The SAGE Ocean Blog started the year off with a piece on our recently published white paper on software tools for social science. Next week we’ll publish a piece from senior product manager Daniela Duca on the challenges of running social science experiments from home and what tools can help. The move to online teaching, learning, and research feature heavily in our top posts of 2020. Back in April Katie Metzler wrote about the challenge COVID-19 to student research projects and in May, Jason Radford provided some helpful recommendations for translating studies into an online format and recruiting virtual participants.

COVID-19 has affected research all over the world. With universities closing their campuses and governments issuing restrictions on social gatherings, behavioral research in the lab has ground to a halt. This situation is urgent. Ongoing studies have been disrupted and upcoming studies cannot begin until they are adapted to the new reality. At Volunteer Science, we’re helping researchers around the world navigate these changes. In this post, I’ll condense the most important recommendations we’re giving to researchers for translating their studies into an online format and recruiting virtual participants.

We will emerge from this pandemic with a better understanding of the world and an improved ability to teach others about it. For now, we need to be continuously analyzing the data and thinking about the lessons we can learn and apply. Here’s how you can join in!

At SAGE, we have been working with academics around improving and sharing teaching resources, especially for quantitative and computational methods in social sciences. Besides the mass remote and emergency teaching experiment happening right now, one of the positive things we can already identify and reuse to improve learning in methods courses is the glut of data visualizations. The absolute advantage here is that all these visualizations are produced (almost always) with the same raw input, telling a variety of different stories. What better way to explain the different uses and impact of visualizations and the use of different tools to students than examples based on the same data?

With a third of the world’s population currently in some form of lockdown to control the spread of the coronavirus, the imperative to better understand the nature of the outbreak could not be greater. In the latest edition of our monthly newsletter, we are giving a shout-out to the response of the computational social science community.

Around the world, higher education faculty and students have been grappling with the mammoth task of flipping from face-to-face teaching to online learning, practically overnight. As teaching faculty scramble to figure out how to use Zoom for online learning and the debate continues as to whether universities should cancel exams or switch to home-based open book or open Google exams, it’s becoming clear that the impact of COVID-19 on academic research could be just as profound as the impact on teaching. In-person lab experiments, face-to-face interviews, focus groups, fieldwork and other data collection may be impossible for much of 2020. Where possible, researchers will switch modes from face-to-face to virtual or telephone data collection, and where that’s not possible or desirable for practical or methodological reasons, university research offices and funders are issuing guidance for academics who need to delay their data collection or fieldwork.

As we all adjust to the new normal things can’t and won’t simply revert to a pre-COVID-19 world. Here in the UK we are only a few weeks into our new socially distant lives, blue Monday 2020 (January 18th) doesn’t somehow seem so depressing now. As Matt Reynolds of Wired has noted, ‘this is only the grim first act of the coronavirus crisis’. With this in mind, it is extremely important that we hear from experts right across the academic spectrum.

This white paper aims to contribute to the small but growing body of literature on best practice and tips for developing curricula and teaching social research methods and data science online by sharing experiences of the team who developed SAGE Campus.

Research communities across the globe are tirelessly collecting, analyzing and sharing data to help us understand and tackle the coronavirus pandemic. Here’s a collection of resources that visualize, map and demystify COVID-19 data.

Initiated by Deborah Lupton, this crowdsourced document provides necessary information and key resources for researchers struggling to conduct traditional face-to-face research under new circumstances. Check out: "Doing Fieldwork In A Pandemic."

The call for ‘social distancing’ in the wake of the coronavirus and its attendant COVID-19 disease has seen schools and universities around the world hurriedly attempting to turn their physical classrooms into virtual ones. While this may be best immediate reaction from an epidemiological point of view, from a pedagogic perspective, it has left instructors desperately trying to retrofit and reformat their courses while trying not to unduly disadvantage large numbers of their students. As a means of supporting those attempting to do their best under trying circumstances, SAGE Publishing has drawn from its large body of published and peer-reviewed research to offer the resources below -- free of charge -- to serve teachers and students around the world.

Find yourself teaching online? MethodSpace offers guidance and open access resources for e-learning & methods instruction.