Research Ideas and Outcomes :
Grant Proposal
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Corresponding author: Xavier Pouwels (x.g.l.v.pouwels@utwente.nl)
Received: 22 Nov 2022 | Published: 22 Dec 2022
© 2022 Xavier Pouwels
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
Pouwels X (2022) Towards Open Science within Health Care Technology and Management Education. Research Ideas and Outcomes 8: e97853. https://doi.org/10.3897/rio.8.e97853
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Lack of research reproducibility, restricted access to scientific knowledge to citizens, fake news (on social media) and limited citizens’ involvement during scientific knowledge generation are phenomena which negatively affect the relationship between Science and society. Unfortunately, students, who will be the next scientists, practitioners and citizens, are not educated to address these scientific and societal challenges. Teaching Open Science (OS) principles to students may equip them to deal with these challenges during their future career. OS refers to any endeavour aiming to make one’s research more open, inclusive, accessible, reproducible and replicable. Therefore, OS is expected to address these challenges by promoting: open and reproducible research, publicly available scientific knowledge, public engagement of (scientific) experts within society and greater citizens’ involvement in Science. OS consequently promises to transform the relationship between Science and society. This teaching innovation will introduce Health Care Technology and Management students with the theoretical underpinning of OS and will let students practise OS during a group project. The teaching activities will comprise a series of interactive lectures and practical assignments. Key topics of this teaching innovation are an introduction to OS and FAIR principles, pre-registration, performing open reproducible research, open peer-review and practise public outreach. The teaching materials and activities will be co-created with students who already participated in this course to ensure the OS content matches students’ knowledge, interests and needs. Dissemination efforts will be undertaken during the entire duration of the project to increase awareness concerning the importance of teaching OS within educational curricula.
Open Science, Health Technology Assessment, simulation model
Lack of research reproducibility (
Teaching Open Science (OS) principles to students may equip them to deal with these challenges during their future career. OS refers to any endeavour aiming to make one’s research more open, inclusive, accessible, reproducible and replicable, as described in the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science (
Due to the important role of higher educations’ institutions in educating future citizens, scientists and practitioners, they should adequately prepare these future generations for practising and engaging with OS. Developing an OS mindset and skillset is becoming increasingly important and should become an essential part of academic curricula (
Currently, OS practices are mostly promoted amongst academics through Open Science Communities (
These initiatives show that embedding OS principles and skills within higher education is feasible; however, these initiatives were mostly narrow in scope, most did not cover the entire research cycle and did not always contain an application of OS principles. This may be problematic since the OS skillset can only be obtained by “doing OS”.
Beside these initiatives, groups of students have set-up Students Initiatives for Open Sciences (SIOS, for example, in Twente (
The current teaching innovation will be introduced during the “Advanced simulation for health economic analysis” course from the Health Care Technology and Management specialisation of the Industrial Engineering and Management Master programme. During this course, students have to develop a health economic simulation model, which provides the perfect opportunity to apply OS practices and develop their OS skillset concerning open reproducible research. Currently, the teaching curriculum of this Masters' programme does not address OS.
This teaching innovation will address how practising OS affects the entire research cycle and encourage students to apply OS principles during their project. This teaching innovation will be composed of a series of interactive lectures and practical assignments. The lectures will provide the theoretical background of OS and the practical assignments will focus on the implementation of OS within their project. A group reflection on the benefits and barriers to OS for Science and society will conclude this teaching innovation. This project is innovative in three ways: the participating student group, the topic (health economics) in which OS principles will be implemented and the teaching of both theoretical and practical applications of OS (which was lacking in most previous initiatives).
At the end of this redesigned course, students will be able to:
This project fits within theme 4 “Open theme” since OS is an important element of the strategy of the Dutch Ministry for Education, Culture and Science towards a sustainable future (
OS is here to stay, hence the experiences, materials and results of this teaching innovation will be shared with the educational community through an Open Access publication, the development of open educational resources and presentations at conferences. In this way, other education professionals will be aware of this teaching innovation and will be able to re-use the developed materials.
This section describes the project plan, risk analysis, project team and plan for dissemination.
The project contains five activities:
1. [May 2022–October 2022] Development of a survey to assess students’ knowledge concerning OS and carrying out the survey amongst the students who will participate in the teaching innovation.
Recruitment of two student assistants to co-create the teaching materials for this teaching innovation. The students assistants and I will use this period to sharpen our knowledge of (teaching) OS by consulting available (teaching) resources on OS (
2. [October 2022–February 2023] Development of the teaching materials.
Learning activities addressing each research cycle phase will be developed. The research cycle phases are: preparation, discovery, analysis, writing, publication, outreach and assessment (inspired by a Summer School of the University of Utrecht on OS (
To efficiently develop the learning materials, the “adopt, adapt, develop” principles will be followed. Existing online resources and courses will be consulted during the development (
The developed teaching activities will:
Even though I will address all phases of the research cycle, key teaching activities will focus on introducing OS and FAIR principles, pre-registration (
3. [February 2023–April 2023] Teach the course.
