Rapid Community Report Series

The Rapid Community Report (RCR) Series shares findings and insights in the quickly evolving, interdisciplinary fields of learning sciences and technology.

Read Reports

Published reports are available in the ISLS repository.

Information for Authors and How to Submit

Researchers ordinarily share such information in journal publications, but these tend to appear late in a project’s lifecycle. Conferences (such ICLS and CSCL) allow timely sharing, but rarely communicate to an audience beyond the limited number of attendees. The RCR series is meant to be complementary to these existing publication venues and to allow rapid, early dissemination of research-based ideas.

RCRs are brief, informative, peer reviewed, citable, open access publications that contribute to both the research community and broader audiences. Thus:

  • RCRs should be informative to both expert and non-expert audiences.
  • RCRs should be immediately useful to the audience, and thus should strive for well-defined “take-away’s” (and pointers to where to find more details).
  • RCRs should communicate clearly, with minimal jargon and an eye to serving a large audience.
  • RCRs should aim for a useful life of 3-5 years, after which an update or replacement may be needed.

Initially, three types of RCRs are being published: primers (short introductions to a key topic in learning science and technology), workshop outcomes (resulting from a focused meeting on a theme), and design reflections (critical look at an emerging design). See the Rapid Community Reports Website for more information about each type, the call for submissions, instructions for authors, and review procedures.

The RCR series began as a joint effort of ISLS and the Center for Innovative Research in Cyberlearning (CIRCL). It continues as a partnership between ISLS and the Center for Integrative Research in Computing and Learning Sciences (CIRCLS). Pending acceptance and completion of revisions, submissions will be published to the ISLS repository with a unique identifier in a citable form, under a Creative Commons license. See the ISLS repository for published RCRs.

For more information, visit the Rapid Community Reports Website.