Time to fill the gaps: Building out a national training inventory

This community discussion seeks to bring together the instructors and facilitators tasked with upskilling researchers and support staff. While this collective dialogue among instructors is not new, what is new is the traction that various groups are getting.

The newly formed group of eResearch support staff gathered by the Melbourne Data Analytics Platform (MDAP) and Sydney Informatics Hub (SIH) is one such group, as is the Lightweight Working Group (LWG): Researcher digital skills training data for enabling digital infrastructure use, spearheaded by University of Melbourne’s David Flanders during the pre-Skills Summit discussions.

In this session we seek to build on the momentum, by including a hands-on working session. Participants are asked to come with information to share and questions they seek to answer. During the first half of this session, attendees will populate a public document with shareable training details. The goal is to at least double the size of the new cross-institutional national training collection started by the LWG.

The second half of this session will be to ask questions to arrive at next steps. What do we need to do to continue building out this national training inventory and who will be in charge of maintaining and distributing the archive? What platforms exist and are used to capture training data and material and make it readily maintainable and findable? Can the material be reused and how do we recognise and capture re-use? Do we know about how to apply a license to our materials for appropriate reuse or do we need guidance?

While there will likely be more questions than these, one question has been answered. When can we move from talking to doing? That time is now.