Overview
With the financial support of the EOSC secretariat, and in cooperation with the organisations EUDAT, EGI and OpenAIRE, a workshop will be organised to collaboratively work on the Rules of Participation for training in EOSC. Training is essential to make EOSC work. There is now a significant volume of training activities in EOSC with the associated deliverables and experiences. Obviously, training will be an important element of the future development and evolution of EOSC. With new EOSC (INFRAEOSC) calls on the horizon, and a new EOSC working group on Skills and Training to be established in 2020, it now seems the appropriate moment to bring trainers together and discuss how to improve EOSC training provision by its quality, findability, accessibility and the easier reuse of learning resources.
35 participants representing more than thirty EOSC-related projects and initiatives joined the workshop “Training in the European Open Science Cloud”. This three-day face-to-face workshop took place from 26-28 February 2020 in The Hague, The Netherlands. The workshop was organised by DANS in collaboration with EUDAT, EGI and OpenAIRE. The main outputs are recommended Rules of Participation for training in the EOSC (to support the EOSC Rules of Participation Working Group), and Practical guidance for training service providers who want to participate in the EOSC (of particular benefit to the EOSC Skills and Training Working Group. The workshop and associated report, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3739055, also provided contribution for outlining the EOSC training elements to be included in coming INFRAEOC proposals.
Objectives & Challenges
First, this report provides recommendations for Rules of Participation (RoP) for training in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). These rules should not act as a barrier for training providers, but rather improve the EOSC training provision by its quality, findability, accessibility and the easier reuse of learning resources. These are intended to support the work of EOSC Governance. The authors hope that especially the EOSC Working Group on RoP will benefit, as well as the EOSC Working Group on Skills and Training. Second, it provides practical guidance for training service providers on preparing training services and training materials for the EOSC.
Main Findings
The main workshop result regarding Rules of Participation for training is the recommended adaptation of the EOSC Rules of Participation (v0.2) to include training services and training materials. Our training-related recommendations are integrated in the “Introduction” section of that document as well as in the sections on “Data” and “Services”. This illustrates how deeply training is entwined with the other services and with data. Main findings include 1) Recommended Rules of Participation for training in the EOSC and 2) Practical guidance for training service providers who want to participate in the EOSC .Also, we recommend three new terms for the glossary in the RoP: “training delivery”, “training materials”, and “training service provider”.
Main Recommendations
The ultimate goal of EOSC Training is to make sure there is sufficient expertise among the people who build, run and use the EOSC, as well as available - and findable - training for upskilling for Open Science and EOSC tools and services for all the relevant EOSC training stakeholders.
The current training landscape is large and heterogeneous, with many Research Infrastructures (RIs), e-infrastructures, service providers and EOSC projects having built or building their own training programme; on some occasions even with their own training portal. It is crucial that all these efforts of those training providers contribute in a coherent way, using a properly defined process, in order to enhance an EOSC skills and training provision. It is very important not to duplicate existing work, but to connect existing training outputs of infrastructures and projects, and to make it discoverable for the users.
In this workshop the attendees worked collaboratively on the practical guidance that is needed next to the RoPs for training. This section offers recommendations for practical guidance for training service providers in three areas:
- Stakeholders in EOSC Training: Define stakeholders and their needs, define the Minimum Viable Product for the EOSC training provision and make sure to engage all stakeholders.
- Requirements for training providers, and trainers regarding EOSC skills development and training: Focus on quality assurance by describing the organisation’s strategies and work processes regarding training, describing the training with respect to skill profiles needed in the EOSC, and setting up trainer self-accreditation collaboratively.
- Recommendations for a federated EOSC training catalogue and its training resources: Use standards for describing training materials, ensure harvestability and discoverability, describe policies to support quality control for training materials, and comply with FAIR principles.
