Workshop Planning

Overview

Teaching: 15 min
Exercises: 15 min

Objectives

• Use the resources available to help plan your workshop

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel

Planning your own workshop isn’t all about starting from scratch. We recommend using existing resources to help develop your workshop. In this session of the Train-the-Trainer course, think about the resources that are available already, the teaching skills you learned in the previous session, and how you can incorporate these into your workshop.

Templates

To help you plan out your workshop structure, you can use our our Workshop Demo site. Later on in this course, when you’re building your workshop, you can edit the pages to say what you want them to.

Workshop structure

We suggest a three-part structure to your workshop which begins with some discussion, gives participants lessons on the topic (including toy examples), 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 learn about open access policies) and the ultimate goal (participants should make publishing open access a part of their normal research workflow).

Open Research Resource Browser

You may find that our Open Research Resource Browser helps you with finding resources to include in your workshop. 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.

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.

Over to you…

Plan your workshop 25 min

Working alone or in a small group (especially if you’re planning a workshop on a similar topic), sketch an outline of your workshop and the content you think your colleagues will need to know for their own work.

Think about..

• Which aspects of the demo lessons would you use in your workshop? What is missing? What would you leave out or change?
• What resources will you use to help you develop your workshop?
• What kinds of exercises (especially, interactive or hands-on activities) might help your attendees understand and learn how to share their code?

Ask for help

Our instructors are here to help you. Ask them about:

• Where to find resources
• What exercises work best for what learning objectives
• Feedback on your workshop plan
• Best practices that you aren’t sure about
• General questions about open access publishing

Key Points

• We’re aiming for practical results!