edX
edXNavigating Actionable Science in the Arctic
20 studentsADVANCEDEnglish
Korshub's take
Actionable Science in the Arctic: Bridging Research and Practice
The gap between research and impact is where many important projects fail. This advanced course teaches researchers and practitioners to navigate that gap by understanding the full lifecycle of actionable science: starting from the questions that matter, gathering data in collaboration with stakeholders, implementing findings, and measuring real-world outcomes. Arctic research exemplifies this challenge—environmental changes demand science that informs management decisions and Indigenous knowledge simultaneously.
The course draws on interviews with practitioners, government agencies, and Indigenous organizations to show how co-production of knowledge actually works. You'll emerge understanding how to design research that moves from laboratory to landscape, creating impact that justifies the effort.
About this course
Management agencies and funding partners increasingly call for actionable science—science that can be directly applied to achieve specific goals. This course supports researchers, from early to late-career, to learn how to navigate actionable science through the lifecycle of a research project, from contexts and inputs to implementation and finally outcomes. It covers current literature on convergence, co-production of knowledge, impactful science, boundary spanning, and engaged research. Capturing the challenges of putting theory to practice, interviews with practitioners are utilized throughout the course. These contributions come from non-academic partners who have firsthand experience in actionable science and co-production with both governmental land and resource management entities and Indigenous organizations at the local and regional scale.
Financial support for the development of this course was provided by the Research Networking Activity for Sustained Coordinated Observations of Arctic Change (RNA CoObs) (NSF# 1936805), the Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center (USGS# G17AC00213), and a UAF Alaska Leadership Initiative Arctic Engagement Award.
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