University of Antioquia’s open science course
An Open Science Course has been developed at the University of Antioquia in Colombia and expanded to the regional level.
The purpose of the course is for participants to get to know components of open science (open access, open data, metrics, policies and other related open science concepts) and the current and future implications of open science for the development of research, considering the different agents who interact in science systems. Such training is useful at different levels of training and university research and across different disciplines.
The open science course is aimed at both undergraduate and graduate students as well as other interested young researchers and professors of the University of Antioquia. It is a curricular course, with the possibility of making it more flexible as a continuing education course and adaptation by different university undergraduate and graduate programs.
The course has impacted the University of Antioquia as a possibility of training the entire community on these issues, and has benefited from coordination with the library system, which enhances sustainability by accompanying the development of the modular course for different academic units.
The course has been adjusted to the 2021 Recommendation on Open Science. The course, and its creator, has been a promoter of (and is cited within) Colombia’s National Open Science Policy (2022).
The course was managed for the University of Antioquia but can be opened to other universities. The course was offered as a massively open online course (MOOC) at the Ibero-American level in 2021, with more than 200 learners registered, and very good results were obtained with librarians, professors and researchers throughout the region. The design and start-up cost was approximately US$ 1,600, and its maintenance and start-up each semester costs approximately US$ 800.
The course has two learning evaluation moments, one at entry to identify prior knowledge and another at completion to identify acquired knowledge. In turn, every time it is developed in full or some of its modules, a satisfaction survey is developed. This survey has very positive results, which has led to the request of the course by other universities in Colombia and Latin America.
A playlist of 32 training videos is available online (in Spanish, with subtitles):
Contributed by Alejandro Uribe Tirado, University of Antioquia, Colombia
Alejandro Uribe Tirado, University of Antioquia, Colombia