#ECIL2023 Data Literacy for Master Level in University of Helsinki

Pam McKinney blogging from day 3 of the ECIL conference. Tuija Korhonen spoke about data literacy in higher education, which is very important as students do independent research, so need to understand data management and citation practices. These are also skills for the workplace. Helsinki university is large, with 11 faculties across 4 campuses. There is a research data support network featuring specialists from the library, IT, research affairs and legal affairs.
Various tools and services are offered, e.g. a data management planning tool and workshops. The library data management team teach research data management for doctoral students and researchers, but following the implementation of GDPR in 2018 they needed to provide this training for students at all levels. This presented an issue of scalability, who was going to teach data management to all these students?
The solutions were to provide self study material, and a personal data test, a teaching pilot with faculty. Self study material was created using lib guides in 3 languages - Finnish, Swedish and English and covered topics such as where data should be stored. The teaching pilot with faculty took place in the context of a masters course, and focused on open science principles and practices. There has been very positive feedback from students and staff regarding the teaching pilot. And other universities have asked to adopt the personal data test quiz.
The abstract for this talk is on this page (scroll down)