Research Data MANTRA

Robin Rice, Ҫuna Ekmekcioglu, Stuart Macdonald

JISC Managing Research Data (International) Workshop, Birmingham, 28-29 March 2011

Project overview Partnership between

The Data Library in Information Services and The Institute for Academic Development, at the University of

Edinburgh Grounded in three disciplinary contexts: social science, clinical

psychology and geoscience Aims to develop online interactive training materials for PhD

students and early career researchers that will Raise awareness of the key issues related to research data

management Provide guidelines for good practice

Online learning materials Eight units with activities, scenarios and videos

Research data explained Data management plans Organising data File formats and transformation Documentation and metadata Storage and security Data protection, rights and access Preservation, sharing and licensing

Four data handling practicals SPSS, NVivo, R, ArcGIS

Xerte Online Toolkits – University of Nottingham

Progress to date Needs assessment

Completed Authoring content

Completed for five units Data handling practicals

Outlines ready for all, SPSS practical is ready for internal evaluation

Internal feedback on completed units Finalised

User testing – five students Scheduled for early April

Next… Video productions

April - June Evaluation of data handling practicals

May User testing – complete module

June Final modifications in the light of user feedback

July

Next… Learning materials to be deposited with an open licence

in JorumOpen and Xpert August

Learning materials to be embedded in three participating postgraduate programmes and made available through Transkills programme for use by all postgraduate students and early career researchers Next academic year

Lessons learned Time – underestimated! Authoring content – not an easy task...

Re-using existing materials vs writing from scratchCopyright – images, videosConsistency in style, terminology, Data handling practicals

Setting up Xerte Online Toolkits (XOT) on the serverSecurity issues Issues with the software

Lessons learned Working with a default XOT template

Limitations of the template Finding volunteers for user testing – not easy! Issues with data handling practicals

Tension between data handling and data analysis in terms of actual content

Ensuring clear explanation of software specific jargon/technical terminology/process-specific language

Retaining consistency across four data handling practicals in terms of look and feel, flow, content, audience

Thank you Project website

http://www.ed.ac.uk/is/data-library-projects/mantra Project wiki

https://www.wiki.ed.ac.uk/display/mantra/Research+Data+Mantra+project+wiki

Institute for Academic Developmenthttp://www.iad.ed.ac.uk/

Xerte – open source elearning http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xerte/toolkits.htm

Contact: Robin Rice – R.Rice@ed.ac.uk