EDINA newsline
December 2011: Volume 16 Issue 4
The new Research Data Management Training course (MANTRA) website developed by the Data Library (see Newsline issue 16.3) has already been visited by 3,000 people since its launch as an Open Educational Resource on 10 October, and has received international recognition from the data curation community through social media communications.
The course is a key component in the University of Edinburgh’s data management awareness and improvement campaign, resulting from the first Research Data Management University policy in the UK, passed last Spring. MANTRA aims to affect long-term culture change by improving practice in data management and sharing by PhD students and early career researchers.
The project manager, Robin Rice, was invited to speak on policy development to the new Managing Research Data infrastructure projects recently funded by JISC at the programme launch meeting in Nottingham last month. Shortly after, she led a workshop with participation from other RDM training projects in the UK and US on Delivering Postgraduate Training at the International Digital Curation Conference in Bristol. Topics discussed at length by the delegates included creating discipline-specific learning materials, modes of delivery (face-to-face vs. online), and engaging with postgraduate training programmes.
The MANTRA course, as an Open Educational Resource, may be freely used by anyone.
The most popular units in the course so far are Research Data Explained, Organising Data, and Data Management Plans.