Open science practices in higher education: Discussion of survey results from research and teaching staff in Germany

Abstract

Aspects of open science and scholarly practices are often discussed with a focus on research and research dissemination processes. There is currently less discussion on open science and its influence on learning and teaching in higher education, and reversely. This paper discusses open science in relation to educational practices and resources and reports on a study to investigate current educational practices from the perspective of open science. We argue that offering students opportunities via open educational practices raises their awareness of future open science goals and teaches them the skills needed to reach those goals. We present online survey results from 210 participants with teaching responsibility at higher education institutions in Germany. While some of them try to establish more open learning and teaching settings, most respondents apply rather traditional ways of learning and teaching. 60% do not use open educational resources – many have not even heard of them – nor do they make their courses open for an online audience. Participants’ priority lies in resource accuracy and quality and we still see a gap between the benefit of open practices and their practicability and applicability. The paper contributes to the general discussion of open practices in higher education by looking at open science practices and their adaptation to the learning and teaching environment. It formulates recommendations for improvements of open practice support and infrastructure.

Applying And Promoting Open Science In Ecology - Surveyed Drivers And Challenges

“…The reasons behind this discrepancy are probably complex and may involve lack of a tradition in higher education for both teaching and learning the relatively new practices and principles of OS, as well as a lack of learning materials and associated uncertainty on how to incorporate OS in teaching and learning activities [20,21]. Furthermore, OS may be perceived by instructors as more relevant for more advanced students, such as those engaged in thesis work, as the respondents gave similar scores for perceived importance of OS in supervision and research.…”

Motive, Anreize und Einflussfaktoren für Open-Science-Praktiken

“…Das Forschungsdesign zielt darauf ab, die Verankerung von Open-Science-Praktiken aus der konkreten Praxis heraus zu verstehen und zu erklären. Dieses Interesse begründet sich aus der Tatsache, dass das Phänomen Open Science trotz seiner noch relativ jungen historischen Existenz von etwa zwei Jahrzehnten zwar bereits umfassend in der wissenschaftspolitischen und forschungsbasierten Literatur umfassend beschrieben wurde, jedoch 1) selten ohne normative Aufladung (Kerres, 2019;Schrögel et al, 2020), 2) selten theoretisch-analytisch im Kontext der Wissenschaftsforschung (Reichmann, 2017;Steinhardt, 2019) und 3) fast nie in der Kombination von 1) und 2) empirisch mit Fokus auf individuelle Praktiken von Wissenschaftler:innen untersucht wurde Heck et al, 2020). Dementsprechend gliedert sich die Arbeit in die folgenden sechs Hauptkapitel, wie in Abbildung 2 dargestellt: Das einleitende Kapitel 1 bestimmt insbesondere über eine thematische Annäherung an den Diskurs zu Open Science die Relevanz der Untersuchung entsprechender Praktiken und legt das forschungsleitende Interesse zur Rekonstruktion der zugrundeliegenden Motive, Anreize und Einflussfaktoren sowie die prägenden Annahmen zur Bearbeitung der Forschungsfrage dar.…”

Means of Optimising the Development of Critical Thinking of Students in German Universities

“…Notably, the above questions should have a special form, which will encourage the student to rethink the information received, as well as concretise or practically apply it in the future. In addition, the use of such a tool as dialogue for the development of critical thinking among German university students is aimed at developing their ability to predict, find relationships between the concepts, phenomena, or objects under study [26]. Thus, based on the use of a separate system of such questions, the teacher has the opportunity to help students be critical of both new and previously learnt information, including those obtained from textbooks or online resources [27].…”