Workshop Report | 03. September 2024

The networking of actors and resources - OER in the NFDI and in the data competence centers: a workshop report

Authors: Katharina Bergmann, Jonathan D. Geiger, Marina Lemaire, Johanna Konstanciak, Andrea Polywka, Ruth Reiche, Sibylle Söring, Anne Voigt

Open Educational Resources (OER) for developing data literacy and skills in research data management (RDM) are a central topic in the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) and beyond. Most RDM projects and networks collect and/or produce OER and deal with questions of perpetuation, collection, curation and linking. The FAIR principles are just as applicable here as they are to research data.

Against this background, representatives of the NFDI consortia NFDI4Culture, NFDI4Memory, the data competence centers QUADRIGA and HERMES and the infrastructure project of the NFDI section Training & Education - DALIA - met for a joint workshop at the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz on 22 and 23 April 2024. The projects presented their respective work statuses and then explored collaboration opportunities, synergy effects and key discussion points in interactive formats.

The NFDI consortium NFDI4Culture (project duration 2020-2025) presented a service that provides a selection of OER aimed at the humanities and cultural studies communities and includes both generic and subject-specific offerings on research data management and data skills. Beforehand, the Cultural Research Data Academy team surveyed the needs of the NFDI4Culture communities in selected events and formats, collected them in a portfolio and evaluated them using selected quality criteria. This resulted in the “Educational Resource Finder” (ERF), a curated selection of German and English-language training and further education offers aimed at interested parties at all levels of knowledge and which is constantly updated.

The NFDI consortium NFDI4Memory (project duration 2023-2028) presented its work packages for the “Data Literacy” task area in the field of OER. The task area aims to improve data literacy in research and teaching in historical disciplines. To this end, a data literacy training catalog with didactic and content recommendations will be created and target group-specific training modules will be developed. The content of the training catalog will be compiled through in-house research, self-developed materials and a survey of the community. The information will then be prepared for online presentation and search in a workflow that is currently being developed.

The BMBF-funded data competence center QUADRIGA (project duration 2023-26) unites the four disciplines of digital humanities, administrative science, computer science and information science along the data types text, table and moving image at the science location Berlin-Brandenburg. Based on case studies, the center develops interactive textbooks (Jupyter Notebooks), the QUADRIGA Educational Resources (QER), which have a modular structure and enable learning objectives to be monitored by means of an assessment. Workflows - in particular the interaction with QUADRIGA Space and the QUADRIGA Navigator - and exemplary designs were presented during the workshop by Zhenya Samoilova, Sonja Schimmler and Bettina Buchholz. Sibylle Söring took part on behalf of the sub-project Continuation.

The data competence center HERMES (Humanities Education in Research, Data, and Methods), funded by the BMBF (project duration 2023-2026), aims to impart and further develop data skills in the field of humanities and cultural studies. Present at the workshop were the employees of the HERMES formats “Open Educational Resources” and “HERMES Hub”: In HERMES, OER are both created and aggregated in a resource base. A metadata recommendation is being developed for this purpose, which will be based on a cross-project metadata base schema. HERMES places particular emphasis on keywording the resources using the TaDiRAH taxonomy in order to be able to filter by research method. The HERMES team will also advise researchers on the design and implementation of OER materials.

The DALIA project is a BMBF-funded infrastructure project (duration 2022-2025) of the Training and Education (EduTrain) section of the National Research Data Infrastructure. The project goal is to build a knowledge graph for data literacy and RDM competence-related OER. The aim is also to bring together stakeholders in the field and to identify and take into account their preliminary work and needs. The knowledge graph is the basis of a platform through which OER can be found by users and listed by authors.

Results of the workshop

Three areas of action in particular were identified as key challenges for the further harmonization of the project work processes:

• Metadata and interoperability of OER (materials and repositories)
• Sustainability
• Cooperation

Metadata and interoperability: In order to design OER in accordance with the FAIR principles, their description (metadata) must be based on standard data and controlled vocabularies. Various metadata standards are available for OER, but the overall challenge lies in the balancing act between existing standards and individual needs, which span the poles of individual capacities, technical framework conditions and the needs of the respective community. Synergies result from a jointly developed application profile and the joint evaluation of the DALIA OER metadata base schema “DALIA Interchange Format” (DIF). Further potential for cooperation lies in the preparation of case studies, training courses and needs analyses.

Sustainability: The topic of sustainability of infrastructure services encompasses various levels. It is clear that a service that is not sustainably organized and financed cannot exist in the long term. In addition to the operating models, the use of open data standards is also necessary in order to reduce dependencies on proprietary formats and tools. However, the workshop participants focused on a third aspect of sustainability: the acceptance and use of the service by the community. In order to acquire financial resources, the offering must be demonstrably relevant to the respective specialist community. This must be demonstrated, for example, by access or download figures and interactions with the operators. How the target groups can be addressed and encouraged to use a specific OER platform is an open question. It goes without saying that optimally serving the needs plays a major role here, but these are not yet fully known. In particular, it was found that the needs of teachers and their OER usage behavior are less well known.

Cooperation: The third topic cluster consisted of considerations for further cooperation between the people and projects involved in the workshop. In addition to the measures discussed in the area of metadata and sustainability, such as use cases and synoptic metadata schema comparisons between the projects, several subsequent meetings and a follow-up workshop were agreed for spring 2025. Where possible, duplication of work should be avoided and the exchange between the projects should be maintained.

In summary, it can be said that there are major overlaps in the work programs of all workshop participants (NFDI consortia and data competence centers) and that the discourse will not only be more fruitful through joint events, but that duplication of work can also be identified and reduced. It also became clear that virtually all aspects (metadata, funding, community acceptance, etc.) are closely linked and interrelated. Accordingly, a series of next steps were planned - in addition to further meetings to exchange information on the metadata profiles, in particular a follow-up workshop in which the circle of participating RDM projects from the humanities and social sciences is to be expanded.