1. An introduction to Science (online course)

Along 2023-2024, my primary aim is to develop an online introductory course about Science for undergrad students. For the past 3 years, I’ve been working on this project, trying to figure out learning objectives to guide the design of this course. At this moment, I’ve already studied a big stack of books on scientific method, science history, sociology, philosophy and epistemology.

Currently, I have a learning map with over 200 learning objectives to guide this course. But, there is a gap in that map… I didn’t find enough information about daily scientists’ behaviour: what they actually do to produce, systematize, publish, and evaluate the knowledge in their field, and the mechanisms to prevent and to correct errors and bias. Recently, I ‘ve come across the movement (or the field?) of metascience. And I found a lot of discussions about these topics in it. 

So, because of that, my principal aim along my sabbatical leave will be to propose new learning objectives for the “An Introduction to Science” course based on the knowledge in the metascience field and to design that course. I’m very thankful to Dr. Simine Vazire and Melbourne University for assisting me with this project.

 

2. Operanda Platform – Open Education

 

The OPERANDA Platform provides massive, open, free online courses related to scientific education and teacher education. Nowadays, we have over 2.500 students enrolled in our courses.

OPERANDA is the first online platform based on Programming of Teaching, a technology developed by Brazilian behavioural scientists. There are eight educational principles at OPERANDA to design online courses:

1. Emphasis on what the student should be able to do in the real world;
2. Consideration of the estimated repertoire of the course’s target audience;
3. Active student participation;
4. Individual pace of learning;
5. Complete mastery of skills by the student;
6. Use of informative and immediate feedback;
7. Emphasis on the use of positive reinforcement;
8. Continuous course improvement based on empirical data.

OPERANDA is based at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC). FAPESC and the Society for the Advancement of Behavior Analysis (SABA) support the project.

 

3. Adventures on Educational Technologies (@ Australia and Online)

During my sabbatical, I plan to study about educational technologies, higher education and open education by visiting and working with research groups in Australia. Australia is the land of Moodle and a lot of other internationally recognized educational technologies. My plan is to get in touch with researchers and professionals from the field to learn and to develop new projects to shape the future of open and higher education. Let’s do it together?