Enabling reusable educational resources for holistic citizen science impact: a complex thinking approach

Abstract

Open Educational Resources on citizen science are advancing in parallel with Education 4.0. However, few are truly reusable and therefore do not achieve a comprehensive impact. Based on the Design Thinking methodology, enabled through the Action Research methodology, a model that will generate reusable Open Educational Resources on Citizen Science projects to communicate the essence of a citizen science project according to the particular needs of any audience taking into account its holistic impact based on framework of the threshold Typology for Citizen Science Projects (TCSP) through various multimedia formats. The findings were: (a) through continuous adaptation, OER in Citizen Science projects are a tool to reach a broader population, which can translate into educational achievements with greater impact (b) identifying specific criteria in citizen science projects will allow configuring OER that communicate more optimally to a target audience and (c) the search for tools to achieve broad reach for citizen science projects and thus, support the democratization of science can be solved from OER, which with continued adaptation, will surely evolve and mature, and lead to richer and more impactful educational outcomes for all. The implications of this study will allow the identification of various elements for the design of OER that can be adapted and reused based on the established objectives and a specific audience. This opens a window for other research that addresses the education of the future and its innovation for the implementation of the model proposed here.