DORA is excited to announce the launch of the SPACE workshop kit, a resource designed for those seeking to share the SPACE rubric with their communities. This kit is intended to equip individuals with the materials needed to run their own version of the SPACE workshop for participants from their academic association, institution, department, and more. It contains English and Spanish versions of a slide deck, pre-workshop materials, and instructions for breakout room facilitators. The kit also includes a workbook for workshop participants to capture concrete existing and future actions for research assessment reform.
In June of 2021 DORA announced the SPACE rubric, a tool that was co-created by Ruth Schmidt, Associate Professor at the Institute of Design of the Illinois Institute of Technology. The rubric is designed to help academic institutions support the implementation of fair and responsible academic career assessment practices in two ways: First, the rubric can be used to establish a baseline for the current state of infrastructural conditions. Second, the rubric can be used to retroactively analyze how strengths or gaps in these institutional conditions may have impacted the outcomes of concrete interventions targeted to specific types of academic assessment activities.
To support its use, DORA and Schmidt facilitated two SPACE rubric workshops in April 2022, organized in partnership with CESAER, a European University Association and CINDA, a Latin American University Association. At both workshops, participants from academic institutions used the rubric to frame discussions about their current evaluation practices and how they might implement reform. Building on momentum from their respective workshops, CESAER has added information about the SPACE rubric to its webpage and CINDA is in the process of piloting the SPACE rubric in multiple universities within its network.
The workshop kit is composed of materials that Schmidt developed for the CESAER and CINDA SPACE workshops.
Haley Hazlett is DORA’s Program Manager