See one, do one, teach one: Teaching Open Research Skills for Data-Driven Innovation in Health and Social Care

Abstract

As the Data-Driven Innovation Talent Team, we teach data and research skills to undergraduate, postgraduate and continuous professional development students in the health and social care sector. We emphasised integrity and reproducibility at every step of the student journey. We want our students to be champions of Open Research in their workplaces. 

See one: We model Open Research and Open Scholarship, showing students how we use these principles, and how open resources can help with their learning. Our teaching team are all enthusiastic R or Python users, we share teaching materials via GitHub and publish some of them as Open Educational Resources (e.g. http://www.codestorytelling.com/). We use open datasets for teaching and assessment (e.g. https://www.opendata.nhs.scot/dataset). We publish Open Access 

Do one: We explicitly teach our students Open Research practices and we expect them to use these skills in their projects. We use GitHub to support student supervision. We encourage students to use open datasets for their projects. We teach our students to write clean and reproducible code in R, Python, SQL. We tell them about FAIR data principles and teach them to document their data and code. Our students conduct replication studies, pre-register their work, publish their data and code in open repositories.  

Teach one: Communication is at the heart of Open Research. Our students use pair programming in most courses and they learn that what is obvious to them may not be obvious to another analyst - that is why documentation and comments are so important. Our students also prepare presentations and short written posts to tell each other about what they have learned about Open Research. They often work in pairs and larger groups to share their knowledge and experience, and to practise communication skills.