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Q&A Form - add your response

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Q&A Form - add your response

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Skills for research - co-design challenge  

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Next Generation Research Environments Co-design Challenge

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How would you solve the research challenges of the future?

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How would you solve the research challenges of the future?

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Blog post

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Co-design Launch 2016

This week sees the launch of Jisc's latest co-design challenge (#codesign16), a consultation to find the next set of big ideas for technology in education and research. There are 6 challenges in total, derived from our recently released set of visions, and now we need the help of Jisc members and other experts to identify which of these challenges we should be exploring further.

Research Challenges

We're pleased to announce that two of the challenges have a research focus and aim to address some of the fundamental issues universities are facing with the advances of technology in research - Digital Skills for Research and Next Generation Research Environments.

This post describes the two provocative research challenges and how you can get involved. In both areas we are aiming to cascade the insights that our recent research at risk and open scholarship activity have given us, to benefit a much wider range of users - to make the use of technology to support research simpler and more closely aligned to research needs.

Digital Skills for Research

Challenge lead: Caroline Ingram

Over many years, Jisc has supported the development of training materials for open access publication and research data management. In revisiting the idea of developing research skills we would be looking much more widely across the training offer for technology-enhanced research, and at a range of roles and levels. How do we equip people with the skills they need for the future of research to ensure the UK keeps its position as a leader in research? Give us your ideas!

The full text of the challenge, where you can post comments, is at Digital Skills for Research.

Next Generation Research Environments

Challenge lead: Christopher Brown

Researchers continue to push the boundaries of research, throughout the research lifecycle, using the latest tools and technologies to support their work. The time has come to define what a next generation research environment should look like and develop a modular solution that can satisfy the increasing demands of researchers. How would you define such a research environment? What functionality should it have to support researchers performing innovative research? Tell us what you think.

The full text of the challenge, where you can post comments, is at Next Generation Research Environments

How to get involved

We encourage you to engage with the discussion around these research challenges and to provide feedback during the consultation phase, which ends on 24 November. There are a number of ways to provide feedback and comment on these challenges:

Add a comment to this blog post

Add a comment to the following shared challenge documents:

Email the following accounts with your ideas and questions:

Email the challenge leads direct (see above for details)

We will be collating feedback and posting summaries via this blog (at https://researchdata.jiscinvolve.org/wp/category/codesign16/) during the consultation phase.

Finally, follow, and contribute to, the debate on Twitter using the #codesign16 hashtag. Come and join our tweetchat sessions, when we'll be taking over the @Jisc account to answer your questions, on the following dates:

Skills for Research - 8 November 11:00-12:00

Next Generation Research Environments - 16 November 12:30-13:30

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Research challenges: the launch of Jisc #codesign16

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This week sees the launch of Jisc's latest co-design challenge (#codesign16), a consultation to find the next set of big ideas for technology in education and research. There are 6 challenges in total, derived from our recently released set of visions, and now we need the help of Jisc members and other experts to identify which of these challenges we should be exploring further.

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#codesign16 posts

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Background At the end of 2016 we launched the latest co-design challenge. Two of the challenges had a research focus and aim to address some of the fundamental issues universities are facing with the advances of technology in research - Digital Skills for Research and Next Generation Research Environments. Following a period of consultation and ... Read more

Posted by on in #codesign16, codesign17 and tagged #codesign16, #vre, codesign17, NGRE, research challenges.

Introduction For researchers working in labs the importance of recording experiments, results, workflows, etc in a notebook is engrained into you as a student. However, these paper-based solutions are not ideal when it comes to sharing and preservation. They pile on desks and shelves, vary in quality and often include printed data stuck in. To ... Read more

Posted by on in #codesign16, codesign17, General and tagged ELN, research, research data, research data management.

