Introduction

Overview

Teaching: 25 min
Exercises: 5 min

UKRN Open Research Training

You’re here to get involved in helping your colleagues share their data. Increasing data sharing is part of the UKRN mission to improve the openness and robustness of research. We can help you put together a workshop which will make it easier to achieve real changes in your colleagues’ behaviour, and you can bring your specialist knowledge and experience.

Approach

  • Practical workflow change: we want to produce actual changes to how people work by tweaking their default workflow
  • No homework for busy researchers (including you!)
  • Better is good - we want everyone doing something a bit better by the end

Course structure

Today we’ll be giving you some tips on how to deliver workshops, courtesy of our guest-presenter Louise from Bristol Institute of Teaching and Learning, followed by an introduction to our Workshop Builder Tool and our Resource List. At the end, there will be a large block of time for you to use the Workshop Builder Tool (or something else if you prefer) to build your own workshop to deliver to your colleagues.

What you’ll get out of this course

  • A Workshop website you can use to help your colleagues with sharing data
  • Some ideas for how to engage colleagues and manage the workshop
  • Membership of an enthusiastic community of like-minded researchers in various disciplines

Data sharing

Data sharing means something a bit different in practice to all of you - that’s why we can’t just produce a one-size-fits-all guide and be done with it!

Discussion 5 min

What does data sharing mean for you?

What are you hoping your colleagues will know by the end of your workshops?

Key Points

  • No homework for busy people

  • We’re aiming for practical results!

Running a Workshop

Overview

Teaching: 30 min
Exercises: 45 min
Objectives

  • Feel comfortable you can run your workshop

  • Feel comfortable including a variety of engagement activities

  • Feel competent to advertise and organise your workshop

BILT

Here we hand over to Louise Howson from the Bristol Institute of Teaching and Learning who is helping with some of the techniques for running an engaging and effective workshop.

Workshop administration

We will not cover this in the workshop, but we have put together a checklist which you may find useful for the administrative side of organising and running your workshop.

The checklist can be found here.

Key Points

  • The end goal is practical change

  • A variety of activities helps keep things engaging

Short Break

This is a time for you to get some refreshment and clear your mind a little in preparation for the next part of the workshop.

Workshop Planning

Overview

Teaching: 10 min
Exercises: 50 min
Objectives

  • Use the workshop structure template to plan your workshop content

Workshop structure

We suggest a three-part structure to your workshop which begins with some discussion and education, gives participants a toy example to work through, and then reserves a large block of time for them to apply what they’ve learned to their own workflows. We’re trying to work with people to tweak rather than overhaul how they currently do things.

At each stage, keep in mind both the immediate goal (e.g. participants should understand how to write a data dictionary) and the ultimate goal (participants should default to sharing their data where possible).

To help plan out the workshop structure, you can use our workshop structure template.

Plan your workshop 20 min

Working alone or in a small group (especially if your research fields have similar data sharing practices), sketch an outline of your workshop and the content you think your colleagues will need to know to implement data sharing into their own work.

  • How much do they know about data sharing?
  • What concerns might they have?
  • When do they need to start thinking about data sharing?
  • What resources (e.g. library services) exist to help them?
  • How do you format and clean data for sharing?
  • What kind of data do you store?
  • Where do you store data?
  • Does the service have a tutorial or allow you to upload dummy data?
  • How will you help people integrate sharing into the existing workflow?

Might some of the activities we encountered this morning help with any of these?

Key Points

  • No homework for busy people

  • We’re aiming for practical results!

Lunch Break

This is a time for you to get some refreshment and clear your mind a little in preparation for the next part of the workshop.

Workshop Builder Tool Introduction

Overview

Teaching: 15 min
Exercises: 30 min
Objectives

  • Understand the basics of the Workshop Builder Tool

  • Be able to search the Open Research Resource Browser for resources

Workshop Builder Tool

Building a workshop can be a lot of work, and a lot of that work is the same for all of you, despite the specific content being different. We’ve tried to streamline the workshop creating process for you with the use of this Workshop Builder Tool. You can access the tool at https://ukrn-wb.netlify.app/.

How it works

The tool works by providing an interface to GitHub. GitHub has a mechanism for hosting GitHub repositories as websites called GitHub Pages. We use GitHub Pages for this website, for example.

The GitHub Pages template we use is fairly complex (based on The Carpentries’ template), so to make it easier to manage we built to tool to:

Getting started

You’ll need a GitHub account - you can create one via the Builder Tool if you don’t already have one.

Create a workshop 5 min

  1. Go to the Workshop Builder Tool
  2. Press the button to log in to your GitHub account (it will let you create one if you need to!)
  3. Create a new repository
  4. Select a topic and a title for your workshop, then scroll to the bottom of the Customize Workshop page and click the button
  5. The ‘workshop id’ should be a two- or three-letter code for your university/institution followed by DS followed by today’s date in YYYYMMDD format, followed by _01
    • This id allows us to keep track of where attendees are and to ensure you get a copy of the feedback attendees give

You now have a workshop website being generated. We’ll wait a few seconds and then we’ll look to see what our website looks like. While we wait, we’ll briefly cover the staging process your edits will go through.

Understanding changes

When you make changes using the Workshop Builder Tool the changes are kept in memory. In order to save the changes to the website you’re building, you need to tell the Builder Tool to send the changes to GitHub. You can do this for individual files, as you’ll see in a moment, or you can do it for all of the files you’ve changed by using the menu on the right (click the ‘Save changes to GitHub’ button).

