The three federal research funding agencies – Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) – through the Secretariat on Responsible Conduct of Research (SRCR) have an education mandate. To fulfill this mandate, SRCR (via Portman Studios) has created, maintains, hosts, and supports the Course on Research Ethics (CORE-2022), an online tutorial that provides an introduction to the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans – TCPS (2022). Users include researchers, Research Ethics Board (REB) members and administrators, students, research participants, and the general public. The completion of CORE-2022 is not a requirement of the Agencies or the Panel on Research Ethics (PRE), but some institutions may choose to make it mandatory, for instance, for their researchers and members of their REB(s). For example, some institutions require that their researchers successfully complete CORE-2022 before they can begin to conduct research involving human participants. Thus, CORE plays an integral part in the research life cycle.
CORE-2022 requires an infrastructure capable of supporting an unlimited number of registered users and ensuring sufficient bandwidth to allow for a large volume of users to simultaneously access the tutorial. The tutorial is completed by an average of 82,000 users annually, and this number has been steadily increasing over the last few years. One reason for this is that it is becoming common practice for professors teaching research ethics courses to require their students to successfully complete CORE-2022 as part of their course (i.e., for course credits). As such, CORE-2022 is an important educational tool not only for researchers and REB members/administrators, but for students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
The work will involve the following:
- Maintaining CORE-2022 in both English and French, to the satisfaction of the Project Authority, including functionality and features (e.g., search functionality, reCAPTCHA for new users/institutional access requests, randomization of questions, reporting capabilities, etc.).
- Hosting CORE-2022 on an infrastructure capable of supporting an unlimited number of registered users and ensuring sufficient bandwidth to allow for a large volume of users to simultaneously access the tutorial;
- Providing all maintenance releases and platform support to the Project Authority by email in English;
- Developing and implementing platform enhancements on an as-and-when-requested basis;
- Implementing minor upgrades to improve user experience and internal reporting features;
- Repairing any bugs, security or functionality issues that may arise, as needed;
- Ensuring CORE-2022 is WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) compliant with the latest version (WCAG 2.1 AA), including the CMS (Content Management System) pages;
- Integrating Government of Canada website configuration requirements;
- Integrating the Web Experience Toolkit (optional);
- Providing the Project Authority with administrative access to the CORE-2022 platform, using Content Manager; and
- Using all reasonable efforts to resolve:
o Any failure of the CORE-2022 platform within 48 hours;
o Any CORE-2022 platform errors within 48 hours;
o Any help requests within 48 hours.
