Dr Melissa Burke1,2,3, Dr Mark Crowe3, Dr Anastasios Papaioannou7, Dr Kay Steel5, Ann Backhaus8, Nicholas May6, Kathryn Unsworth4
1Australian BioCommons, , , 2Research Computing Centre, The University of Queensland, , , 3Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation, , , 4Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), , , 5Federation University Australia, , , 6Digital Research Skills Australasia (DReSA), , , 7Intersect Australia, , , 8Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre, ,
Background
DReSA (Digital Research Skills Australasia) is a national portal for discovering Australasian digital research training events, materials, providers and trainers. It’s a grassroots training community initiative born out of the explicit need to improve the discoverability of training to upskill the research workforce on cutting edge digital research methods and technologies. DReSA launched a year ago at eRA21.
Actions
A working group representing 13 Australian organisations was formed at the ARDC 2020 Skills Summit. Key activities were: 1) evaluate options for building the portal; 2) develop an Australasian instance based on Elixir’s TeSS portal; 3) investigate and adopt metadata models for describing training, materials, and trainers; 4) create a mechanism to ingest training events and materials; 5) onboard new training providers to build content; 6) seek user feedback to ensure DReSA meets the expectations of the community; and, 7) find a sustainable support model.
Results
A year on from the launch, DReSA is a fully featured and functioning training portal. Over 4,000 user views, 350 training events and 150 materials from 17 providers have been registered and the numbers are growing. Five automated ingestion methods have been implemented so far, supporting ten different sources. An international community is building around the technical infrastructure with TeSS now implementing DReSA-developed features.
Conclusion
This presentation outlines progress so far and future plans. We’ll also discuss the advantages of sharing your events and materials in DReSA and explain why your researchers should use DReSA to find the training they need.
Biography:
Dr Melissa Burke is the Training and Communications Officer for Australian BioCommons.
Dr Kay Steel is Associate Librarian Research & Research Collections at Federation University Australia.
Dr Anastasios Papaioannou is the eResearch Training Manager & Lead Research Data Scientist at Intersect.
Dr Mark Crowe is the Skills Development Manager at QCIF.