Research Data MANTRA (online training units & data handling tutorials)

MANTRA is an online training course which provides guidelines for good practice in research data management. This release presents the learning units and practical data handling tutorials and materials available on the MANTRA site as of October 2017. The course content is applicable to all research disciplines and is particularly appropriate for postgraduate students and early career researchers who work with data and would like to learn more about managing their research data. This course is an Open Educational Resource that is free for anyone to access and use via the website: https://mantra.edina.ac.uk/ 

The online course includes eight online units and one set of offline (downloadable) data handling tutorials:

Research data explained: Understand the nature of research data in a variety of disciplinary settings
Data management plans: Create a data management plan and apply it from the start to the finish of your research project
Organising data: Name, organise, and version your data files effectively
File formats & transformations: Gain familiarity with different kinds of data formats and know how and when to transform your data
Documentation, metadata & citation: Document your data well for yourself and others, learn about metadata standards and cite data properly
Storage & security: Know how to store and transport your data safely and securely (backup and encryption)
Data protection, rights & access: Understand legal and ethical requirements for managing data about human subjects; manage intellectual property rights
Sharing, preservation & licensing: Understand the benefits of sharing, preserving and licensing data for re-use

Data handling using ArcGIS
Data handling using NVIVO
Data handling using R
Data handling using SPSS

The online course units were created using open source software Xerte Online Toolkits 2.x and can be imported and edited into Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) such as Moodle. Video interviews with University of Edinburgh researchers and selected videos are available via the Data Library YouTube channel.