The "Teachers as Researchers" programme: Citizen science to engage educators in the production of structured practice-based evidence at a large-scaleEvery day, millions of educators try out new practices to improve education. To be effective, they need to build upon each other’s successes and failures. However, collaboratively producing evidence about their practices that can be trustworthy, compared across contexts, and aggregated at a large scale is challenging.Since 2019, we are developing the “Teachers as Researchers” programme, a citizen science project to engage educators in the collaborative production of practice-based evidence as they daily experiment with new educational practices. The "Teachers as Researchers" programme trains volunteer educators to create communities and to facilitate regular workshops in which community members follow a methodology designed to motivate collaboration and reflection about their practices while at the same time producing structured records of practice-based evidence. The work of communities is undertaken in a collaborative publication platform to promote wide collaboration across communities and to feed a shared and public database of practice-based evidence (https://plateforme.profschercheurs.org).

We use network science and data analysis to decipher collective phenomena at biological and social scales

We work at the frontier of political sciences, sociology, and cognitive sciences on the one hand, and mathematics and computer sciences on the other. We rely on massive web, social media, and survey data, aided by High Performance Computer Clusters. We bring these models and tools to the study of epistemically-demanding phenomena occurring in large algorithmically-mediated social and political systems. Several of the phenomena that we study, relate to disorders of digital public spaces: fragmentation, concentration, polarization, epistemic drift in internet communities.

"Empowering, supporting and enlarging Citizen Science and Open Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) communities regardless of their location, background, culture or literacy levels to take the lead in research that’s directly relevant to them". Prof. Muki Haklay, Citizen Science Team Leader. The Citizen Science Team works on two main European Commission Horizon Europe funded projects: (1) European Citizen Science (ECS) and (2) PATTERN Open Research. Both projects aim is to widen and strengthen and promote European Citizen Science and Open RRI practice and communities respectively through capacity building and awareness raising activities.European Citizen Science (ECS) ProjectThis project is coordinated by the European Citizen Science Association and includes 19 other organizations (one of which is us at LPI) that work together to realize it. This project seeks to understand how ECS will widen and strengthen the European Citizen Science community via the following examples:The project will form a network of 28 Citizen Science ambassadors in 27 EU countries + the UK. This allows for a citizen science contact point to be established in each EU country and the UK.The European Citizen Science Academy will widen and strengthen the European Citizen Science community by establishing a strong training resource base on the eu-citizen.science platform and also offline (i.e. summer courses, workshops, day-events) which caters to diverse training needs and languages across Europe. This will be done, co-created with a network of citizen science educators and trainers.In addition, the European Citizen Science project builds on other and previously EU-funded projects such as the eu-citizen.Science platform and Cos4Cloud. Therefore this allows for the project to continue past endeavors and nurture existing links and collaboration between members of the European Citizen Science community.For more information, here.PATTERN Open Research ProjectThe aim of this project is to promote the practice of Open and Responsible Research and Innovation by developing and piloting training activities for researchers at all stages of their careers. These trainings will strengthen their transferable skills, with the ultimate goal to empower higher education institutions and research organizations to embrace a transformative process to improve the excellence of the science conducted, the capacity within the European Research Area to tackle societal challenges and the interaction between science and society.In PATTERN, we identify the following transferable skills as part of Open RRI: (1) Open Access, (2) Research Integrity, (3) Management and Leadership, (3) FAIR data management, (4) Science Communication, (5) Dissemination and Exploitation of results, (6) Citizen Science, (7) Gender, non-discrimination and inclusion in research.PATTERN work plan consists of specific and interlinked activities, each of them implemented in the framework of a consistent methodology, based on 4 subsequent Running Phases and one horizontal Holding Phase:State of the art: consolidation of knowledge: mapping and comprehensive analysis of the state-of-the-art of learning opportunities for researchers on Open RRI.Developing PATTERN training activities and platform, led by the LPI and OpenAIRE: The team will produce a novel Competency Framework for Researchers on Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), develop interdisciplinary and transversal learning paths, and coordinate the development of training materials. The Digital Ecosystem Team will deliver a training and discovery platform (Projects) that will enable learners to easily access and make use of those materials in the long-term and will provide a cross-platform AI-recommendation system (WeLearn) that will be linked to OpenAIRE OpenPlato’s platform in order to create a unified Digital Ecosystem for PATTERN.Testing PATTERN training modules: co-design and fine-tuning of PATTERN trainings with PATTERN Pilot Organisations to perfectly respond to the needs of end-users.Evidence for policy development: in the light of the experience and knowledge gathered PATTERN will develop a set of policy recommendations addressing institutions responsible for researcher training.For more information, here.