Funding approved by JSPS

The JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists funding application got approved in April 2022. 

The project's duration is three years between April 2022 and March 2025.

The approved amount of grant is ¥3,600,000 (currency: Japanese Yen).

Project title: Impact of Online Journal Club on Educational Research Literacy: Towards New Model, Measurement, and Practice (see detailed introduction)

First technical outlook

The project continues to evolve. By July 2022, it developed three separated platforms using WordPress (researchic.com), Moodle (researchic.com/courses), and Mahara (researchic.com/portal). In September 2022, it integrates the BigBlueButton feature with unlimited videomeeting functions inside the platform of Moodle.

The WordPress site publishes information about the project, the hosts' information, the event information, and calls for participation, tips for doing educational research.

The technical layout of three platforms was influenced by the original plan of setting up an online knowledge base for educational researchers; therefore, it looks rather complicated and distracted from the research project. In fact, it was not only aiming for hosting online journal club events.

Team formation

Dr. Jingjing Lin, initiated this project. She serves as full-stack developer of the project and the platform, as well as the principal investigator of the research activities in this project.

Ms. Cindy Liang, who volunteered her collaboration from the original ResearchIC idea continued to volunteer her ideas, support, and efforts in this funded research project. Now she serves as an event coordinator at ResearchIC. She is still active in the project

Mr. Diego Rosal, who was hired as a project assistant, started to work in July 2022 on ResearchIC project, and left the project on December 21, 2022 upon the completion of the six-month contract. 

Ms. Niki Chu Ji joined the team on November 1, 2022 to be volunteer assistant for the project. She is still active in the project.

Second technical outlook

In October 2022, the focus of ResearchIC was switched completely to hosting and organizing online journal club events. 

Aligned with this new direction, WordPress site was deleted and replaced by the Moodle instance (originally published on researchic.com/courses). The functionality of the WordPress site was integrated into the Moodle instance so that no two separated sites were needed anymore. 

Active site:

Discontinued sites: 

  • ResearchIC Courses using Moodle (researchic.com/courses): status-deleted
  • ResearchIC Portal using Mahara (https://researchic.com/portal): status-idle

Third technical outlook

On December 6, 2022, three things happened, which influenced my decision to narrowing down two directions of the researchic project.
The three things were:
  • I was preparing for IEIR2022 conference's keynote speech. I found that Computers and Education is the most cited journal on the e-learning topic. It seemed that Pareto principle (20/80 rule)also applies to citation distribution in journals.
  • I downloaded a csv file including 4,949 articles' metadata from Scopus. Among them 669 were open access articles.
  • I got enquiries from an assistant professor on LinkedIn sharing with me that he was quite new to the practice of online education and has no experience of teaching online. He wanted my advice and suggestions. 
I suddenly realized that instead of training educational research literacy, I can continue to narrow down the training scope of ResearchIC to IT-based Education or e-learning. Because of COVID-19 pandemic situation, many universities and schools switched to online teaching and learning. Most teachers spent much time on digitalizing their print materials to the online teaching environment, and got no time to think of proper pedagogies and applicable technologies that can make their online teaching much easier than they think. It is important to equipt teachers to be able to practice research-informed teaching in their online/offline/flipped classrooms. 

Such a direction narrow-down can make ResearchIC become a platform that can support online faculty development programs in universities and schools. It will not be limited to research students or early-career researchers anymore. Instead, it will have the potential to benefit all teachers on different education levels regarding their relationship with applying technologies to teach and help students to learn better in the digtal age. 

Such a new direction will significantly change the way the 100 OJC Events are organized, such as:
  • event categorization will be modified to cover different themes in e-learning research and practices
    • AI and education
    • Gamification and education
    • CMS and education
    • etc.
  • the selection of journal articles used in OJC events will be mainly from Computers and Education, to ensure its high quality and trendy updates
  • invitation of OJC hosts will switch to invite authors who published in Computers and Education

Last modified: Friday, 23 December 2022, 10:03 AM