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Open Academic Research aims for an ideal non-profit academic environment that is open to everyone. We create opportunities to seek answers for open questions. We believe in free thinking and curiosity driven minds.
Open Academic Research aims for an ideal non-profit academic environment that is open to everyone. We create opportunities to seek answers for open questions. We believe in free thinking and curiosity driven minds.
The academic settings in a country like India imposes constraints to forget how to think freely. This takes away the creativity of a child. In the age of information technology, there is no lack of trained professionals. However, we have an emerging scarcity of creative minds. Only a few undergraduate schools aim to focus on nurturing the creativity. The number of them is less than 10 in India. Hence, our sole interest is to gather creative minds in a platform to help youngsters keep their creativity alive.
The academic settings in a country like India imposes constraints to forget how to think freely. This takes away the creativity of a child. In the age of information technology, there is no lack of trained professionals. However, we have an emerging scarcity of creative minds. Only a few undergraduate schools aim to focus on nurturing the creativity. The number of them is less than 10 in India. Hence, our sole interest is to gather creative minds in a platform to help youngsters keep their creativity alive.
Primary goals
Primary goals
- To target students from high school to undergraduate level.
- Allow the young minds to think freely by giving them opportunity to create and ask open questions.
- We expect to hear from two kinds of students - those who are able to think freely and those who find it hard.
- For the first kind, we will enable and guide them how to seek answers.
- For the other kind, we will teach them how to think and guide them how to seek answers.
- The workshop will take place for 2-3 weeks. During this process, we will be continuously interacting with the young minds.
- The workshop will take place very close to nature which will remove the class-room like boundaries from their thought process. The living cost should be close to zero because we aim to camp this one month in a place which is far away from the city. The venue will be changed every year.
- We will provide financial support to the participating students in the form of tax-less scholarships and travel expenses.
- The only evaluation criteria for the students will be the limited duration to apply for the workshop (reason: students who will be interested will contact asap). In the next phase, there will be personal phone interviews to verify if the students are curiosity driven.
- To raise funds and public awareness to support OAR.
We are looking for . . .
We are looking for . . .
High school, undergraduate, and masters students of any discipline. The participation will be solely curiosity driven instead of any competitive screening. The total number of student participants will be decided based on the total number of supervising project leaders. We will send out calls to all the schools, colleges, and universities in India through email and announce in the newspapers during the last week of September. Since we will have a limited number of project leaders, we will select the students based on first come-first serve basis by giving a deadline. We will create a set of general questions and the supervisors are expected to call the respective students to find if the students are genuinely interested to fully utilise this opportunity.
High school, undergraduate, and masters students of any discipline. The participation will be solely curiosity driven instead of any competitive screening. The total number of student participants will be decided based on the total number of supervising project leaders. We will send out calls to all the schools, colleges, and universities in India through email and announce in the newspapers during the last week of September. Since we will have a limited number of project leaders, we will select the students based on first come-first serve basis by giving a deadline. We will create a set of general questions and the supervisors are expected to call the respective students to find if the students are genuinely interested to fully utilise this opportunity.
We intend to give scholarships along with travel, camping facilities as accommodations, and food to the participants to rejuvenate their creativity.
We intend to give scholarships along with travel, camping facilities as accommodations, and food to the participants to rejuvenate their creativity.
Frequently asked questions:
Frequently asked questions:
- Where exactly is this camp is going to happen?
The venue of the camp is not yet decided yet. We will finalise the venue after discussing with all the prospective project leaders/organisers. We have couple of places in mind with logistic supports from some of our current organisers. Those options are Coorg, Nainitial, Pondicherry, and some places in Assam.
- What exactly is the responsibility of a volunteer?
The responsibility of the organizers are mentioned in the call - https://sites.google.com/view/openacademia/calls. If you have any specific questions please do not hesitate to ask. The primary job will be leading one or two small projects with a signle or group of a students. The secondary work will be to organise the workshop and support the concept of OAR.
- Are the volunteers are expected to bear any expenses?
The volunteers are not expected to bear any expenses. However, you are welcome to support one or two students' stipend but its not at all mandatory. The cause are very much noble so the current organisers are contributing as much as they can. However, we are expecting to receive a good funding from several places based on our previous experiences.
- Is there an exact source of funding?
The definite source of funding are us where we have around 5000 EUR. Once we know the volunteers we are going to raise funds from origanisations like Max Planck Society, Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, Gates Fioundation, EU's open education challenge, National Science Foundation (USA), and the Government of India.
- What way is it going to benefit the volunteer?
The benefits of the volunteers are:
1. Enhancing teaching and leading skills. At the moment, in India PhD and postdocs are not teaching much as well as not supervising any bachelor or masters thesis work. Hence, the academic system is in India is not recycling its own resources which is why the teachers in the schools, colleges, and universities are not up to the mark.
2. The government is not supporting fundamental research and creativity. We are trying to build a platform where research will be open and in future the platform has a potential to act like a world class autonomous research institutes which will not have any competitive entrance examination scheme. The volunteers will be a part of this journey.
3. At our age, we may not be able ask many fundamental questions as lucidly as a kid does. So, interacting with them will enable us to find several important research questions and solving them together with the kids will be another way of learning free thinking for us in advanced level.
4. If one cannot explain things that means he/she does not understand the topic. Sometime it is also true many concepts gets cleared for us when we are explaining to someone else who is not from our field. OAR brings the opportunity to reach youngsters where teaching them will increase our science communication. Today, the world has a very low number of good academic communicators which is why we see so many garbage academic publications and proposals.
4. At the end, OAR brings the concept of recycling knowledge which will enable us to be good researcher who can ask the right questions. This is a significant quality needed for any researcher. The questions raised during the workshops may or may not be solved by the end of the workshop. Our interest is to create a Wikipedia like platform but for different purpose. The OAR platform will publish their questions and their solutions in form of a paper which will be corrected and modified over the time wherever required by an open audience of researchers.
Header by Anders Hoff
Header by Anders Hoff
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