OSF can be a powerful classroom tool. Collaboration, file organization and storage, forking, and version control can all be very helpful for teachers and students.

Forking a project creates a copy of an existing project and its components. The fork always points back to the original project, forming a network of citations. You might a fork a project to expand upon another's work. For example, a professor may create an OSF project with student assignments. Each student forks the project to have his or her own copy of the materials to start his/her own work.

New forks are private by default. You can change the privacy settings on your fork after it has been created. Forked projects will link back to the original project.

For a case study on using OSF as a classroom, please review Christopher Berndsen. OSF as a tool for managing course-embedded research projects. October 10th, 2019.