Freely-available digital learning platforms often provide space to create and share open education resources for teachers and students (e.g., ASSISTments, Graspable Math, Upgrade, etc). Many of these technologies are also research platforms to test, improve, and share freely-available researcher-designed instructional content (e.g., Heffernan & Heffernan, 2014). However, understanding the affordances and challenges of this research, navigating ethical considerations for K-12 education research, and working through the institutional review board (IRB) process can be difficult and vary across institutions. In this session, we will present descriptive and qualitative results from an online survey distributed to IRBs across the United States to provoke a conversation on how advances in educational technologies, student privacy, and human subjects research practices must be considered to design evidence-based online open resources for K-12 education.
Attendees of this session will be able to:- Understand considerations for doing research to develop evidence-based open education materials.
- Recognize common themes of how this type of research is viewed by institutional review boards (IRBs) across the United States.
- Relate their own work to this research process and implement suggestions on how to write compelling IRB applications for ethical research projects.
