Lessons from Mapping and evaluating dRTP’s contributions to computing skill and pedagogies in HE

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 11:39:07 +0000

In this talk, we will be sharing findings from our research funded by the UKRI’s DisCouRSE Netwok+, aimed at mapping and analysing the provision of digital research competencies (DRC) led by or involving dRTP’s across higher education institutions in the UK.

The teaching of computational methods has spread across disciplines, spawning numerous pedagogical approaches and a wide variety of methods, software, products, and environments. However, the role of dRTP’s in the proliferation teaching DRC remains unclear. dRTP’s responsibilities are primarily focused on research and infrastructure and expectations around involvement in training and teaching vary widely across the sector. Furthermore, choices as to which approaches and delivery modes to adopt in teaching and training are often driven by trends, licensing constraints or the trainer’s familiarity rather than pedagogical criteria or context suitability.

Our research therefore seeks to investigate what training and teaching is being delivered by dRTP’s through a detailed survey and a systematic auditing of curricula on DRCs. The findings will be useful to address questions such as: What skills and competencies are being taught? How are dRTPs engaging in their provision? What pedagogical approaches are being taken? What are the main future challenges in the delivery of DRPs? How does this differ across audiences, infrastructures, and institutions?

We will use this talk to report on our preliminary findings and to further initiate conversations with the dRTP community leading towards evidence‑based recommendations to enhance DRP curricula across HE.

Prerequisites

None. We will make this session accessible to all audiences, albeit it will be particularly interested in those involved in teaching in Higher Education, regardless of their role, or seniority. Outcomes

In this session, we will be depicting the landscape of current teaching of DRCs across HE as well as an identification of future challenges. Besides gaining an awareness of how DRCs are taught in terms of professionals involved, pedagogical approaches and technologies being used, this will provide opportunities to be exposed to new approaches and ideas and reflect on how each participant approaches their own teaching. A desired outcome would be to network and initiate discussions towards evidence-based recommendations (E.g. identifying a series of best practices, challenges faced, or how dRTPs are and should be involved in the DRC provision…)

In-Person or Online Delivery

Hybrid (Both In-Person and Online Presenters)

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the DisCouRSE Network+, which received funding through the UKRI Digital Research Infrastructure Programme

Quarto: a library to run them all? A collaborative exercise to use, learn and assess quarto for authoring reproducible documents in different scenarios

Thu, 01 Sep 2022 13:00:00 +0000

Using literate programming is a widespread practice amongst data scientists. This practice not only encourages data scientists to produce transparent, rich and reflective accounts of their analysis without the extra overhead of switching between tools, but also leads to artefacts (i.e., notebooks) that are increasingly becoming a medium for dissemination, reproducibility and education. Rmarkdown or Jupyter notebooks, are two of the most well known and used options. While both solutions can be used with multiple programming languages, the decision of whether to use one or the other is almost certain to be exclusively based on that. At least until now, with Quarto being mature enough to become a game-changer.

Quarto is a language-agnostic software based on Pandoc to render files combining markdown and code into multiple ranges of formats and outputs. As a result, it can be used with either R, Python or Julia without any other dependencies.

This collaborative workshop will be structured as follows:

a brief theoretical introduction and instructions;
a task that participants may choose from the different use cases provided (i.e. generating a single document, migrating from Rmarkdown or Jupyter, creating a book or generating interactive content); and
a group discussion and conclusions.

Participants in this workshop have fun while gaining enough depth of breath and practice to evaluate how feasible it is to use Quarto in different scenarios and, ultimately, if it can become the one tool for authoring reproducible scientific or technical documents, regardless of your language of choice.

Expertise level

Practitioner
Expert

Audience

This workshop is targeted to anyone interested in reproducible publishing, especially if they are looking for a single solution to use regardless of their programming language and are willing to explore with others quarto’s pros and cons, contributing to a group discussion.