Students (working in pairs) will have to apply at least one OS principle when developing their health economic simulation model. To ensure a diversity of OS principles are addressed by student groups, each group will have to apply a different OS principle on their project. During the final session of this teaching innovation, the Open Science mindset of students will be assessed by performing the “key-terms” game (
4. [April 2023] Evaluation of the teaching innovation.
Students’ knowledge concerning OS will be re-assessed using the same survey as in activity 1 and additional questions concerning the quality of the teaching materials and activities relating to this teaching innovation. During the final discussion on OS with students, feedback on the teaching innovation will be gathered.
5. [July 2022–August 2023] Dissemination activities.
Dissemination activities will be undertaken during the entire duration of the project. The current proposal will be uploaded to Research Ideas and Outcomes Open Access journal (
This project will be considered successful when the following criteria have been met:
There is always a risk that students do not fully engage with the developed teaching activities. Hence, I have introduced the requirements of applying at least one OS principle to their project and of actively participating during the last teaching activity to successfully achieve this teaching innovation. The competition element (the most Open group will win a prize) aims at increasing students’ engagement during the teaching activities and OS. Finally, experience tells that students’ response rate to online survey may be low. Therefore, students’ knowledge on OS will be tested during the first and last teaching activity using a polling system, such as Wooclap.
Xavier Pouwels is an assistant professor in health economics and member of the Open Science Community of Twente (OSCT). He is leadership-member of the Open Source Models Special Interest Group of ISPOR, the largest international health economics and outcomes research community. Xavier has the theoretical knowledge of OS principles and the practical skills to implement these principles within health economic modelling. Both these skills are required to teach OS, which is still an evolving field of research and education within health economics. Xavier has successfully achieved his University Teaching Qualification. He is the lecturer during the “Advanced simulation for health economic analysis” course and teaches courses on health economics, which he continuously updates through the implementation of novel teaching methods, such as interactive applications for students. Xavier recently received a grant to implement challenge-based learning within these courses. Xavier will be responsible for project planning, developing the materials, teaching, evaluating and dissemination of this project.
Student assistants will be recruited at the beginning of this project, by advertising this project at the end of the 2021-2022 edition of the “Advanced Simulation for Health Economic Evaluation” course. These student assistants will co-create with Xavier the teaching materials that will be used during this teaching innovation. Their role will be to discuss and advise on which OS topics are of interests (and should receive more emphasis) for participants in the course. They will participate in designing, testing and disseminating the teaching materials. They will provide feedback on the connection of the teaching materials with previous students’ knowledge, the difficulty of these materials and the time investment required to perform the developed teaching activities (to ensure it does not jeopardise the other learning objectives of the course).
Hendrik Koffijberg is the course coordinator of the course in which this teaching innovation will be implemented. He is a member of the OSCT and of the scientific advisory committee on pharmaceuticals’ reimbursement from the National Health Care Institute. Naomi van der Linden is an experienced health economic modeller, reviewer of health economic models and teacher in health economics. Both Hendrik and Naomi will advise on how OS skills may be implemented within the existing course and will provide input on how OS will affect health economics research and health policy-making.
Helma Vlas, senior consultant of the Centre of Expertise In Learning & Teaching at the University of Twente (UT), will support the choice of design, implementation and evaluation of the educational activities in collaboration with Xavier and the student assistants.
Markus Konkol is OS officer at the Faculty of geo-information science & earth observation and an expert in computational research reproducibility. He will advise on the most appropriate methods and tools to teach open reproducible research principles to students.
Qian Zhang, member of the Digital Competence Centre at the UT, will advise on which digital tools are the most appropriate to use during this teaching innovation, considering the Dutch setting and legislation.
The research team is described in Table
Name |
Organisation |
Function |
Role in this project |
Xavier Pouwels |
UT |
Assistant Professor |
Project planning, material development, teaching, evaluation and dissemination. |
Student assistants (to be recruited) |
UT |
Students |
Co-creation of the teaching materials |
Hendrik Koffijberg |
UT |
Professor/ Section chair HTSR |
Project advisor on the impact of Open Science on health policy-making |
Naomi van der Linden |
UT |
Assistant Professor |
Project advisor on the implementation of Open Science within health economics |
Helma Vlas |
UT |
Educational Consultant CELT |
Advisor on educational activities |
Markus Konkol |
UT |
Open Science Officer |
Project advisor on teaching open reproducible research |
Qian Zhang |
UT |
Data steward |
Project advisor on digital tools for Open Science |
The research proposal will be uploaded on the Research Ideas and Outcomes Open Access journal (
Based on students’ feedback, the teaching innovation will be updated and tailored to be implemented within the “Health Economic Modelling” course of the Health Sciences Master (already approved by the course coordinator Hendrik Koffijberg). Programme directors of other curricula will be approached to discuss further implementation of this teaching innovation at the University of Twente.
This dissemination plan fits the NWO Open Access strategy.
Comenius Teaching Fellows 2022 (https://www.nro.nl/calls/comeniusprogramma-teaching-fellows-2023)
Towards Open Science within Health Care Technology and Management Education
University of Twente
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