OER1157 Oral Presentation ppt

Thursday 12 May 14.30 Cockcroft Theatre

MANTRA for Change

Stuart Macdonald, University of Edinburgh

Conference Theme: Collaboration and communities

Abstract: For data sharing, access and management in the future to become a higher priority within scholarly communication than it is now, new generations of scientists and scholars need to learn to do research in ways that support these ends. This paper describes a work in progress to create open cross- and multi-disciplinary online learning resources to support academic culture change, adding a timely resource to the OER commons.
The Research Data MANTRA project (2010-2011) aims to develop online learning materials which reflect best practice in research data management grounded in three disciplinary contexts: social science, clinical psychology, and geoscience. The resulting materials will be embedded in three participating post-graduate programmes and made available through the Transkills programme for use by all postgraduate and early career researchers as well as made available generally through an open license and deposited in JorumOpen, a national repository for open educational resources. In this way, the project deliverables may be used and repurposed by others who wish to provide training in research data management. Indeed, external partners will provide early feedback to ensure the course meets their needs as well as the internal partners.
In addition to web-based modules that students can work through at their own pace, the course will include clips of video interviews with leading academics about data management challenges, as well as practical exercises in handling data in four software analysis environments: SPSS, NVivo, R and ArcGIS.
The project is a partnership between the Data Library, Information Services, the Institute for Academic Development and three academic departments at the University of Edinburgh and is funded by JISC as part of its UK programme, Managing Research Data. It brings together data librarians, e-learning specialists, media specialists and lecturers to create and evaluate the resources. We are also collaborating with other projects in the JISC programme and with another university to develop and test the materials produced.

Keywords: research data management; oer; open data; collaboration; research training; postgraduate education; multi-disciplinary resources; transferable skills

References:

Research Data Mantra Project (2010-11), University of Edinburgh. Available: http://www.ed.ac.uk/is/data-library-projects/mantra

Managing Research Data (2010), JISC. Available: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/mrd.aspx