Friday, 22 January 2016

Open Access workshop toolkit and the use of pre and post workshop questionnaires for course development

Another posting from Emily Bennett describing the use of of pre and post workshop questionnaires to help modify and tailor monthly workshops to the needs of the academic.

At Portsmouth we run monthly workshops on Open Access, which are delivered by our Research Outputs Manager (ie me!) These workshops are part of our centrally run Researcher Developer Programme and are advertised on our Open Access info web page. The workshops are open to all academics, and hold up to 20 people at a time. We wanted to design these workshops to they were tailored to the needs to academics.

In order to do this, we asked academics due to attend each workshop to complete a pre-workshop online questionnaire. This looks at their previous experience and knowledge, plus whether they have any specific needs, such as whether they have funding from a particular funder. The workshop was then designed / adapted from the previous workshop based on this info. After the workshop, the academics are asked to complete a post-workshop feedback online questionnaire, asking what they found useful, how they were going to change their behaviour and how the workshop could be improved. This feedback is used to inform the design of subsequent workshops.  This pre and post workshop questionnaire approach is repeated each time the workshop is run, so (in theory at least!!) the workshop should improve each time. 

So far the pre-workshop questionnaires have indicated that academics tended to have a broad idea of what OA is, and supported the concept. However, they were unsure of the details and what they needed to do. Feedback from post-workshop questionnaires has been overall very positive, with many academics indicating they are aware of the key issues, e.g. they indicated that they now knew they needed to upload articles to Pure, and  to check a journal's compliance before submitting their work.  Attendance is fairly good, with each workshop having between 15 and 20 academics, from across the University. A copy of the Power Point (June 2016 version) used in the workshop is here. It's released under the CC-BY licence, so feel free to adapt and reuse :)

Open Access workshop toolkit  includes a copy of the presentation and copies of the the pre and post workshop questionnaires.

(The links to the pre and post workshop questionnaires above are to PDFs, however, if anyone is interested in having a copy of the editable Google form to try the same at your University, then please contact emily.bennett@port.ac.uk.)

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