Step 2: Select or develop learning experiences

Below is a list of learning experiences commonly used in teaching and training based on Via et al. (2020) and our own experiences.

Selecting the right learning experiences, i.e. the most suitable setting or environment for a specific learning activity or process, is not a straightforward thing to do. You need to tailor the methods used to the time available, along with the experience and skills of the target group and their expectations. If the course is part of a curriculum, students are unlikely to challenge the need for training. In this case, you can concentrate on thinking about how to get participants to learn. Informal training is often needed when looking to develop and enhance the skills of staff members. There may be a whole host of reasons why people choose to attend informal training events. Therefore, tailoring relevant and directly applicable materials to meet participants' day-to-day research activities is a great way to motivate them. By offering different types of teaching or training, you as a teacher or trainer will learn what works best for different groups of learners over time.

FAIR training could be delivered as part of a formal course, part of a training or promotional event, or it can be embedded in managerial processes, e.g. grant application support, ethical review process, or basic training for new affiliate researchers. It could also be a lecture, a workshop, a series of events, an online course, self-learning materials, or training interventions.

It is easier to meet the expectations of students if you know what kind of understanding they already have about FAIR. If possible, try to get to know your course participants before or at the beginning of the training. This can be achieved by pre-tasks, a self-assessment survey, a poll or a discussion. If there are participants with pertinent prior knowledge, you can make use of that during the training.

No matter what type of teaching and training you choose when implementing FAIR in your institute, it is crucial to stay abreast of relevant local/regional resources that are available to your stakeholders to meet their day-to-day research needs and to be compliant with policies and regulations.

Lectures

Lecturing as a traditional form of teaching/training is an effective way to provide basic information about the topic. Lectures can be recorded and used as flipped classroom (8) material combined with an interactive workshop. Starting a lecture with researchers describing their experiences, how they have implemented the elements of FAIR in their work, or a typical researcher's most urgent questions about data handling will help to engage the audience from the beginning. Basic concepts of a topic can be communicated effectively through brief lectures. Due to the far-reaching goal of FAIR, instructors should anticipate many questions from the audience, in turn making it good practice to include discussions, other activating methods and hands-on exercises after the lecture to consolidate the key points of learning. It is important to stress the role of FAIR in terms of good research practice, but it should be made clear that it is not always feasible to implement all aspects of FAIR to their fullest extent.

Pros: A lecture is a great delivery format for experienced and motivated learners where instructors can maximise content delivery in a dedicated time frame. Going beyond a dedicated lecture on FAIR, with a bit of planning, instructors may be able to fully incorporate FAIR teaching in any existing course, e.g. an introduction to research methods.

Cons: It can be time-consuming in the course design phase to incorporate relevant materials into a course without overloading information for learners. Learner engagement is key.

Workshops

Workshops can be organised around a certain FAIR topic, or they can be more general in scope. By way of example, a ‛What should I know about FAIR' workshop can allow participants to discuss what FAIR means to them. In a ‛Where should I deposit my data to be FAIR' workshop, participants can choose a repository and deposit a dataset. In a ‛How to write a DMP' workshop, participants can write their own DMP. Workshops can also focus on a research method where you can embed tasks involving FAIR, such as local institutional data storage options, documentation, and file naming conventions.

Arranging a workshop gives you an opportunity to find out and discuss the main questions or problems your target audience has concerning FAIR. Organisers can also provide standard offerings of FAIR workshops that will be repeated every year and plan for add-on workshops that would vary from year to year to meet the specific needs of the audience.

Pros: Workshops are ideal for delivering content on a single topic or to a specific target audience. They are short and easy to organise, with great flexibility in modifying materials to meet the different needs of different audiences, e.g. researchers vs. entry-level graduate students.

Cons: It is almost impossible to cover all FAIR topics in one single workshop. Therefore, teachers or training providers can design and conduct a workshop series covering various FAIR topics. Sometimes, learners might miss out on important topics covered in individual workshops due to self-selection biases, e.g. I only attend the workshops I deem interesting, or because of time constraints. Making connections from one workshop to another with brief recaps or highlighting key points of past and future workshops will be a useful strategy to promote full training in FAIR.

