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This resource consists of a series of activities which can be used in the classroom or in self-paced learning. This teaching resource incorporates a selection of qualitative material collected during the course of the Peter Townsend’s 1950s Last Refuge study, which was a major investigation of long-stay institutional care for old people in Britain.

The aims of this resource are to think critically about the original project's methodology and think through what kinds of opportunities and challenges these methods might present for reuse of that data.

This resource is designed for teachers to get students to think about data and numbers, teach them how to interpret, analyse and visualise data. This will be done by answering questions such as what proportion of the British public opposes capital punishment, how have attitudes about gender roles changed over the last 30 years and how have levels of crime changed in the last few decades. 

Stellenbosch University Library and Information Service is pleased to announce the launch of the Research Data Management (RDM) Adventure Game. The RDM Adventure Game is a text-based role-playing interactive fiction serious game, based on the data management challenges of a research project. The game takes the form of an online choose-your-own-adventure format in which game players take a simulated research project through the following processes: data management planning, data collection/generation, data organisation, data description and research publication, while encountering data management challenges along the way. The game was developed as part of a collaboration between the University of Bath Library and Stellenbosch University Library and Information Service between 2017 and 2020 by Alex Ball (University of Bath), Samuel Simango (Stellenbosch University) and Nushrat Khan (University of Bath). In January 2021, the Wellcome Trust's Early Career Researchers Advisory Board endorsed the game by including it in the Wellcome Open Research early career researchers pack, recognising it as a useful tool for researchers.

The Game itself is available here 

QAMyData is an easy-to-use, open source tool that provides a health check for numeric data. The tool uses automated methods to detect and report on some of the most common problems in survey or numeric data, such as missingness, duplication, outliers and direct identifiers.

The tool offers a number of configurable tests that have been categorised into four types: file, metadata, data integrity, and identifiers, which can be run on popular file formats, including SPSS, Stata, SAS and CSV. A standard config file has default settings for each test, such as a threshold for pass or fail on various tests (e.g. detect value label that are truncated, email addresses identified as a string, or undefined missing values) which can be easily adapted to meet the user’s own desired thresholds. The configuration feature allows the creation of a unique Data Quality Profile. The software creates a ‘data health check’ that details errors and issues as both a summary and detailed report, providing a location of the failed test. New tests can easily be added. Data depositors and publishers can act on the results and resubmit the file until a clean bill of health is produced.

You can get word/token-wise information from which revision what content originated (and thereby which editor originally authored the word) as well as all changes a token was ever subject to.

Overview of possible costs per activity within each phase of the research process. The format has to be useful not only for researchers, data specialists, but also for funding applicants and funding bodies. An early start for certain activities within the data life cycle (like for instance metadata specification) will lower the costs for data management in the run of the life cycle. A good data management plan before gathering the research data also helps to prevent extra efforts and costs later on in the research cycle.

How to Fail Your Research Degree was created to deliver knowledge and understanding of research processes and techniques, within the context of a postgraduate training programme at Glasgow School of Art. Development was in relation to the concepts of encouraging creativity and risk-taking within a safe game environment and of learning by (potentially) failing. Game characteristics and intended learning outcomes were defined, leading to game mechanics and text that emphasise player agency, working within a time limit, and humour. Evaluation shows that the game is highly successful at delivering the intended learning outcomes and is a memorable and enjoyable complement to the existing course curriculum.

In this course you will learn the basics of programming and how to teach it yourself as a primary or secondary school teacher.

This MOOC teaches programming in Scratch through fun videos which explain programming in an inspiring and clear way. These videos are accompanied by assignments which let kids practice programming and create programs they will like to use themselves!

Every week you build a different Scratch project yourself: a flappy bird game, a virtual pet or a Mondriaan like artwork. Also weekly, new programming blocks are taught and together we’re working on ways to improve your written code. In addition, you will learn how you can integrate the same programming lessons in your class for both primary and secondary education.

Youtube playlist of past webinars organised by the UK Data Service. Topics include:

• mapping crime data in R
• longitudinal data
• census and population data
• getting started with secondary analysis
• data management
• how to anonymise quantitative and qualitative data
• working with twitter data
• web scraping
• consent issues in data sharing

Youtube playlist of online video tutorials demonstrating practical data management aspects such as writing a data management plan, encrypting data files, backing up data, etc.