Becoming Peers: shorts -

a shared open repository of "behind the scenes" videos

The Becoming Peers Video project is about creating resources that can be used as complementary teaching material.

The videos highlight three main aspects of research that are usually hidden in the normal curriculum:

• Different research environments in which animal research takes place


• Processes, constraints, and decision making that is part of research but not usually portrayed in publications or textbooks


• The researchers, their motivations, plans and potentially, also struggles

For each video type, questions for researchers were developed with the input of the Animal behaviour and cognition Twitter community.

The initial stage of this project has been funded by an Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour (ASAB) Education grant. More details in the "ASAB Grant" section.

Using the resources

The videos are short (3-4 min) and freely available under a CC-BY licence.
All videos contain captions or subtitles.

You can thus easily link them to material taught in your animal behaviour and animal cognition course/module ‐ either as part of direct teaching (e.g., embedded in lectures) or as links given to students whenever a study is discussed for which a video exists.

You can choose between three different video types:

Video type 1: Researcher 'gives a tour' of their research environment

Video type 2: Researcher talks about a specific publication/set of publications

Video type 3: Researcher talks about their current research project and research interests and motivation

The videos are available (also to download) on the ASAB Vimeo channel.

How to contribute to the resources

Any researcher can produce a video for the project ‐ the videos will be collated, maintained, and promoted by us.

By submitting a video, you agree for it to be freely available under a CC-BY 4.0 licence on the ASAB Education Vimeo channel.

You can choose what type of video to make, and for each of the 3 types, we suggest you select 2 to 3 pre-specified questions. Video types, questions, and detailed instructions on how to prepare and submit the videos can be found here.

When you are ready to submit your video, please fill out the Becoming Peers: Shorts Submission Form.

Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour (ASAB) Education Grant

We are delighted to announce that in 2020, we were awarded an Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour (ASAB) Education Grant for the initial stage of this project. These funds allow us to compensate the first 30 people who submit their video and who identify as Early Career Researchers and/or part of a historically excluded community.

To be considered for the reimbursement (£20), all that is needed is to tick the box next to "I would like to be considered for the reimbursement of £20 through the ASAB Education Grant" statement in the submission form (no other questions asked). Reimbursement will be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis.

The deadline to submit a video under this scheme is 30th June 2022.
Reimbursement will be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis ‐ i.e., the first 30 submissions received by this deadline will receive a reimbursement. If we do not receive 30 submissions under this scheme by this deadline, we will open a second call.

For questions, please contact us at our email address.

More details on reimbursement: PDF.

About Us

Fostered through Twitter dialogues at the height of COVID-19, we came together to organise Becoming Peers: Shorts. The project operates via a community effort to bring open education materials to animal behaviour and cognition classrooms while promoting the research of historically underrepresented and early career researchers in the field.

Example videos -