Events

Your audience may not know about the FAIR principles. A good way to influence these types of audiences is to raise awareness with brief presentations at the events they already participate in, e.g. unit meetings, events of the faculty, newcomer events at the university, and all kinds of Open Research events. FAIR can also be a topic of coffee lectures or working lunches.

Take advantage of opportunities to reach your audience in a motivated state. For example, if a funder requires FAIR data, try to get a time slot at an event organised by the funder to explain what FAIR means. Funders are generally happy to accommodate this type of collaboration.

Pros: Outreach events are most suitable for promotional purposes. They are usually concise and provide a great opportunity to make allies of those willing to advance the FAIR agenda.

Cons: Time is often limited at outreach events. The messages about FAIR you want to convey must be clear and concise. They will be ideal ways to provide information about future training offerings, or to direct attendees to self-learning materials.

Online courses

Online courses are a convenient way to organise training for a large number of participants or for participants from many locations. They can be taught fully online without any live interactions (i.e. asynchronous online learning), as a course where live training is given (i.e. synchronous online learning), or as a combination of the two.

Pros: Online courses, particularly in the form of asynchronous learning, might suit the needs of many busy learners who would appreciate a flexible format where they can take the course independently and at their own pace. Updates and adjustments to materials in common online course Learning Management Systems (LMS) are easy to manage with minimal impact on learner experiences.

Cons: The risk of losing learners is very high in online courses (i.e. high enrolment rate but low completion rate). While traditional courses usually retain about 80% of students (Atchley et al. 2013), the median completion rate for large-scale online courses (i.e. Massive Open Online Courses) is about 13% (Jordan 2015). This is partly due to the lack of live interactions and low engagement with the course materials (Muljana et al. 2019). An easy remedy for this could be to make part of your online course synchronous by providing weekly or fortnightly live office hours. Using interactive learning content (e.g. https://h5p.org/) embedded in the LMS will also facilitate retention of the learner's interest.

Self-learning material

Self-learning material is an important part of any training format. This material is a reference for learners to consult as a recommended information source after a course or event. Self-learning material can also be used separately to acquire the basics of FAIR or to check a certain fact. This can include fact sheets, short instructional videos, quizzes to check the level of knowledge, and links to university guidelines and policies. It might be handy to have some instructional print materials, such as flyers and fact sheets. You can use self-learning materials created by other parties, but each higher education institute should still have a clear starting point for its students and researchers on how to follow the FAIR principles at the organisation and where to get help.

When creating self-learning materials, extra attention is needed to organise the content to make it easy for users to browse and find the information they are looking for. The inventory of self-learning materials will grow over time, making it essential to provide users with a clear table of contents or a glossary.

Pros: Self-learning materials can be used and referenced in conjunction with other training formats, such as a workshop or an outreach event. They can be used as references not only by learners but also by teachers, trainers, and research support staff, e.g. grant officers who need to access DMPs for grant applications.

Cons: Self-learning materials are a rather passive learning experience, making it difficult to track learning progress and outcomes. Many learners will fall into a scenario where ‛I will look at it later' means ‛Never'. Since it is relatively easy to produce and compile a large number of self-learning materials, self-learning materials could very quickly become a mess by not paying proper attention to the organisation and by not keeping information up to date, in turn creating difficulties for learners trying to find and access relevant information.

Training interventions (9)

In higher education institutions, we may face situations where the level of our stakeholders' knowledge about the FAIR principles does not meet their everyday research needs. For instance, when reviewing a data management plan, we may encounter a clear knowledge gap, and these situations might be the right entry points to provide specific/customised information about FAIR and start a discussion with the aim of promoting FAIRness in data management, not only to meet grant application and policy requirements, but also to improve the research workflow. Connecting local services, e.g. upcoming workshops or self-learning materials, to the researchers could be an effective way to address the knowledge gap.