Late last year we kicked off a co-design consultation to identify what big new ideas Jisc should focus on once we have completed our current R&D projects. That consultation focused on 6 possible challenges: What does the imminent arrival of the intelligent campus mean for universities and colleges? What should the next generation of digital ... Read more

Posted by on in #codesign16, codesign17, Research at Risk and tagged #collaboration, codesign17, digital skills.

Over the last couple of weeks we've been promoting a consultation through various social media channels. We want the UK research and research support community to engage with the challenges for the future. These came out of previous consultation with the sector to develop a vision for Jisc. We want to have your ideas support ... Read more

Posted by on in #codesign16, Research at Risk and tagged #codesign, #collaboration, #skills, #vre.

Co-design Launch 2016 This week sees the launch of Jisc's latest co-design challenge (#codesign16), a consultation to find the next set of big ideas for technology in education and research. There are 6 challenges in total, derived from our recently released set of visions, and now we need the help of Jisc members and other ... Read more

Posted by on in #codesign16 and tagged #codesign16, #collaboration, #skills, #vre, digital skills, research, research challenges.

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#codesign16 Archives - Research data management

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Background At the end of 2016 we launched the latest co-design challenge. Two of the challenges had a research focus and aim to address some of the fundamental issues universities are facing with the advances of technology in research - Digital Skills for Research and Next Generation Research Environments.

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Introduction

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Introduction

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As part of our co-design consultation, we identified six potential challenges that face people working in education and research.

About this challenge

Researchers continue to push the boundaries of research, throughout the research lifecycle, using the latest tools and technologies to support their work. We asked the community whether the time has come to define what a next-generation research environment should look like and if modular solutions might satisfy the increasing demands of researchers.

Read more about this challenge

Researchers often use common web tools and services and look beyond their organisation for storage facilities and increased processing power to satisfy their increasing demands. Tailored web-based environments have been developed to integrate tools, applications and access to data, but these are often for specific projects or domain specific solutions.

These solutions are often described as science gateways, virtual research environments or e-lab notebooks. The time is ripe to look at the very definition of a research environment and determine what a next-generation research environment should look like.

A solution is required to support the increasing needs and demands of research throughout the whole research lifecycle, from idea to collaboration to outputs and re-use. We need to move beyond the domain-specific environments and develop modular solutions that can satisfy the increasing demands of researchers.

A sustainable environment that encourages openness, but is secure and trusted, that links the research process to research outputs, that shows the provenance of research and enables its reproducibility, that breaks down the barriers across disciplines, institutions and nations, that enables collaboration and sharing - such a next generation research environment will ensure that innovation prospers and research flourishes.

Questions for you to consider

When a researcher starts work what will they see and what do they want to be able to do in an environment that supports their research?

What are the important features and conditions that need to be part of a research environment to support researcher work practices, research integrity and innovative research?

What do we want researchers to be able to achieve that they can't do now within a research environment?

What is the positive change we want to enable by supporting researchers in a next-generation research environment?

This prompted an interesting discussion that had overlaps with the research skills and next generation learning environment challenges. The main themes that emerged were:

It's unlikely that one research environment could satisfy the needs of multiple disciplines and time should not be spent trying to develop an inter-disciplinary solution

Researchers like the flexibility of using their own tools so a modular approach is preferred, although balanced against the security demands of an institution

Policies and processes are often the main barrier rather than technical ones and harmonising various policies should be considered

Any solution must integrate with existing workflows

Flexibility and adaptability are important to allow flexible learning and research

Cross-institution and international collaboration is an important feature of any research environment as is a social element

The idea

The general message that came across was that this was an area that it was important to tackle but that we are at a very early stage of understanding the problem and the potential solutions. We think Jisc can help with that so suggested the following idea:

Investigate the needs and requirements for a next generation research environment

Feedback has shown that it is difficult to build cross-disciplinary environments and one size does not fit all. The focus should be on developing modular solutions that support the requirements of researchers across the research lifecycle. There needs to be integration across, and interoperability between, systems.

This requires a standards-based approach and the use of persistent identifiers to link research outputs. Access to external or institutional computing resources, as well as virtual machines, should be made easier by any research environment.

