How to learn and teach RDM – a collection

At this point, FAIRagro has tabulated various learning and teaching materials on handling research data for the agrosystems research community.

Which target groups are the educational materials for?

The individual resources are aimed at different target groups with regard to

1. the function of the target group addressed: column “Target Group (Learner)”
   • this could be researchers, students, data managers, data stewards, but also policy makers, librarians or farm managers, for example
2. the competence level of the target group addressed: column “Expertise (Skill) Level”
   • this can be beginner, intermediate or advanced, depending on previous experience in the field of RDM
3. the research domain of the target group addressed: column “Target Group (Domain)”
   • this can be, for example, research disciplines such as agricultural sciences, soil science, biodiversity science, biology, environmental sciences, geosciences, plant sciences or special data types such as weather data, climate data, social science data or phenotyping data
4. the users of the resource: column “Target Group (Users)”
   • this can either be a person who wants to use the materials to educate themselves – the Learner
   • or a person who wants to use the materials to offer workshops or training on the topics themselves – the Teacher

How are the materials described?

The minimal metadata set for educational resources compiled by the RDA was adapted for the description of the resources [1].

As a result, the compiled educational resources are comprehensively described with title, abstract, author(s), learning outcomes, keywords, primary language and access costs, and can be filtered in the table according to various aspects.

On the one hand, this allows those who want to learn about handling research data themselves to find suitable self-study courses or webinar recordings. At the same time, teachers have access to various materials that they can use for their own training courses and workshops. To quickly find suitable materials, the “Target Group (User) overall” column can be filtered by “Teacher”, “Learner” or “Teacher, Learner”.

For some resources, several different materials are available. This is the case, for example, if a webinar recording can be found as a video on YouTube and the corresponding presentation slides have also been published on Zenodo. In this case, the following metadata was compiled for material 1, the presentation slides, which are mainly of interest to teachers for subsequent use:

1. the target group (user) – in this case teachers
2. the resource type – in this case presentation slides
3. the URL where the material can be found
4. the URL type – in this case DOI
5. the license – e.g. CC BY 4.0
6. the available formats – e.g. pdf and pptx

The same information is also available for material 2 (resource type: video, target group (user): learner) and, if applicable, for material 3 and so on. 

The table is available in both English and German and also contains a READ ME spreadsheet in which explanations for the individual metadata can be found.

This work was created as part of the NFDI consortium FAIRagro (www.fairagro.net). We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the German Research Foundation (DFG) – project number 501899475.

Did we miss something?

If you know of any other discipline-specific teaching materials or have any other comments or suggestions, please send your feedback to training@fairagro.net.

References

1. Hoebelheinrich, N. J., Biernacka, K., Brazas, M., Castro, L. J., Fiore, N., Hellström, M., Lazzeri, E., Leenarts, E., Martinez Lavanchy, P. M., Newbold, E., Nurnberger, A., Plomp, E., Vaira, L., van Gelder, C. W. G., & Whyte, A. (2022). Recommendations for a minimal metadata set to aid harmonised discovery of learning resources (1.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.15497/RDA00073