Abstract:

The role of citizens is changing from being passive consumers of government services towards being active participants in governance. Higher educational institutions have an important role here as they can engage citizens in open knowledge-building activities (OKAs). Here we define OKAs as bottom-up technology mediated open knowledge building activities that higher education institutions and public libraries co-create together with students and external stakeholders for engaging the wider public for social and community purposes. OKAs will engage wider audiences into building scientific knowledge and data in a publicly open way using digital technologies support.

This paper aims to give an overview of engagement practices in OKA case studies and to present recommendations for other higher educational institutions for planning successful OKAs in the future. The case studies were conducted in the frames of an KA2 Erasmus+ project Integrating Open and Citizen Science into Active Learning Approaches in Higher Education (INOS) 2019-2022 (http://inos-project.eu). The INOS project intended to involve academic and library staff, university students, citizens with various levels of expertise, community members and domain experts from different disciplines and sectors to the co-creation of the OKAs with the aim of transforming knowledge into innovative artifacts.

Firstly, the paper will give an overview of the OKA pedagogical design framework, including goal setting, activity development, activity format selection, running the activity, reflection and personal development. Secondly, the paper will describe 10 OKA case studies carried out in several higher education institutions in Europe.

These OKA cases were titled:
1) Noise Pollution at Reidi Road,
2) Designing public services for elderly with external stakeholders,
3) Integrating Citizen Science at Universities: from 'What' to 'How',
4) Why Universities and Libraries Should Get Involved in Citizen Science?,
5) Edit-a-thon Wikipedia, 6) SPINE, 7) CATCH UP!@LET,
8) "LIFE IN FARMS” A Minecraft-based Environmental Science Module,
9) The Rover Adventure,
10) Data workshop for “Technological and organizational trends in service design”.
All of the OKAs were designed as interdisciplinary problem based challenges with societal value.

Based the good practices and challenges of carrying out these OKAs, the paper will present recommendations for designing OKAs in higher education institutions regarding:
1) topics and types of problems,
2) codesigning the open knowledge-building activities and shifting agency to students,
3) involving facilitators and policymakers,
4) accessing stakeholders,
5) timing the events,
6) environments for interaction,
7) learning outcomes from open knowledge activities, and
8) agency development and stakes for participants.

Overview of the case studies and the recommendation are intended to encourage higher education educators to creatively try out the learning activities with the open science and citizen science approaches with the students.

Keywords:

Open knowledge-building, engagement practices, higher education.