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We are always interested in opportunities to work with new departments or organisations, and our courses can be tailored to suit specific research domains and different levels of user expertise.
Requesting a Bespoke Course
If you would like a bespoke delivery of an existing course, or to co-develop a new course, please contact us (ARC.Education@ucl.ac.uk) and provide the following information:
- Details of the course, e.g. course title or proposed new topic
- Technologies and topics to be taught, e.g a specific programming language, testing, version control
- Learners, e.g. number, previous experience, background
- Constraints: specific time frame, location, system setup e.g. managed desktop
Please see our Training page for a list of regular and occassional offerings.
Ways of Working
When working with ARC's Education team, we ask our partners to respect our ways of working, as set out below. These supplement UCL’s general commitments on staff interactions for maintaining a healthy working environment, as set out in the Dignity at Work Statement. Project leads will be asked to confirm their agreement in writing prior to forming a collaboration.
Overview
Our approach is based on ARC's nature as a hybrid research institute, combining the norms associated with research cultures with professional practice in scientific computing and digital scholarship. Our aim is to create and deliver training through collaborative team-based efforts for the university and beyond.
When developing and delivering a bespoke course, our educators will co-author the newly required material with you and your team, and may from time-to-time lead authorship of education-focused publications. Work may well continue beyond the end date of the agreed plan to complete publications or work on follow-up activities, and in turn, preparation work on your course may well be combined with such leftover work from other previous collaborations, and on grant authorship for new opportunities. Where funders expect detailed timesheets they will be generated by us on the above basis.
It is important that the expertise of our educators meets both your needs and UCL’s standards of academic excellence. If you have any concerns about the development needs of ARC staff working with you, please let us know.
Project leadership and management
All projects should have a named ARC lead – a senior educator specialist with relevant expertise, tasked to ensure success of our contribution to the work. This should be as a part of their core contribution to the activity – we do not want to add additional co-I costs where this does not help the outcomes. Where we contribute to writing grants, this person should normally be named formally as a co-I; for existing funding it is up to you whether we do this formally with the funder, or just agree internally.
Part of ARC’s mission is to propagate best practices for software development and data science within research. We therefore aim to model these in our course development and training interactions with our partners. What this means in practice is set out in the sections below. The primary starting point is that we use “agile methods” for project management – while these originated within industry in essence they involve applying a research mindset to the technology aspects of projects, recognising that the end point is not fully known when a project commences, that cycles of experimentation and refinement of ideas are typical, and that through reflection we regularly refine how we work. Effective management is essential to delivering on the goals and deadlines of the project.
There will therefore be regular (e.g. fortnightly) meetings organised between ARC staff and the partner leads, for the purpose of demonstrating the work done during the preceding period and agreeing priorities until the next meeting. These will be arranged at times mutually convenient for all involved.
This is however the minimum required level of interaction! We favour rich collaborations, and so in-depth discussion meetings and other means of communication (e.g. project Slack channel, GitHub issues) are encouraged for efficient exchange of information.
Personnel
The staff working on the activities will be chosen by ARC, based on skill set and time availability. Our preference is for at least two research technology professionals (RTPs) per activity, for the benefit of robustness in the event of staff leaving UCL, and to facilitate sharing of knowledge and feedback. We also reserve the right to change staff throughout the partnership (although we will endeavour to do so in a way which is mutually beneficial, recognising the potential cost of bringing a new person up to speed). Note that staff remain managed within ARC and are not seconded to your group, unlike postdocs.
Work locations
We recognise the value of in-person interaction for building strong working relationships, and so encourage our staff to meet personally with our partners. However, they will be mostly based at one of ARC's locations or working remotely. Only in those situations where the training needs to be delivered outside campus, our partners will need to arrange access and space for our team members.
Scheduling work
ARC supports many teams across UCL and beyond simultaneously, and needs to manage the time commitments individual RTPs give to each project in order to ensure each one is successful, as far as it is within our power to do so. We are often under very high demand and hence need to schedule work several months in advance. While we strive to adapt to changes in research priorities and unexpected deadlines, we cannot guarantee being able to do so. In particular, if there is a lack of responsiveness from our partners during the scheduled work period, the activity may need to be rescheduled, resulting in significant delays. Similarly, if extra funding is found near the end of a project, we may not be able to extend it straight away and instead need to pause activity or change staffing. The collaboration will be most effective if we are informed of known deadlines well in advance, and schedule tasks together with you in order to meet these. We will update you on the forecast schedule at the regular meetings as desired, and will let you know of any material changes on our side as early as we can.
Requests for development of material or training activities have to reach us and be agreed before our next staff assignment planning session. These sessions are scheduled around January, April, July and October. For example, if there is a request for delivering a course in December, the request and acceptance of such should be done before October.
Costs
ARC costs for work on either a pay-scale or day-rate basis. Note that we do not commit to produce specific deliverables for a given price, in the way that industrial IT contractors typically work. Instead, we commit to a given number of hours worked on the project. These costs assume 100% FTE includes appropriate allowances for dissemination, training, grant writing, meetings, holidays, and sick leave.
Estimation of course development and training delivery is as follows, though it depends on other factors discussed below. One hour of course material will require a full day of development, and one hour of training delivery will require 3 hours of preparation for the instructor. Our pedagogical approach requires that we don't teach alone, and therefore at least a co-instructor or a helper will join the delivery, and for them, the estimated time of preparation is 1.5 hours per hour of delivery. There are other administration, development, and delivery costs that will depend on the nature of the training.
Course development
ARC staff will always endeavour to create the best material for the learners' needs. We may have differing views on how best to achieve that, and will negotiate those points to reach the best outcome, remembering, however, that our team are also experts on pedagogy and how learning works. For example, customising a course with data from a specific research domain is a common request that requires a lot of thought and planning, but often provides very little impact on the learning; it may even in some cases be a distractor element.
We advocate for all the training material developed to be developed as Open Educational Resources and as such the output will have an appropriate open licence to the material.
Course delivery
In addition to our team-teaching approach, we follow other pedagogical methodologies, including active learning methodologies that will depend on the material, audience and location. Our preference is that learners bring their own device so that they can access the same learning environment after the workshop. To help us to improve we will require feedback from the learners and the partners throughout the activity.
If there are special requirements (e.g., software restrictions, hardware dependencies, security restrictions), please let us know well in advance.
Contributing to the wider community
In our activities, we often make use of open licensed material and open source software libraries. We make changes and improvements to these for our benefit and the rest of the community. We will of course acknowledge funding and offer co-authorship in publications arising from such contributions to upstream communities.
Dissemination
ARC is a strong proponent of UCL’s Open Science and Scholarship policy, and we make all our work as open as possible. We encourage co-authorship on research publications (including course materials) written during our collaboration. One of our aims is also to raise the profile of non-publication research outputs within the wider research community. We are thus keen to co-author papers with you, publish material, software and data on open platforms which can be given a DOI and cited, promote the tools and methods used or created at relevant conferences, and generally disseminate the work we do as widely as possible. Such activities help to enhance both of our track records for subsequent grant proposals. We expect suitable time to be set aside on projects for them.