By: Myrthe Veenman
In September, Iris and I started participating in the Create a Course Challenge at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). The goal of this challenge is to create an interdisciplinary course that you think should be taught at the UvA. The winner of the challenge gets the chance to actually develop the course. This week, we heard we made it to the top 10 with our “Science, Open Up! Open Science in Different Disciplines” course and now we need your votes to get to the final round!
The idea of our course is to teach students about the history of Open Science, its methods, its successes and its struggles. We can learn from the way other disciplines apply Open Science methods in their research. However, at the moment we are too focussed on our own disciplines’ problems that we do not see the obvious solutions that other disciplines offer. This course could be a solution: it will show the issues and solutions in multiple disciplines.
In the course, students will learn to evaluate science critically, and not to assume everything that is presented to them in articles. In addition, they will learn about Open Science practices. For instance, preregistration and data management. They will also learn to use specific open source programs as Git, JASP and the OSF. Most important, students will discuss which solutions or techniques their specific discipline could benefit from.
In the first round of the challenge, we had to write our course idea on a beer mat, shown below. According to a great scientist: ‘A good idea fits on the back of a beer mat.’ (https://iis.uva.nl/en/interdisciplinary-education/create-a-course-challenge/create-a-course-challenge.html)
For the second round, we had to write an action plan that included ideas about the lectures, lecturers and assignments. Now, we made it to the third round in which people with a UvA account can vote for their favorite course. Of these ten courses, five will go to the final. In the final, the jury will decide which course gets the chance to be developed.
As said before, we need your votes to get to the final. If you like our idea, please support is by voting at this website: https://iis.uva.nl/en/interdisciplinary-education/create-a-course-challenge/create-a-course-challenge.html. Scroll down for our course. It is only possible to vote if you have a UvA login. The deadline is November 18th. We would also love to hear if you have suggestions for the course! If so, you can send an email to sios.information@gmail.com.
SIOS - Student Initiative for Open Science 