As our adventures in radically transparent engineering education research continue, we find ourselves staring at IRB and going "well, all right, how is that going to work?"

Well, here's how it's going to work.

  1. Linda gets individual permissions to make transcripts & identities public (and keeps track of the emails granting permission).
  2. Some participants may request certain edits before their transcripts are released. We do this editing.
  3. Transcripts are posted online under a creative commons license. We may want to post permission emails (stripped of email addresses) alongside the data as the closest thing we have to "signed informed consent forms."
  4. The Purdue group visits Purdue's IRB to get these interviews cleared as a public use dataset. Specifically, we're in category 6b on page 3 of that document.

Or at least that's the plan as of now. If we need to adjust, we'll adjust. But if this all works, we'll have an open data set that can be used by any future Purdue researchers for any future research without any further IRB approval - it basically places it in the same league as, say, publicly available census data.

Of course, this doesn't solve the problem for other institutions. But Purdue has a pretty good reputation as a research university, so if we post the notice that Purdue's IRB is ok with it, it makes it easier for other schools to go "well, if Purdue says it's ok, we guess it's ok here too."