abstract
- Trainings for research data management (RDM) are an essential part to spread and enable the cultural change of data handling in sciences. As domain-specific trainings gain higher satisfaction compared to generic ones, NFDI4ING developed basic RDM trainings specifically for the engineering sciences, in addition to specialised trainings for certain tools and applications. The trainings are publicly available as Open Educational Resources (OER) at https://education.nfdi4ing.de. As a consortium of NFDI's first funding round, we present our approaches and share our experiences in the community-driven development of basic RDM trainings: For the target group of researchers and university teachers, we built self-paced trainings that can be used in teaching classes and workshops as well. Instead of building up trainings from the scratch, we identified and reused existing RDM training materials (e. g., by TU9), and extended them with engineering-specific contents and interactive elements. The learning objectives matrix by Petersen et al. was used as an orientation tool for identifying relevant learning content and as a working basis for subject-specific definition of learning outcomes. We foster active learning within the trainings by using interactive elements like quizzes. The training modules cover the phases of the research data life cycle (DLC) as well as cross-topic modules like licenses and metadata. To collaborate with the community on the trainings and to cover the thematical broadness of engineering sciences, we chose a community-driven approach. In so-called Special Interest Group (SIG) meetings, interested members of the community were invited to give feedback on the trainings and to contribute. Valuable input were especially engineering characteristics like engineering-specific data formats, and use cases like 'data horror stories' from (failed) construction because of missing RDM. The various perspectives of engineers as well as infrastructure employees (i. e. IT and librarians) were collected during the online sessions and documented on interactive whiteboards. With our approach, we contribute to OER and the FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusage). The trainings are provided online and openly in terms of access, technology and content: no registration is required to access the trainings, the non-proprietary Markdown dialect LiaScript and H5P are used to implement the trainings, and the source files are provided in a GitLab repository. The community is invited to contribute with corrections, feedback and use cases. Quality is ensured by the cross-disciplinary NFDI4ING training team and the option for users to provide feedback, where given feedback is publicly visible. The registration in DALIA, Twillo, and OERsi as well as on the discipline-specific page of forschungsdaten.info makes the trainings findable. Access to the trainings as well as the underlaying files is open and without registration. Interoperable file formats and a CC BY license enable reusability of the materials. After the cornerstones of the approach have been presented before within NFDI4ING, with sharing our experiences with the whole RDM community, we want to contribute to the development of open RDM trainings and foster the exchange on the approach and contents.