I have been a very brutal time keeper today and I suddenly feel bad about it, please don't
be too hard on me.
Hi, so my name is Deborah Udo and I have flown a couple of hours here from Nigeria to give
this talk today.
So I left my house at 5am yesterday and arrived in Migration, say 7am, so do the math.
I am a nurse, me, the wife and public health practitioner from Nigeria, and I'm also a community
manager for an organization called OLS where we teach people how to do open research.
And just recently I have also become an SSI fellow and part of what I will be telling you
now is what I will be doing as my fellowship project.
So imagine a world where research was actually inclusive and accessible to everyone.
And if you are seated here in this room it means that you care about openness and that
in some ways you are actually working towards making openness a reality.
But we tend to miss a critical step when we keep about the basics and we go straight
to teaching people how to do, reproduce the ability to teach them how to make their software
open.
But how do we teach people to do open research when they don't even know what research
is?
So that's the fundamental step that my project hopes to cover hence the thought bubble
research 101.
This is called pre-seeds, pre-seeds is a beginner crash course and is designed to equip
aspiring researchers, people who are often left out of the conversation.
And the project is going to give them all the skills and knowledge and confidence that
they need to even start their journey to get to a point where they now decide whether
they want to do it in the open or not.
This also serves the larger RSC or research software engineering community by becoming
that's bridge where RSCs who have come from non-academic or non-research oriented backgrounds
get a better idea of what research actually is.
This is a modular self-paced course meaning you can take it on your own but it can also
be delivered via workshops and these are the pillars on which the project is built open
education research skills, community building and accessibility.
I love this meme.
Show of hands if you feel like your master's or PhD program equipped to enough with
foundational research skills.
Yeah, so this is the depiction of that experience and that's why pre-seeds is very necessary
but don't take my word for it.
We did a survey my team and I in Africa and for some people spread across different parts
of the globe most of whom are either what's the word for that's refugees, right?
Where are the words when I need them?
So this next couple of slides will show you demographic data from these individuals.
This is for age, most of them were between the ages of 18 to 24 and then the other parts
25 to that 4 and I will stop reading it out loud because I believe you've seen that already.
Another distribution was mostly female and with a lot of people neither identify as non-binary
and with few people preferring not to ascribe because to call agenda there's some lessons
in there and it does represent something about Africa which I do not have the time to unpack
for now.
For that, demographics most of the respondents were Africans and some from Asia you wrote
not America and it begins to get very interesting really soon.
So for people who identified as being under-represented in research, part of what the pointed
out as the major factor they felt under-represented was the socioeconomic backgrounds and then
geographical location where they were in the world.
They are race, ethnicity, disability, gender and then nothing.
For our respondents, these shows the level of exposure to research.
Some of them have never ever been involved in research.
Some of them have done small scale research and then the others have done intermediate work.
This is my favorite one.
So challenges faced in research journey.
Sometimes when we talk about precedes, why do we even need a cost to teach the foundational
things about research?
Well, these are the challenges that people all over the world actually face when it comes
to get in access to research education.
Some of them have limited knowledge of the software tools, some lack access to affordable
research training, something taken for granted mostly.
We call it understanding the research concepts, no access to mentors, limited availability
of programs in my region, lack of confidence to participate in research discussions, language
or culture barriers, feeling excluded or unsupported due to their programs.
Have you ever felt that research training programs are not tailored to your needs?
These were the responses that we got.
And I must mention that the data is available at any point.
If I have to skip over in my 10 minute talk, please forgive me.
And so the barriers to accessing former research training, lack of awareness, high cost
of program limited opportunities, inflexible scheduling, language or culture barriers, feeling
excluded, nothing.
And of course, a lot of people want to pilot precedes, hopefully we can make that come
through for the 65.9% of people.
So who is precedes for after much ado?
Well, Maria, for instance, 34 high school biology teacher in Madrid, Spain, very passionate
about nature and wants to collect biodiversity data, collecting tons of species, but the
problem lies in the fact that Maria has no former research training yet, she is very
eager to make this meaningful and sound data.
There's also Tajadine, 24-year-old biochemistry graduates from Cano Nigeria, has just started
a PhD program and like some of you felt when you started your PhD program, Tajadine wants
to embrace open science principles from the beginning, but finds that transition from
what is taught in class and the practical thing that happens in the real world is quite
different.
And then there's Claire, 22, computer science on the graduate at Manchester University,
UK, interested in research software engineering, but has no former exposure to open
practices, feels lost when the professor mentions fair principles, these are personas
for the precedes course and if you could get anything from this, well, precedes for everyone,
really.
This is a timeline overview of our project for the first third month we plan to be part
of the Carpentries Collaborative Lesson Development Training, if you're someone who is
passionate about open education, definitely recommend that and then within the four to six
months we plan to develop the first module pilot and then revise that module on future models
based on the data we collect from the pilot workshop and then we plan to expand our
reach as well and build a larger community and finally in the 11th to 12th months we plan to
set down some frameworks that will help us to test the effectiveness of the course, but we need you.
And for some reason, my QR code has refused to display, it didn't display there either.
Oh well, I'm standing here, you can always come get the link or just mail me.
So we need people who are familiar with curriculum developments to assist us and we also need
people who know to write grants to help us apply for grants because we cannot do this without resources.
I looked at something but it's not the QR code and we also need funding.
So if you've either got the funds to support us or know people who've got the funds
will be lovely to chat with you afterwards and we also want partners who either
wants this course to leave out at their institutions or they know people who would particularly
need this course which is everybody like we've established.
Please get in touch with us and we also need platforms to host this course.
Beyond hosting it on the Carpentry is incubator we would also need other places where this course
would live because if no one sees this course, if no one knows about it, then all our effort has
been wasted. And finally we would like you to become the biggest fund gales and fund boys of our
course and just tell everybody you know. And this is the team of people currently working on
this project I could not do this without them. This person here to some was up all night
until 4 a.m. this morning putting together the visualization you saw earlier. So thank you to some.
And if you would like your face to be displayed somewhere around here next time I present three
seats. Please come and have a chat with me. And these are supporters.
I'm a particular about Peter Barron. That was the first person who ever donated to precedes and
single-hundredly has made the biggest donation to precedes so far. So thank you Peter.
I'm the Society of RSC. I also thank my organization OLS for always
chairing me on and believing in the dream of precedes. I have my hoodie but I haven't won it. I've
won first step instead. The SSI for giving me an opportunity to be their fellow and the
cap entries for all their support. Thank you very much for listening to me and I will take questions at
this point.
Just by way of making stuff available are you going to file copies of the
pictures that you do up on get harbors on the node or somewhere where it will definitely be the
hey, you don't have to pay to host them but you have to control it. Yes, so that's a really good
question and I'm going to repeat it for those online. So the question is is this available somewhere
either on GitHub or the node? Yes, it is. It's a really won GitHub and the QR code that
refuse to load was linked to the GitHub repository and the website as well. So yes, it's a really
one line. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you so much. So the question is, is this available? Yes, it is.
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much. So the question is,
is this going to start from the beginning or would it be based on all the materials that exist
currently? So it's actually two yeses. Yes, so it's going to start from the beginning and also yes,
so it's going to be based on other materials. So we're taking those materials and adapting them to
make a fresh course that's more basic than anyone can understand. Start makes sense.
Yes. I promise I have the QR code. Thank you.
Thank you. Fantastic. Thanks, Jim.