicable and relevant across all of Trinity’s Structured PhD Programmes, and beyond as and Open Educational Resource.

The development was based on:

• Student and staff requirements; the University’s strategy; and national/European competence recommendations
• Creativity in teaching and learning, open pedagogy and inclusive assessment practices
• Integration within Trinity’s scholarly communities
• ‘FAIR’ Open Scholarship (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Re-Usable), including Creative Commons licencing

Since its rebirth, 1149 students have been enrolled in the module and out of those, 701 have completed it and obtained their “Certificate of completion”. In order to get this certificate and the 5 credits, students need to reach 80% or over in all the summative assessments. And they also need to contribute to a discussion forum in each session as the module has been set up with adaptive release in Blackboard.

In 2021/22, 60% of the students who finished their summative assessments also completed a formative assessment where they reflected on the content of the module on how it directly applied to their Research. These efforts were rewarded with a “Certificate of achievement”.

In 2022/23, students are facing with a new challenge which is to mark the formative assessment themselves. Once they accomplish their reflections, they are presented with a quiz they need to go through before being able to retrieve their “Certificate of achievement”.

The module has received very good feedback, with one student commenting that “I thought that the course was phenomenal. It gave me tremendous insight into the world of ethics and academic publishing”, another praising the Data Management Plan exercise because “This exercise has been very helpful in identifying for me some key decisions which need to be reached with my supervisors”.

We are now at the stages of rolling out the content to staff members, the new module is called RIO. Not only that, but the commitment of this development was to have the module available as an Open Educational Resource for all. And soon enough, the module “Research Integrity and Impact in an Open Scholarship Era” will be up and running in the National Forum’s Open Courses platform. This initiative would have finally achieved its objectives of creating a module that has taken into consideration: creativity, inclusiveness, scalability, transferability, openness, and sustainability.