What does Open Science mean for Educational Technology Research? Challenges, Opportunities, and a Call for Research

Abstract

Educational technology (EdTech) research should champion the values of open science in order to be robust, methodologically rigorous, collaborative, inclusive, and transparent. ‘Open science’ is, broadly, an approach to scientific scholarship that adopts tools to promote openness, mitigate against bias, enhance opportunity for collaboration, and reduce questionable research practices. EdTech research often involves collaborative empirical work with partnerships between academia, industry, and policymakers, often with competing stakeholder timelines, agendas, and expectations. It also employs a diversity of methodologies and epistemologies, given the broad goals of EdTech as a field. Taken together, these unique features of EdTech research mean there is a distinct set of contextual and methodological challenges for engagement with open science tools and initiatives. Here, we write as a collective of academics, scholars, and industry representatives who all work in the EdTech space and hope to envisage a future for how EdTech researchers can meaningfully engage in calls to ‘open up’ science. We share insights from a stakeholder workshop event, hosted by CERES (Connecting the Educational Technology Research Ecosystem). We summarize four main open science practices: (1) open data, (2) study pre-registration, (3) positionality and conflict of interest statements, and (4) CRediT taxonomy of contributorship. For each of the practices, we summarize the key opportunities for EdTech research and highlight the unique disciplinary challenges that academics and industry must negotiate when integrating open science into EdTech research. We show how open science is an ally to EdTech research, but careful consideration about its implementation is needed.