What is the STEMEd+ Commons?
STEMEd+ Commons is a professional, digital network for STEM education researchers and practitioners. STEMEd+ Commons seeks to transform the research enterprise to embrace an “ours, not mine” view of research, expertise, resources, and power - collaboration as a norm rather than competition. Housed under the umbrella of the Knowledge Commons – an academy-owned and governed, open access, and open source nonprofit – STEMEd+ Commons provides a space for the global STEM education research and practice community to collaborate, share and create cutting-edge research and innovative pedagogy – a space that does not and will not monetize users’ intellectual and personal data. Users can build profiles, join scholar-practitioner communities, share scholarship, publish materials, and search a repository from journal content to multimedia and datasets, and more. Upcoming functionality will also allow journals to publish, review, and curate their collections.
Why join STEMEd+ Commons?
Build research-practice connections. Education research rarely makes its way into classrooms - what impact can we have on learning if research and practice interact?
Gain visibility. Create a profile. Connect to a larger research ecosystem both within and beyond your own disciplines. Profiles provide snapshots about you and your work and will soon offer connections to other suggested researchers who do similar work.
Create community. Follow other members, join communities, and generate discussions.
De-silo your work & share knowledge. Upload published and unpublished materials from journal articles to lesson plans and data sets. Create websites for projects and curate your uploaded work. Each unpublished deposit can receive a DOI.
Collaborate. Generate publicly viewable or private online project infrastructure.
Host class projects. Curate student publications and facilitate open and collaborative peer review with classmates.
The STEMEd+ Commons is only as diverse as its user ecosystem
Designed with the functionality to connect, create, share and experiment together, STEMEd+ Commons carries the same potential to emerge a collaborative community – growing stronger and more diverse with every contribution – to re-imagine STEM education and STEM education research. The vitality of the platform depends on the users in the STEMEd+ Commons ecosystem and this is where scholars, writers, and educators, such as yourself, come in.
We support an open exchange of knowledge - knowledge accessible to all, regardless of geographic, socioeconomic, political or physical circumstances. So, the more we engage the platform, the more useful it will become and the more it will be able to realize its purpose: to break down silos of knowledge production, to support researcher-practicioner collaborations, and to expand access to knowledge systems globally.
Who should join STEMEd+ Commons?
We encourage researchers, teachers, writers, educators and anyone with an interest in STEM education research and STEM education to join! We also encourage STEM education professional societies to migrate to STEMEd+ Commons. We have capacity to house academic journals and curate the journal process for closed and open peer review.
What is the Knowledge Commons and how do STEMEd+ Commons and Knowledge Commons work together?
When you join STEMEd+ Commons you automatically join the Knowledge Commons. Think of STEMEd+ Commons as a smaller ecosystem within the larger ecosystem of the Knowledge Commons.
The Knowledge Commons: A short history
The Knowledge Commons is a parent platform for STEM Ed+ Commons. Launched December 2016 with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Knowledge Commons emerged as a platform to test whether four humanities-based scholarly societies could benefit from shared infrastructure for member-to-member communication, collaboration, and public engagement.
Since that pilot, additional organizations have joined the network, including the Association of University Presses, HASTAC, Michigan State University, and STEMEd+, each developing their own member-based engagement and use of an ever expanding platform and repository.
The knowledge systems that structure the production, validation, dissemination, and preservation of knowledge have long privileged those in the global north, as well as those with the resources and institutional connections necessary to participate in increasingly narrow channels for publication. The Knowledge Commons is designed specifically to open up and diversify these knowledge systems.
Unlike other social and academic networks online, the Commons is open access, open source, and a nonprofit. The Knowledge Commons functions as a co-op.
