Instructor Notes

Format

  • About 3 hours online, two instructors.
  • Participants advise researchers on RDM and usually do not program. They do not install anything: all tools are shown in short live demos.
  • Each case episode follows the same structure (about 45 minutes):
    1. Scarytale as a yes/no guessing game (5 minutes)
    2. Present the case (5 minutes)
    3. Group work in breakout rooms (15 minutes)
    4. Short summary of the groups (5 minutes)
    5. Live demo of one or two tools (10 minutes)
    6. A small first step and where to learn more (5 minutes)

Suggested schedule

Time Episode
0:00 Introduction, collect consulting questions
0:15 Case 1: Moving patient data from Excel to a database
1:00 Break (15 minutes)
1:15 Case 2: A team overwriting each other’s scripts
2:00 Case 3: Enriching a list of journals with metadata
2:45 Decision guide, wrap-up
3:00 End

The schedule is tight. If time runs short, shorten the group work or skip the Scarytale in case 3.

Didactic principles

Based on the playbook “How to Encourage Researchers to Adopt Good RDM Practices” (RDMTraining4NFDI). Participants can use the same principles in their own consulting:

  • Make consequences tangible: start with a horror story, and always provide a solution.
  • Show that good RDM pays off: success can be small (better file organisation), medium (reproducible analysis) or big (reuse, citations).
  • Answer “What’s in it for me?”: show where a tool removes work, not where it adds work.
  • Make the first step small: good enough and adopted is better than perfect and ignored.

Scarytales

The stories come from the Research Data Scarytales of the Kompetenznetzwerk Forschungsdatenmanagement Thüringen (CC0, also on Zenodo). How to play:

  1. One instructor reads the solution beforehand.
  2. Participants only see the teaser and ask yes/no questions.
  3. The round ends when someone has guessed what happened.
  4. Read the solution and the RDM conclusion, then move on to the case.

The stories are in German. For an English-speaking group, translate the teaser.

Preparation

Notes on the cases

Introduction

Case 1: Moving Patient Data from Excel to a Database

Live demo (10 minutes)


Case 2: A Team Overwriting Each Other's Scripts

Live demo (10 minutes)


Case 3: Enriching a List of Journals with Metadata

Live demo (10 minutes)

  1. Open the DOAJ API for one ISSN in the browser, e.g. Scientific Data: https://doaj.org/api/search/journals/issn%3A2052-4463. Show title, publisher, licence, publication fee (apc) and subjects in the JSON. Most browsers display JSON in a readable form.
  2. Show the same journal in the Data Journals Dashboard.
  3. Optional: show the field enrichment_source in the metadata collection to discuss documenting sources and AI use.

Decision Guide: Which Tool for Which Question?