This course is offered in three ways:
- Open access: The course materials are publicly available on our online learning platform, allowing you to engage in self-guided learning.
- Instruction led offerings: We plan to schedule the course in a synchronous learning format, guided by experienced tutors, again in the future. For information about our current offerings, please visit the Open Access Courses section of the website.
- Tailored offerings: This course can be customized to meet your personal or organizational needs, with guidance from an experienced instructor. For more information, please contact us at vis@merit.unu.edu.
About the course
This short course is fully online and is designed for bachelor's and master's students who are working on or have recently completed their thesis. We aim to support participants to use existing research, in order to write short, easy to understand policy briefs. Those briefs follow the formats as used in practice. They can be shared with (future or current) employers and serve as reading content for LinkedIn or other social media outlets.
Often, research output created by participants does not get disseminated upon completion. While the research results are academic outputs, a publication in an academic journal is not often feasible due to the peer review (high quality) standards of those journals. At the same time, due to the academic (complicated) language and length of most research, the documents can also not easily be used for other (non-academic) purposes.
In this course, we introduce a toolkit that includes instructional materials (instruction video’s, readings, format templates), examples of policy brief’s highlighting good/bad elements and link to repositories that disseminate research outcomes to policymakers. The toolkit will include exercises that help translate the existing research material (in master theses or research reports) stepwise into a policy brief format, as well as exercises that encourage students to define the target-audience they write the policy brief for and exercises guiding them to create a dissemination strategy for the policy brief.
At the end of the course, participants will:
- Have awareness of the modes of dissemination and value of research dissemination.
- Understand how to translate research outcomes into policy briefs, based on existing master thesis research outcomes.
- Understand the key criteria for a good policy brief
- Increase their skill in policy brief writing
- Increase their skill in peer reviewing, by providing feedback to other policy briefs
- Understand what dissemination actually can look like after completing the brief.
Session 2 – 29 April
Group 1: 10:00-11:30 AM CET
Group 2: 15:00-16:30 PM CET
For questions, please contact vis@merit.unu.edu
