FOSTER Open Sciences: Courses

To foster responsible research and innovation, research communities, institutions, and funders are shifting their practices and requirements towards Open Science. Open Science skills are becoming increasingly essential for researchers. Indeed general awareness of Open Science has grown among EU researchers, but the practical adoption can be further improved. Recognizing a gap between the needed and the provided training offer, the FOSTER project offers practical guidance and training to help researchers learn how to open up their research within a particular domain or research environment.

Aiming for a sustainable approach, FOSTER focused on strengthening the Open Science training capacity by establishing and supporting a community of trainers. The creation of an Open Science training handbook was a first step towards bringing together trainers to share their experiences and to create an open and living knowledge resource. A subsequent series of train-the-trainer bootcamps helped trainers to find inspiration, improve their skills and to intensify exchange within a peer group. Four trainers, who attended one of the bootcamps, contributed a case study on their experiences and how they rolled out Open Science training within their own institutions.

On its platform the project provides a range of online courses and resources to learn about key Open Science topics. FOSTER awards users gamification badges when completing courses in order to provide incentives and rewards, and to spur them on to even greater achievements in learning.

The paper at hand describes FOSTER Plus’ training strategies, shares the lessons learnt and provides guidance on how to reuse the project’s materials and training approaches.

The aim of this tutorial is to assist course instructors with creating new courses and editing existing ones in the FOSTER portal.

After completing the module, the course instructors will be able to:

• propose a course
• upload course material in the portal
• create a course
• add a lesson and lesson material
• create and add a quiz
• publish the course
• communicate with the course participants (use the Forums)

In this moderated course you will learn how to reuse the FOSTER toolkit on any other context like the website or the Learning Management System (LMS) of your institution.

The Open Science Toolkit https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/toolkit consists of ten online courses addressing key Open Science topics: What is Open Science?; Best practices; Managing and Sharing Research Data; Open source software and workflows; Data protection and Ethics; Open Licensing; Open access publishing; Sharing preprints; Open peer review; and Open Science and innovation.

This moderated course is available in the FOSTER Learning Management System platform.

A group of fourteen authors came together in February 2018 at the TIB (German National Library of Science and Technology) in Hannover to create an open, living handbook on Open Science training. High-quality trainings are fundamental when aiming at a cultural change towards the implementation of Open Science principles. Teaching resources provide great support for Open Science instructors and trainers.

The Open Science training handbook will be a key resource and a first step towards developing Open Access and Open Science curricula and andragogies. Supporting and connecting an emerging Open Science community that wishes to pass on their knowledge as multipliers, the handbook will enrich training activities and unlock the community’s full potential.

Building on Open Science Training Handbook and on successes of over 40 online and face-to-face events that FOSTER organized in 2017-2018, this report provides good practice recommendations on open science training targeting researchers and multipliers – train-the-trainers approaches for research support staff and librarians.

GOAL:  Trainers can use this game to facilitate ‘train-the-trainer’ workshops. Participants design a usable framework for a training – which will they deliver themselves at a later stage -  on (a) topic(s) of their choice. The card game offers the participants the option to preselect audience type, audience size, training type and audience knowledge level. In addition, two ‘unforeseen’ circumstances can be added: audience mood, and ‘trouble’ (uh-oh!).  Apart from going home with a usable design for a training, the audience of this workshop will also benefit from the input and experience of the other participants.  

AUDIENCE: (Potential) trainers on Open Science related topics.  These trainers are supposed to have a sufficient level of knowledge about their training topic(s) in order for them to be able to pass it on in the trainings they will organise themselves at a later stage. This exercise is suitable for max. 7 groups, consisting of 2-4 trainers per group.

DURATION: 1,5 hour preparation time, +15 mins for persona exercise, + 15 minutes per group for presentation and evaluation

This game is still in beta mode. New versions will be released as we have more chances to practice with real audiences!

This game is licensed under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. You can reuse and remix this game as you please, but you have to credit Gwen Franck as the creator, and you have to share the new versions under the same conditions as the original.