Jisc will bring relevant experts together to identify what is required from a next generation research environment, assess existing systems and investigate whether a modular solution can support researchers throughout the whole research lifecycle.

There are a number of initiatives across the globe on VREs, science gateways, virtual labs and electronic lab notebooks (commercial and non-commercial) produced for particular domains of research. We will undertake a landscape study and review of existing systems to determine if these can satisfy the requirements for a next generation research environment. If not, what elements are required to enable the building of modular solutions to satisfy the needs of researchers?

The results

Thank you to everyone who voted.

There is obviously a strong demand for a research environment from researchers and research managers but still a huge amount of questions over exactly what shape this should take. We will take some time to explore these questions in more depth with experts to develop an understanding of an outline for a research environment that Jisc can help develop.

Get in touch

If you want to comment on the ideas, please tweet using #codesign17 or email contact researchenvironment.feedback@jisc.ac.uk.

Catch up on the discussion on our research data blog.

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What should a next-generation research environment look like?

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As part of our co-design consultation, we identified six potential challenges that face people working in education and research. Researchers continue to push the boundaries of research, throughout the research lifecycle, using the latest tools and technologies to support their work.

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Background to the 6 co-design challenges

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Recently we released a set of visions for how technology will transform research and education by 2020-2030. Since we released those visions we have been rationalising our research and development portfolio to focus on delivering them.

As a result, the majority of our effort is concentrated on three big areas: digital capability, analytics and the research data shared service. However, we also need to start to prepare for the future. If we can identify what the next big ideas are now, then we will be ready to move on them quickly as soon as our current ideas are delivered. So we needed your help to identify what those next big ideas might be.

The results

We identified six challenges from the visions you helped us develop and received a lot of really valuable feedback where some clear themes emerged. We suggested ideas for how Jisc could help with some of the themes and asked for your help to choose which we should pursue. Thanks to everyone who voted.

If you have comments on any of the ideas then please tweet using the hashtag #codesign17 or contact the person listed on the relevant challenge page.

Timeline

Throughout the consultation you will be able to take part in different ways:

Discuss and debate the challenges from 31 October-25 November 2016

Help prioritise the ideas that emerge from the discussion and indicate where you would be interested in collaborating from 9-30 January 2017

Find out which ideas we have decided to pursue when they're announced in early February 2017

Follow the progress of the challenges and resulting projects in June 2017

Benefits

We think that engaging in this consultation will benefit you as you'll have the opportunity to:

Help shape future Jisc products and services

Get informed about future technology issues that may have an impact on you

Network with others interested in the same areas as you

Desired outcomes

We plan to use this consultation to start a wide-ranging discussion around the challenges that could result in tangible ideas that we could develop into new services for Jisc members.

We hope that this consultation will result in:

Ideas for technology services that we could deliver to Jisc members to help them improve education and research

Big ideas for the future, rather than quick wins as the majority of our effort is currently dedicated to delivering digital capability, learning analytics and the research data shared service

Ideas that are a good fit with our research and development visions and Jisc's strategy

We will commit to taking the successful ideas through an initial exploration before we decide what a full project will cost. At this point we do not have an identified budget for the successful ideas and we will be exploring a number of options for how we fund the projects, including partnerships with Jisc members and other organisations.

How this relates to existing projects

This consultation is about preparing for the future, once we have delivered our current portfolio of projects.

This diagram shows where the new ideas from this consultation will fit into our innovation pipeline and where our three existing areas currently sit.

Any new ideas we explore as a result of this exercise will move slowly through the initial stages of the pipeline until existing projects are finished and more effort becomes available. However we may explore ways to speed them up if the need emerges.

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Recently we released a set of visions for how technology will transform research and education by 2020-2030. Since we released those visions we have been rationalising our research and development portfolio to focus on delivering them. As a result, the majority of our effort is concentrated on three big areas: digital capability, analytics and the research data shared service.