The University of Sheffield was pleased to host a three day ‘Teaching Reproducible Research and Open Science Conference,’ on June 20-22 as part of the UKRN’s Open Research Training Programme. Project TIER’s Norm Medeiros and Richard Ball led talks, seminars and mentoring around incorporating reproducible methods in teaching reproducible research.
The opening symposium entitled ‘Perspectives on teaching reproducibility’ was organised by Sheffield Methods Institute in collaboration with the University Library and Open Research Working Group (ORWG), led by Aneta Piekut (SMI) and Jenni Adams (Library).
The Symposium provided an excellent forum for interdisciplinary exchange of best practice in doing and teaching open research. Throughout the day participants discussed various approaches on embedding open scholarship principles in taught programmes in such disciplines as social sciences (Jennifer Buckley, Univ. of Manchester; Julia Kasmire, UK Data Service; and Jim Uttley, Univ. of Sheffield), geo-data-science (Jon Reades and Andy MacLachlan, UCL), psychology (Marina Bazhydai, Lancaster Univ. and Lisa DeBruine, Univ. of Glasgow), computer science (Neil Shephard, University of Sheffield) and engineering (Alice Pyne, Univ. of Sheffield and Carlos Utrilla Guerrero, TU Delft Library).
Project TIER’s Directors gave a keynote speech arguing in favour of saturating quantitative methods instruction with reproducibility. In the second keynote of the day, Helena Paterson from School of Psychology & Neuroscience at the University of Glasgow reflected on the School’s journey of redesigning the psychology undergraduate and postgraduate curriculum to focus on teaching reproducible methods and analysis.
On day two, (21 June) Norm and Richard delivered a bespoke, UKRN accredited workshop on integrating principles of transparency and reproducibility into quantitative methods courses and research training. Participants came from UKRN affiliated institutions in Surrey, Oxford, Glasgow, Manchester and Sheffield. This was the first in a series of faculty development workshops that Project TIER will be offering through the UKRN Open Research Programme. A dozen more such workshops, some virtual and some in-person, are anticipated over the next three years.
During the final day (22 June) Norm and Richard were available for individual and small-group meetings with instructors interested in introducing reproducible methods into their classes.