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Project TIER/UKRN Faculty Development Workshops

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We are excited to continue our multi-year collaboration with the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN) to deliver a series of faculty development workshops to instructors and staff at UKRN member institutions. In June 2023, Project TIER delivered its first workshop at the University of Sheffield, in cooperation with the Sheffield Methods Institute.  This was the first of 13 Project TIER/UKRN workshops to be delivered through 2026 via in-person and virtual means. This initiative is offered under the UKRN's Open Research Programme, and participation is limited to affiliates of UKRN institutions.

Upcoming workshops

March 11, 12 and 15, 2024: Via Zoom | more information | registration
June 5 and 6, 2024: In-person at the University of Glasgow
| more information | registration

Who can benefit from the workshops?

  • Instructors who teach courses in statistics or quantitative methods
  • Faculty who supervise student research projects using statistical data
  • Librarians and other professionals who support quantitative methods training, curriculum development, and research

What are the goals and intended outcomes of the workshops?

  • Introduce participants to tools and workflows that can be used to ensure that all the data processing and analysis undertaken for an exercise or research project is computationally reproducible.
  • Equip participants with strategies and resources for teaching these tools and workflows to their students, both in taught classes and research supervision. The focus is on practical strategies that can be flexibly adapted to a wide range of contexts.
  • During the workshop, each participant generates a reproducibility exercise that they can use to introduce their students to reproducible quantitative methods.

Are there opportunities for further collaboration after the workshop?

  • Yes. In fact, one of the main goals is to not just train individual faculty members, but also to foster the development of a community of educators who share the goal of making reproducibility a standard component of quantitative methods training.
  • In the semesters and years following the workshop, Project TIER and UKRN will organize events and communication that allow past workshop participants to share with each other their experiences teaching reproducibility.
  • We therefore seek participants who are committed to engaging in sustained communication, collaboration, and outreach.

About UKRN

The UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN) is a national peer-led consortium that aims to ensure the UK retains its place as a centre for world-leading research. We do this by investigating the factors that contribute to robust research, promoting training activities, and disseminating best practice. We also work collaboratively with various external stakeholders to ensure coordination of efforts across the sector.

We seek to understand the factors that contribute to poor research reproducibility and replicability, and develop approaches to counter these, in order to improve the trustworthiness and quality of research. These issues affect all disciplines, so we aim for broad disciplinary representation. We believe that ongoing efforts to address these issues represent an opportunity to improve our research by reforming culture and practice.

UKRN is coordinated by a Steering Group and supported by an Advisory Board, with representation across the UK through researcher-led local networks at several institutions, many of which have formally joined UKRN.