FORRT’s Educational Nexus

FORRT’s e-learning platform (or Nexus) is a hub for community-driven initiatives and resources. Teachers’ and researchers’ time constraints are substantial, posing a challenge to developing course materials and integrating new research practices in teaching. This challenge motivated FORRT to develop strategies and propose solutions to mitigate time constraints and help scholars implement open and principled education in their workflows. The focus of FORRT’s Educational Nexus lies not on simply aggregating resources but on making sense of existing materials and ideas, giving them context and continuity, as well as filling in the gap where no connections exist.

Elements of the Nexus include

• FORRT’s Adopting Principled Teaching & Mentoring Practices
• FORRT’s Clusters
• FORRT’s Curated Resources
• FORRT’s Educator’s Corner
• FORRT’s Equity in Open Scholarship
• FORRT’s Glossary
• FORRT’s Impact of Open & Reproducible Scholarship on Students
• FORRT’s Initiatives Towards Social Justice in Academia
• FORRT’s Lesson Plans
• FORRT’s Neurodiversity Resources
• FORRT’s Pedagogies
• FORRT’s Summaries
• FORRT’s Syllabus
• FORRT’s Self-Assessment Tool

FORRT’s Educational Nexus has five major goals:

• Provide educators a comprehensive but straightforward framework to teach and mentor open and reproducible science (i.e., FORRT Clusters) as well as qualify and quantify the degree of open and reproducible research practices in their teaching and mentoring (i.e., FORRT’s Lesson Plans where teachers can find ready-to-use pedagogical activities with OS content; FORRT’s self-assessment tool) where educators are supplied with a personalized pathway toward incremental integration of discipline content with open and reproducible science tenets; FORRT’s Glossary where educators find consensus-based crowd-sourced definitions of Open Science terminology), and FORRT’s Reversals, where educators can find a curated collection of replications and reversals across social sciences to galvanize adoption of replications as a pedagogical tool in the classroom.
• Curate and enrich available open educational resources and build an easy-to-use, searchable and FAIR platform to facilitate the integration of open and reproducible science into educators’ teaching and mentoring (i.e., FORRT’s Curated Resources).
• Offer a platform for educators of all stripes to share their stories, experiences, successes and hardships in teaching and mentoring (i.e., FORRT’s Educational Corner).
• Foster social justice through the opening and democratization of scientific-educational resources to those who otherwise would be educationally disenfranchised (i.e., FORRT’s Initiatives Towards Social Justice in Academia, FORRT’s Equity in Open Scholarship Initiative, FORRT’s Neurodiversity Resources, FORRT’s Open Science Summaries, FORRT’s Glossary, FORRT’s Reversals, & FORRT’s Curated list of Resources).
• Equipping scholars with high quality pedagogical tools on open and reproducible research practices - instructors can then adapt successful and implemented pedagogies to help ease the transition and reduce the instructor’s burden (e.g., FORRT’s 7 ways to adopt principled teaching and mentoring practices, FORRT’s Glossary, FORRT’s Lesson Plans, FORRT’s Open & Reproducible Science Syllabus, and FORRT’s Pedagogies.

FORRT’s community conceptualized the Educational Nexus as integrating diverse components into one infrastructure serving those wishing to learn, adopt, and disseminate open and reproducible science tenets, as well as those teaching and mentoring these concepts, and raising awareness of its pedagogical implications and its associated challenges (e.g., curricular reform, epistemological uncertainty, methods of education, academic Mertonian norms in the classroom).

We hope it fulfils its mission but if you have thoughts, ideas, criticisms, please reach us at info@forrt.org, via Twitter, or join our Slack community.