The ORION ‘Train-the-Trainer’ course was developed to help Open Science advocates and stakeholders learn from the training that has been delivered throughout the project and equip them with the skills to run their own training. The course ran from the 19th October to the 4th November and 21 people from all over the world participated in the online training.
The course was originally conceived as an in-person 3 day ‘bootcamp’ that would take place at the Max-Delbrück-Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin. However, due to the pandemic restrictions this was revised at an early planning stage to be an entirely digital program. The knowledge gained in producing the two MOOCs on Open Science in the life sciences helped immensely in the course design and implementation.
World wide interest
65 applications were received from all over the world and these were then assessed to award the 21 available places. Candidates with a clear plan for implementing the Open Science training they received were favoured. The selected 21 participants represented 17 countries from 4 different continents. This level of internationality demonstrates the importance of Open Science to institutions across the world, and that digital formats for training can allow for wider participation.
The course featured two webinars, two modules of an online course (hosted on OpenLearnCreate from Open University under the following link) and it culminated in the participants delivering a 20 minute talk or micro-training at a live-streamed online event for Berlin Science Week called the Open Science Cafe.
The online course was created on OpenLearnCreate, a platform created and hosted by the Open University. It was divided into two modules: Theory and Methods. The theory module focused on conveying the principles of Adult Education, for example identifying audiences, focusing on participants’ needs, and selecting material. The methods module focused on formats and activities that can be utilised to create online and offline training, for example, the FOSTER EU-project card exchange, a brainwalking activity, improving webinar experiences, and evaluating training. The online modules acted both as a way of building a sense of community and of demonstrating how certain online tools could be used in training.
Coffee, cake and Open Science
The course culminated in the Open Science Cafe event at the international science festival: Berlin Science Week. The participants got to choose which group of three people they wanted to be in, each group was responsible for presenting on one of seven Open Science topics; Open source, Open access, Open data, Science communication, Open content, Citizen science and Open hardware. The event itself ran from 14.00 - 19.00 on Nov 4th, with two talks and two 10 minutes breaks per hour.
The entire event was recorded and is now available on the ORION MOOC YouTube channel and as a downloadable file on Zenodo. It (and the videos of the individual talks/micro trainings) will function as a valuable open educational resources (OER) for the Open Science community in general. All the participants that finished the course got an ORION Open Science Train-the-Trainer certificate.
Open and sustainable training material
The ORION Open Science Train-the-Trainer online course will remain online and will be publicly available, the participants have lifetime access and new participants can take the course at any time. The course material and activities will be slightly adapted to be self-paced and standalone. All the materials in the course are licenced under CC-BY and can be shared and reused freely. There is also a potential collaboration with partners from the FAIRisFAIR and European Open Science Cloud projects to reuse part or all of the ORION Train-the-Trainer course.
The train-the-trainer course and the Open Science Cafe event have helped support a number of Open Science enthusiasts to have a greater understanding of how to implement Open Science training. In addition, the participants have created a new Open Science OER in the form of the videos from the final event.
More information
For more information please contact Luiza Bengtsson or Zoe Ingram of the ORION Training team at MDC Berlin.