Concept for establishing and maintaining a network of NFDI4Earth education and training sites (EduHubs) (NFDI4Earth Deliverable D1.3.15)

Deliverable D1.3.15 Concept for establishing and maintaining a network of NFDI4Earth education and training sites (EduHubs) Remon Sadikni ([email protected]), Martin Werner , Yomna Eid , Edzer Pebesma , Carsten Keßler 2024-09 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17866245 nfdi4earth.de Citation Remon Sadikni, Martin Werner, Yomna Eid, Edzer Pebesma, Carsten Keßler. 2025. Concept for establishing and maintaining a network of NFDI4Earth education and training sites (EduHubs) (NFDI4Earth Deliverable D1.3.15). NFDI4Earth Community on Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/ zenodo.17866245 License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons “Attribution 4.0 International” license. Acknowledgement This work has been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) through the project NFDI4Earth (DFG project no. 460036893, https://www.nfdi4earth.de/) within the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI, https://www.nfdi.de/). NFDI4Earth D1.3.15 Executive summary This deliverable is a specification of a concept for establishing and maintaining a network of NFDI4Earth education and training sites (EduHubs). EduHubs are partner sites which offer NFDI4Earth-related education and training services on a long-term basis. The purpose of these hubs is to advance NFDI4Earth-related competencies about research data management within the Earth System Sciences community in a sustainable way. Physical and virtual education and training events for different target groups have been and will be conducted on a regular basis. This report presents the concept, describes the existing EduHubs at the universities of Hamburg, Munich, and Münster, and provides an outlook on the network’s future development. Concept for EduHubs Abbreviations DaKoNord – Data Competence Network North ECTS – European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System EduHubs – A network of NFDI4Earth education and training sites EduPortal – An online platform for NFDI4Earth training courses, see https://edutrain.nfdi4eart h.de/ EduTrain – Education and Training Materials and Services, see https://www.nfdi4earth.de/2par ticipate/education-training ESS – Earth System Sciences FAIR – Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability LMS – Learning Management System M1.3 – Measure 1.3: Education and Training Materials and Services NFDI – National Research Data Infrastructure (Nationale Forschungsdaten Infrastruktur), see http://www.nfdi.de NFDI4Earth – NFDI Consortium Earth System Sciences, see https://www.nfdi4earth.de/ OER – Open Educational Resources RDM – Research Data Management SDSL – Spatial Data Science Across Languages TA – Task Area TUM – Technische Universität München UNIHH – Universität Hamburg UNIMS – Universität Münster WiNoDa – Wissenschaftlichen Normdaten Concept for EduHubs Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 Concept 1 3 Examples 2 3.1 EduHubUHH ................................... 2 3.2 EduHubTUM ................................... 2 3.3 EduHubUNIMS .................................. 3 4 Outlook 4 References 4 Concept for EduHubs 1 Introduction This deliverable is a concept how EduHubs are and will be implemented in M1.3 of NFDI4Earth. 2 Concept EduHubs are partner sites, which offer NFDI4Earth-related education and training services on a long-term basis. The purpose of these Hubs is to advance NFDI4Earth-related competencies about RDM within the ESS community in a sustainable way. Physical and virtual education and training events for different target groups have been and will be conducted on a regular basis (workshops, courses, etc.) as live events counterparting and integrating the EduPortal. Some students might not benefit from online-only courses since they need a real teacher interaction including the possibility to ask questions. The EduHubs fill the EduPortal with life and serve as well as a means to improve and update its learning materials. As a positive side effect, these events also generate users for the EduPortal since the course material is located there. The content of the EduHubs events is determined by NFDI4Earth institutes with specific core areas, so that they share their expertise with the community. By now, 3 EduHubs have been established in Hamburg, München and Münster. Example courses and workshops of these EduHubs are described in detail in Section 3. Apart from these examples, we welcome all highquality in-person events of the ESS community with a focus on RDM and data science. Therefore, EduHubs are supposed to organize and support guest lectures from scientists and RDM experts from the domain. Quality control of the EduHub events is conducted by form-based evaluations to guarantee high quality workshops. We describe in 1.3.8 how these evaluations work in detail. The expertise of the single EduHubs also contributes to high quality events. As an entry point to find the EduHub events we will develop a central website showing the schedule of all courses and workshops. It will provide additional information about the event and how to register. Within the frame of NFDI4Earth, we aim to make this information available for the OneStop4All such that people can get referred to relevant in-person events while browsing other NFDI4Earth products such as the Living Handbook. The overall goal is to establish an open network of nationally distributed NFDI4Earth EduHubs. The strategy to find new EduHub partners is to contact all NFDI4Earth members to share their RDM courses with the community and list them on our EduHub website. We don’t need to start from scratch – existing activities such as data competence centers (e.g. DaKoNord, WiNoDa), joint events of all NFDI consortia at TUM, and activities of our networking team of TA3 will 1 Concept for EduHubs be integrated in our EduHub network. Joining this network will foster the interconnection between participating institutions and will simplify the process of sharing their expertise within the ESS community. Students and early career researchers of every institute can benefit from a Germany-wide network of workshops. The EduHub website and the networking activities will be coordinated within the EduTrain team by UHH and TUM. 3 Examples This section provides a detailed description of existing EduHub activities. 