Pros: Identifying knowledge gaps and providing locally available resources to address these gaps on a one-on-one basis is a great way to keep in touch with the research community and to effectively meet stakeholders' needs.

Cons: This service model operates on a case-by-case basis, which could prove to be a time-consuming task if you need to reach all the stakeholders in your institute. This could render the service model unscalable, especially if you are operating with a very small service provision team.

Table 6: Overview of advantages and disadvantages of different forms of teaching and training delivery

Type of learning experience	Pros	Cons
Lectures	- Great delivery format for experienced and motivated learners; - Possibility to fully incorporate FAIR content in any existing course.	- Could be time-consuming; - Learner engagement is key.
Workshops	- Ideal for delivering single topic content or for a targeted group; - Flexible, short and easy to organise.	- To cover all topics of FAIR, a workshop series may be required; - Learners might miss out on important topics due to self-selection biases.
Events	- Most suitable for promotional purposes; - Great for networking; - Ideal to provide information for follow-up services and/or direct links to access existing materials.	- Limited time; - Messages need to be clear and concise.
Online courses	- Flexible, self-paced, independent. - Easy to manage and update at the back-end with minimal impact on learner experiences.	- Need to be aware of issues of student retention in asynchronous learning; - Lack of live interactions and low engagement; - Could include weekly or bi-weekly live office hours to include partial synchronous learning; - Use interactive course content to facilitate learner engagement.
Self-learning materials	- Could be used and referenced in conjunction with other training formats; - Could be used by learners, teachers, trainers, and research support staff as references.	- Passive learning; - Not easy to track learning progress and outcomes; - Need to pay attention to the organisation and maintenance of the most up-to-date information in self-learning materials.
Training interventions	- Great way to keep in touch with the research community by directly addressing their knowledge gaps.	- Case-by-case consultation; - Might be time-consuming.

A hybrid model

When planning teaching and training strategies for FAIR, service providers might need to count on resources and collaborations from different units within the institution, while also making use of institutional, local, regional, national and/or international resources, and forging alliances with those willing to maximise the impact of the FAIR teaching and training. Below is a simplified hypothetical hybrid plan to implement FAIR teaching and training strategies using the different delivery formats mentioned above:

• With the joint efforts of the Office of Research and Innovation and the University Library, University M implements an independent self-paced learning programme (online courses) using the existing university course management system (Moodle) to provide general training on FAIR principles along a typical research lifecycle. At the same time, the University Library complements this self-paced online learning programme with a series of hands-on workshops , spanning one academic year, to provide more tailored and focused training on domain/discipline-specific topics. All relevant training materials can be downloaded and used as self-learning materials. Both the learning programme and the library workshop materials are centralised in the institutional file repository and maintained jointly by the Office of Research and Innovation and the University Library.

• Outreach/Awareness events are organised in conjunction with new faculty onboarding meetings as well as with student orientations. Representatives from the Office of Research and Innovation and the University Library are also present in certain monthly faculty meetings to promote various service offerings to researchers. Given that the independent self-paced learning programme capitalises on the convenience of the university's course management system, materials in Moodle for the online learning programme can be easily transferred to other courses within University M for instructors and lecturers to use in their own lectures and curriculum in order to reach a much broader audience at the university. Course instructors and lecturers are all invited to contribute back to the online learning programme where appropriate. Representatives and liaison librarians from the University Library can also provide short lecture services for instructors, lecturers and research centres who would like to promote FAIR in their own courses or research units.

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(8) In a flipped classroom setting, students acquire basic knowledge about a new topic by self-study at home, e.g. by watching online lessons or reading textbooks, while in class, the focus is on the practical application of this knowledge (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom).

(9) Definition: "Having perceived that the individual has short-fall in [their] output, and that it is expedient that [they] perform [...] at optimal level, training activity is undertaken by the individual in order to equip [them] with the wherewithal for performance at the required level. In other words, training is provided for the individual, to 'salvage' [them] from steady downward performance. This is referred to as 'Training Intervention'." (Abdul 2015, p. 108)

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