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

Currently, 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 call for submissions for more information about each types. When preparing an RCR, see the instructions for authors. Submissions will be accepted with quarterly deadlines. Per the review procedures, peer review will be conducted in a virtual, online meeting with editorial board members and additional reviewers. The RCR series is a joint effort of ISLS and the US Center for Innovative Research in Cyberlearning, as described on the history page. Pending acceptance and completion of revisions, submissions will be published to the ISLS repository with a unique identifier (DOI) in a citable form, under a Creative Commons license.