3.1 EduHub UHH In the field of Earth System Sciences (ESS), data centers typically have specific demands regarding the content and format of data. The Integrated Climate Data Center at the University of Hamburg offers a themed course in the form of EduTrain online tutorials as well as EduHub on-site workshops. In this course, we aim to equip learners with the necessary knowledge and skills to create publishable netCDF data (one of the most widely adopted data formats in ESS) that complies with the widely accepted metadata standard, the CF Conventions. So far, the on-site workshops have taken place twice in Hamburg, in the summers of 2023 and 2024. In the most recent workshop, held in July 2024, we welcomed a diverse group of participants, including graduate students, PhD students, postdocs, and staff of the public service sector, coming from five cities across Germany. Many participants brought their own data to the session and learned how to compose standard netCDF datasets that are valid for publication. The feedback collected from participants after the session indicated that the workshop was very well received. In the future, we expect to host the workshop at least once a year. Additionally, we plan to develop further themed workshops that fall under the categories of open science and the implementation of the FAIR principles. We are committed to offering workshops that are accessible to everyone. At the same time, we are actively discussing ways to integrate EduHub events into the ECTS system of the study program at our institution. 3.2 EduHub TUM The Professorship for Big Geospatial Data Management provides a constantly increasing number of courses and block events in the frame of the EduHub activity. We aim to provide 2 Concept for EduHubs these courses in an open way, but supported from an existing demand and an initial audience to rely on. Thus, we are currently investigating to offer all courses through our Graduate School with ECTS and examination associated, but at the same time open to anyone else. Furthermore, the EduHub is completed with regular seminars and social events bringing together people of the field. In the coming term (Winter Term 24/25), we offer courses such as an Introduction to Rust, an introduction to Geospatial Python libraries, a Deep Learning lecture in collaboration with Potsdam university, an introduction to Apptainer as an alternative to Docker for Deep Learning, an introduction lecture to research data management in geospatial science, and more. We augment the activities with invited talks and seminars inviting all our students (Bachelor, Master, PhD) and colleagues (professors of department of Aerospace and Geodesy). All courses are reasonably compact and can be integrated in existing lectures - a model which we successfully run with multiple consortia by providing a shared Bachelor module “Research Data Management in Engineering”. In the future, we aim to strengthen the collaboration within TUM as well. From many other places (e.g., other NFDIs, the library, the super computing centers) offerings are made that we want to advertise to our peers. Therefore, we might extend the EduHub concept towards adding more existing, but sufficiently open activities. 3.3 EduHub UNIMS The Institute for Geoinformatics at the University of Münster provides expertise in the domain of geoinformatics and spatial data science in general, with an emphasis on R and Python as programming languages. The Institute has a reputable history of providing open educational resources, notably through the “Spatial Data Science: with Applications in R” book published by CRC and online available at [1]. This resource contains theory accompanied with snippets of code and exercises, with available solutions. It also serves as a foundational element for the theoretical development of the modules we plan to introduce. Significant to the institute activities is the collaboration with other international initiatives, in particular with the OpenGeoHub, a not-for-profit research foundation that promotes open geographical and geo-scientific data and develops open-source software (h t t p s : //opengeohub.org/), and a foundation that sets a precedent for our concept. This collaboration was in the form of numerous educational activities, including annual Summer Schools, the content of which is made public for broader benefit at [2]. Such examples of collaborations are instrumental in the establishment of a network of EduHubs critical for our vision, extending beyond the confines of the NFDI4Earth project. 3 Concept for EduHubs In the context of the EduHub, the first Spatial Data Science across Languages (SDSL) Workshop was hosted at the University of Münster in 2023. Details can be found at [3]. The workshop was a first of its kind, bringing together the users and expert software developers from the different spatial language ecosystems of Python, R and Julia. The hybrid event was attended by both online (30 participants) and on-site attendees (22 participants), aimed to foster the discussion across the different language communities regarding the commonalities and current challenges they are facing, in an effort to bridge the gap and facilitate interoperability. The subsequent edition in 2024 expanded this conversation and was hosted at the Geographical Institute of the Charles University in Prague, detailed at [4], drawing 28 on-site and 25 online participants. Plans are underway to continue this workshop series in 2025 in collaboration with the Department of Geoinformatics at the Paris Lodron University in Salzburg, Austria. Aligned with our educational mission, we are developing a new course in collaboration with Eurac Research Institute and Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemisty, focused on Earth Observation data analysis using raster and vector data cubes and utilizing R, Python, and Julia. Additionally, an introduction to Quarto as a publishing tool will be included. These modules are designed as tutorials and lesson plans, which will be integrated into the existing Master modules “Analysis of Spatio-Temporal Data” and “Spatial Data Science with R,” and will thus award ECTS points upon completion. This created content will not only be hosted on the EduPortal to reach a wider audience, but is also planned to be re-taught at conferences as tutorials to cultivate a user base and gather valuable feedback on the material. 4 Outlook Up to now, we established the first 3 EduHubs with a clear focus. We will try to extend the network within the funding phase of NFDI4Earth to create a greater EduHub community with a broader programme. However, the EduHub-Network is supposed to ensure sustainable NFDI-related competency development beyond the lifetime of the project. This way also higher education institutes will be supported in integrating NFDI4Earth educational resources into existing and future study programmes to ensure sustainable long-term adoption of NFDI4Earth principles. We will use the second phase of NFDI4Earth to determine the incentives for participating in the EduHub network after the funding phase beyond the obvious benefits of networking and sharing expertise. References 1. Pebesma, E., & Bivand, R. (2023, December 6). Spatial Data Science With Applications in R. Spatial data science. https://r-spatial.org/book/ 4