Since June 2022, in ELIXIR-CONVERGE, hackathons-style events have been organised with the (beyond life sciences) community to develop FAIR lesson plans. Community-led, open lesson plans originate from the 2021 FAIRsFAIR training handbook, addressing competencies, training designs and 16 lesson plans.
We aim to provide a consistent approach for FAIR training. Focus is the shared foundations and learning paths critical for long-term FAIR data sustainability. Although lesson plans aren’t ready-to-go courses yet, they offer the framework and the basis for FAIR training. A community-led exercise helps to harmonise FAIR training efforts and create a basis for the implementation of FAIR data in local organisations: what do researchers, data stewards, other data experts have to be skilled in to apply FAIR in projects and to datasets?
This community effort to create cross-domain FAIR lesson plans is highly innovative, as most local organisations regardless of the discipline struggle with training about the FAIR principles in practice (how do you go/do FAIR). Such an aim reaches beyond the efforts of ELIXIR-CONVERGE, potentially even beyond ELIXIR. The challenge is to identify and incorporate relevant training materials from national and local contexts and cross-domain/domain-agnostic resources into lesson plans.
The main activity of this Biohackathon project is to review and expand the current lesson plans. We will discuss the need and scope of the lesson plans collection, collectively write new lesson plans, and inspire on integrating lesson plans into local training programs. We think this Biohackathon project stimulates novel collaborations in data FAIRification training.
All contributors from and beyond ELIXIR are invited to bring in their expertise, regardless of academic qualification. There is no minimum or maximum number. The lesson plan format was chosen as it was used in FAIRsFAIR as well and it works so far for community members.
- Gained insight into existing materials aimed towards researchers and data managers, specifically focused on FAIR data management
- Added relevant elements from those materials to existing lesson plans
- Have created content for new lesson plans, as well as extended existing ones, f.i. for a new audience
- Published the updated and new lesson plans via the Training Platform Github
- Integrated lesson plans into learning paths for various stakeholders
- Established an editorial board as part of the emerging ELIXIR RDM Community
- Created a sustainability plan as part of the emerging ELIXIR RDM Community
Stephan Nylinder, Martijn Kersloot, Mijke Jetten
Project document with all info