Collaborative PhD Education

What kinds of competencies and personal attributes are valued in research and innovation employment settings?

How can you teach these competencies to PhD researchers in an international, interdisciplinary, online context?

What do PhD researchers and supervisors need to know about Open Science?

OPENING DOORS is an EU funded project that addresses gaps that can often exists in PhD education

The Project


  • We involved over 50 stakeholders from industry, academia, public sector and citizen groups to help us design a course in open science and open innovation for PhD researchers, using innovative participatory research methods
  • We designed the online course entitled “Opening Your Research to Collaborative Futures”, based on collaborative, challenge-based learning and the “open science” movement
  • We delivered the course to a group of amazing PhD students, and learned from their projects, reflections, innovations and career plans
  • We created open, online resources from these course materials
  • We analysed our findings, disseminated our work and made policy recommendations on how to embrace open science and open innovation as part the PhD journey
Come and explore our work!

Opening Your Research To Collaborative Futures

Fifty-nine PhD researchers from across Europe registered for this 5-week online course, which ran in January/February 2022. It was based on a “challenge-based learning” model, whereby external partners contributed real “challenges” to the course curriculum that were of strategic importance to their organisation. This excellent, interdisciplinary group of researchers worked in small teams to address these challenges. They were kept very busy, also engaging in many online lectures and discussions, attended talks from guest speakers on open science, open innovation and intellectual property, undertook practical open science tasks relevant to their own research, created action plans for career development and reflected on their learning process. The course has been developed into a stand-alone learning resource, accessible here.

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