In Spring we held an Open Forum online on the topic of training needs. We held breakout rooms with a Director of Postgraduate Education in each who took notes. We then came together and discussed the suggestions from our Doctoral Researchers.
There were some requests that we can definitely action such as running short introduction sessions on the use of MS Teams, we clarified what Supervisor training was available in each department, School and College and realised that quite a lot of the suggestions had happened or were running yet perhaps we need to do better on our communications of this. For instance there were suggestions for alumni sessions and we have run alumni sessions in the month before the Open Forum. These were very successful to those who attended yet turn out was small. We will have our alumni back for the Doctoral School Conference in June.
We have had suggestions for technical learning of systems and data and for this year we have access to Linkedin Learning where there are many online courses for these topics. We also have DataCamp which also host a range of courses.
We have discussed sharing courses between schools and departments and as part of the refresh of training which is part of our Doctoral School Strategy that is currently in progress we hope to pilot a range of courses to share between schools.
We feel that some suggestions are already being run such as informal social sessions yet they are poorly attended so our Summer Open Forum will address the issues of Research Culture. We hope to find out more about how we as a College and within Schools and departments can help curate a research culture that you feel you are a part.