Background information

The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and Research Data Netherlands (RDNL) are internationally-recognised centres for excellence in digital curation with a focus on building capacity in research data management (RDM). Both organisations have a history of providing training in RDM, through face-to-face workshops and online training modules. This training is aimed at a range of audiences from the HE sector including researchers, librarians, information specialists and research office staff.

The UK and the Netherlands are world leaders in RDM, both in terms of national-level initiatives and individual institutional examples of best practice, such as the University of Edinburgh. Increasingly, this experience is in demand internationally from institutions and countries newly engaging with Open Data, Open Research and RDM, demonstrated by a surge in numbers of international participants at training courses and increasing consultancy requests. The DCC and RDM services team at Edinburgh regularly host international visitors who want to benefit from our experience and leadership in RDM service delivery.

RDM Services MOOC

To meet this demand and increase the range of countries that DCC and RDNL engage with, we will collaborate to develop an RDM MOOC. The University of Edinburgh is already an acknowledged leader in this area, through its support for the MANTRA online training resources and its online RDMS MOOC, both of which deliver skills development in the fundamental principles of RDM for researchers and librarians. Our proposed MOOC would complement these resources, specifically targeting support services providers, and enabling the design, development and review of institutional RDM infrastructure. 

We envisage the MOOC will include five modules on:

• The business of RDM support
• Quick wins and starting points
• Active research support
• Data Publishing and sharing services
• Service refinement and improvement

Timescales

We aim to complete the project within 12-18 months. It is likely that the MOOC will not be fully completed by the end of the innovation fund grant period, however during the course of development we will produce short, contained video segments which will be made available to the RDM community as a reusable resource. We expect these to generate interest in the MOOC before publication and enhance the reputation of the developing organisations.