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The mass closure of schools as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic paralyzed many children’s education. Teachers across the globe did their best to engage students and help support their learning through online educational formats. However, teachers and parents indicated that students' struggled with these approaches. This study aims to build on successes some science teachers had using curiosity as a starting point in inquiry-based science projects that bridged face-to-face and online learning formats. This year-long qualitative, participatory action research study brings together fourteen teachers (seven elementary and seven secondary) and four university faculty using an online community of inquiry framework. This work is in its early stages. Through two cycles of planning, implementation and reflection, the community of inquiry will ultimately develop a model for best practices and resources that respond to the educational challenges faced during the pandemic and help prepare teachers for future crises. These materials will be shared with other teachers as open education resources, that are freely accessible, digital, re-mixable and revisable. This work will also contribute to theory regarding best practices for curiosity-driven, inquiry-based science education in blended learning spaces.

In recent years, an increasing number of Open Science initiatives have emerged that are accessible to anyone, but mainly target researchers. We believe that students are overlooked within the Open Science movement and do not receive adequate education on many of the Open Science practices. For example, many students do not know about the replication crisis or that some research is questionable. In turn, this may have consequences on how they will conduct their own research in the future. Our initiative feels the urge to spread Open Science within the student community. To realize this goal, we started a student organization that promotes Open Science and emphasizes its applicability directly to students. We are Data Sharing. We are Open Access. We are Reproducibility. We are Open Science, from students for students. We aim to promote Open Science by organizing lectures, debates, and workshops (e.g., how to pre-register a bachelor/master thesis). As such, we inform students how Open Science might be able to solve issues within research and how they can engage. Additionally, we educate students on why the current way to do science is not the way forward (e.g. panel discussions). We want to strongly emphasize the students' perspective on the applicability of Open Science to their life as a student. We believe that by creating awareness at an early stage of their career, we will be able to improve research practices in science in the long run. Besides, Open Science might not only be valuable within their studies (e.g. thesis) - and when pursuing a career in academia - but also when being confronted with research after their studies (e.g, when interpreting other’s work). Our initiative is unique and innovative by solely focusing on the engagement of students. Continuous support and increased interest from students even outside our university has motivated us to encourage students to start a SIOS at their own university. To help motivated students get started, we wrote a Step-by-Step guide that describes how our organization was established and gives advice on how to structure and manage a student initiative around the topic of Open Science. Within the manual, we also included a COVID- 19 crisis management section where we give tips on how to keep an initiative alive in times of online meetings and closed faculties. For the Step-by-Step guide, we have just received a grant by Berkeley University that will fund distributing the project to different universities. In the spirit of evaluating our own effectiveness, we further aim to design studies measuring the impact of our Step-by-Step guide and initiative. This will help guide our decisions in how to further promote Open Science practices among students by better understanding what students actually need. Besides our annual introductory lectures to Open Science, our plans for the following year include the following projects: Taking part in the Open Science festival, inviting lecturers on the topic of power analysis, writing a blogpost on the experiences with supervisors with poor academic integrity, organizing an introductory workshop on Bayesian statistics, and many more.

On Thursday 12th March 2020, the Taoiseach announced a number of significant measures designed to contain the spread of Coronavirus (COVID-19) and lessen the risk of infection in the population, especially to vulnerable groups. These measures have placed significant restrictions on the normal operation of business and society. Many accommodations have had to be made to ensure the operation of critical services during this time, including both front-line health services and other services which support the continued functioning of society and business. Planning authorities have responded through implementation of business continuity plans and are ensuring, insofar as possible, and having regard to public health advice, that necessary provision is made to allow for the appropriate functioning of the planning service. This is an evolving situation, which will be kept under review by the Department through engagement with the City and County Management Association (CCMA), Local Government Management Agency (LGMA), An Bord Pleanála, the Office of the Planning Regulator and other Government Departments. This planning guidance addresses potential uncertainty which has arisen where there is an interaction between the public health measures that have been implemented, and operational restrictions imposed by planning condition, for example where essential retail operators, in an effort to ensure that food and other supplies can be delivered in a safe and timely manner, may be subject to planning conditions that restrict delivery times.

In this SAFE Policy letter on the implications of the Coronavirus for financial stability in Europe, we address how to mitigate a systemic financial crisis that is propagating in slow motion, as we speak, and which we identified and diagnosed in the SAFE policy letter 782. This second letter emphasizes the speed at which the underlying unprecedented real sector cash drains and how asymmetric national solutions may be destabilizing in the longer run.

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EXCLI Journal; 20:Doc276; ISSN 1611-2156