Statement
Dear Open Science MOOCers and all interested,
After the rush of last year (dealing with emotional distress, writing a statement, updating the COC, reorganising the tasks inside the SC - all due to the massive disturbance caused by the OpenCon incident, as well as dealing with the bankruptcy of our MOOC platform, Eliademy), we took time to reflect on the future of the MOOC, as well as our future with and without the MOOC. We came to the conclusion that the MOOC needed a new start and the current Steering Committee will collectively step down from the SC on April 01, 2020 as further explained below. This chapter of our lives and this chapter of the MOOC are closing, and we are looking forward to the next chapter, which we are sure will be awesome.
The MOOC belongs to you - the community - and we are asking you to step up and continue the adventure.
Governance: a new SC for the MOOC
We have been discussing a new mode of organisation to drive the OSMOOC community effort. In accordance to this new organisation, our key priority is to renew our Steering Committee (SC). We came to the conclusion to collectively step down from the SC effective today March 31, 2020, in order to allow for a fair election of a novel SC, providing space for a new group of committed individuals to continue our vision and mission. The OS MOOC has brought exciting collaborations to life and will certainly continue to do so. Being part of the SC was an honor and a great adventure, and we all feel the open science MOOC project needs a fresh restart.
As a member of the OSMOOC community, you are therefore asked to propose a person who you think will be able to steer this project in the right direction. An executive committee will then contact those who have been nominated, to then see whether they are interested. Please use the form (also linked at the end of this document) stating who you would like to see take a SC chair, giving contact information. You can of course also nominate yourself if you are interested in getting involved.
A very important message we took home from session 11 of the Open Science Barcamp (see section below) is that non-experts are better at teaching and reaching out to Newcomers to the rich world of Open Science, and we would encourage anyone - be it experienced or with little or no previous experience in Open Science - to feel empowered: the MOOC needs your input and we would love to see you taking the wheel of this project.
An executive committee will then propose a voting system in April.
Moving to moodle
Our past MOOC platform Eliademy has ceased operations - see our December note on the topic as Eliademy’s blog has now also disappeared - and we have been looking into the options offered to us. After careful evaluation of a variety of tools/platforms, Moodle seemed to be the most straighforward option for our use case, and we looked into moodle hosting possibilities. A big thank you to Lambert Heller (@lambo) for suggesting OnCampus, we do like the h5p functionality and are now running some tests. We are also exploring the option of a self-hosted moodle instance.
If you want to share your experience with moodle, h5p, and/or open badges, you are welcome to join a team of enthusiasts who are migrating the mooc content into a moodle format. You are welcome to fill this initial form if you would like to participate.
Open Science Barcamp 2020 #oscibar
Parts of the Steering Committee participated in one of the most exciting Open Science events of the year. We proposed several sessions for the Open Science Barcamp, the innovative Day Zero of the more formal Berlin Open Science Conference. You can find more details in the open barcamp etherpad (sessions 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, and 12). Explore what is there for you in the MOOC or how you can integrate your own perspectives on Open Science! You can listen to highlights from last year as well as the most recent episode on the Open Science Radio: http://www.openscienceradio.org/.
Reach out to our communtiy on slack/twitter/github, share your questions, critique or ideas to further develop the MOOC!
The former Open Science MOOC steering committee.