Let’s now hover over that menu - we should see at the bottom that there’s a tick and a message that tells us that our website was built successfully. If that’s the case, click on the ‘View workshop website’ button to open the website in a new tab. If you don’t see the tick, or there’s a cross there, please ask for help.

Adding lessons

Workshops are made up of lessons - individual bits of content which contain explanations, activities, etc. Each of the pages in this website is a ‘lesson’.

You can add and customise lessons created by other users of the Workshop Builder Tool. There are also template lessons if you want to build yours from scratch. Let’s start by customising an introductory lesson.

Add jspsych-born-open-data Introduction 15 min

  1. Click ‘Add Items to Stash’
  2. Enter ‘mjaquiery’ in the search box to narrow the results down
  3. Select the dropdown for ‘jspsych-born-open-data’ and wait while the results are fetched
  4. Click ‘Add items to stash’ - you should now see a lot of lessons in the ‘Stash’
  5. Find ‘Introduction’ and drag it into the ‘Day 1’ slot
  6. You’ll see a green ‘+’ icon appear in the lesson’s icon bar - click it and you’ll install the remote lesson into your workshop

Now it’s installed, you can edit its metadata (‘Edit properties’ icon) and content (‘Edit content’ icon).

The content is written in a combination of liquid, jekyll, html, and markdown. The markdown editor will allow you to use the buttons to insert markdown features like bold, and italic text, and hyperlinks. You do not need to know any of these to produce content, although being able to copy the examples in the text lesson template will help! You can always ask for assistance with anything you’re finding tricky.

You can try editing the data and metadata - once you’ve done that you’ll see a ‘Save changes to GitHub’ icon appears in the icon bar, and the ‘Save changes to GitHub’ button becomes available in the right-hand-side GitHub Integration menu.

The ‘Discard local changes’ button also becomes available, useful for if you make mistakes! Refreshing the page will have the same effect, and also clear your stash.

Click either of the ‘save’ buttons and you’ll see the website updates in a few seconds - usually under a minute.

Play around

If you’re waiting for us to finish helping others, have a go at adding and customising some more lessons, or go back to the ‘Customize workshop’ step and add some more workshop details there.

Open Research Resource Browser

The Open Research Resource Browser is a tool that reads and filters a Google Sheets document we have created (and to which you can contribute) which lists open research resources.

You should find the Browser intuitive to use, but ask if you’re not sure.

Can you… 10 min

  1. Find NASA’s GeneLab
  2. Work out how many Humanities resources there are
  3. Find the data repositories which mention ‘sequence’ in their description

The spreadsheet the resources are taken from is available to view and we welcome suggestions for additional contributions. Contributions can be added and available instantly, so just ask us to add something if you need it.

Using the Tools

You don’t have to use the tools we provide. Our aim is that you have a workshop created ready to deliver by the time we finish here today. Whether you do that using our tools or your own (e.g. making your own slides) we don’t mind - we’ll help as best we can whatever you choose.

We do hope you’ll find the tools useful, of course - and we’d love to know how we can make them better. You can send any feedback about the tools to ORT@ukrn.org.

Key Points

  • The Workshop Builder Tool creates a website like this one with your content

  • The Open Research Resource Browser resources can be added to via our Google Sheets document

Workshop Building (Part 1)

Overview

Exercises: 60 min
Objectives

  • Build the framework for your workshop, and complete the first couple of components

We now have a chance to actually build a workshop. We are not aiming for a template or for notes that we’re expecting you to develop on your own time - we want to produce a workshop right now that you could deliver tomorrow morning.

You have your workshop plan from the template. Now you can build that plan into a workshop using the Workshop Builder Tool and Open Research Resources Browser. If you prefer, you can create your workshop using other tools, of course - the important thing is to get it done!

Remember:

  • The focus is on producing practical changes
  • Don’t give out homework
  • What do they need to understand to implement workflow changes?

We’re here to help

Ask us if you get stuck, or just want to talk something over.

You can ask questions in the chat, or ask one of us out loud. Everyone else can ignore the chat/conversation and get on with creating a workshop while it’s all going smoothly.

We’ll have a break in 90 minutes and take stock of how everyone’s getting on.

Key Points

  • Keep focused on what you want your colleagues to do differently

Short Break

This is a time for you to get some refreshment and clear your mind a little in preparation for the next part of the workshop.

Workshop Building (Part 2)

Overview

Exercises: 75 min
Objectives

  • Complete your workshop

Resources

Remember:

  • The focus is on producing practical changes
  • Don’t give out homework
  • What do they need to understand to implement workflow changes?

We’re here to help

Ask us if you get stuck, or just want to talk something over.

You can ask questions in the chat, or ask one of us out loud. Everyone else can ignore the chat/conversation and get on with creating a workshop while it’s all going smoothly.

We aim to be finished in 90 minutes so we can practice delivering some parts of the workshop before the end of the day.

Key Points

  • Keep focused on what you want your colleagues to do differently

Practicing your Workshop

Overview

Exercises: 45 min
Objectives

  • Get some insight into how it feels to deliver the workshop

In small groups 30 min

  • Take turns selecting a part of one of your lessons to present, ideally including an activity to oversee
  • Present that component to the other members of the group

Feedback 15 min

  • When you’ve all had a turn presenting, discuss what you liked about one another’s presentations
    • How could it be improved?
    • How did it feel to present?

Farewell

Overview

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Key Points

  • You can contact us for support in delivering the workshop

  • Your institution likely has other support, too

  • Join our community of practice!

Break

This is a time for you to get some refreshment and clear your mind a little in preparation for the next part of the workshop.

Template