What does a better – more equitable, more hospitable, more flexible, more creative, less oppressive, more impactful – post-pandemic education system look like? What does teaching and learning look like in such an environment? What does scholarship look like? Speculative futures work in education aims to imagine answers to such questions, but, what are some steps individuals and institutions are taking now toward imagined futures?

Open Science has been described as a key to responding to COVD-19. Whether in vaccine search or medical equipment design, open science is critical. It also has a critical role in education – in teaching, learning, and scholarship.

I encourage you to explore the following initiative:

“The Association for Learning Technology (ALT) is proud to support the launch of the Open Covid Pledge for Education, covering all forms of research, data and know-how that can support the COVID-19 response in education around the world. The creation of the Open Covid Pledge has been co-ordinated by Helen Beetham, Researcher and Consultant, and ALT Member.”

You could start small (e.g., by depositing a pre-print of a paper in a repository or publishing your next paper in an open access journal). For example, I learned about OSF in June. OSF is an open source project management tool supporting researchers throughout their entire project lifecycle. I’ve seen some use it as a place to host pre-prints, data, and insrtruments. To explore its use, I deposited the survey instrument and outputs from the Canadian Pulse survey to a project there: https://osf.io/dt3h7/