[open-development] Aid data training curriculum draft- what do you think? (Lucy Morris)

Mon Mar 31 14:11:59 UTC 2014

Dear Zara,

This looks really exciting!  Thanks for inviting input into the Aid Data curriculum.

One suggestion would be to include a session on 'The limitations of aid data thus far' under the basic skill level, because I think it's essential that people understand that although there are increasing amounts of data on aid flows 'out there', that there are currently issues with the quality of the information that is available depending on how much training/capacity different organisations have.  This means that some aid flows may potentially be double-counted for example, and I think it's important to provide a bit of a reality check and to contextualise this data in the opening session.  I'm sure the quality will go up in time, but it's still very early days for many organisations that are publishing to IATI, so worth people bearing that in mind before they go data-diving!

Best wishes,

Lucy

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Message: 1
Date: Sun, 30 Mar 2014 19:16:30 -0400
From: Tim Davies <tim at practicalparticipation.co.uk<mailto:tim at practicalparticipation.co.uk>>
To: Zara Rahman <zara.rahman at okfn.org<mailto:zara.rahman at okfn.org>>
Cc: "open-development at lists.okfn.org<mailto:open-development at lists.okfn.org>"
    <open-development at lists.okfn.org<mailto:open-development at lists.okfn.org>>
Subject: Re: [open-development] Aid data training curriculum draft-
    what do you think?
Message-ID:
    <CAMH9oT7jnnbBjeKQw37tK3RK2U5OnuY_sqpATmOsr6GnWoRB=Q at mail.gmail.com<mailto:Q at mail.gmail.com>>
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Hello Zara,

Thanks for sharing this list. Is there a possibility of using a platform
other than the Wiki - as the sign-in requirement is a bit of barrier to
adding things there?

Two quick reflections/questions:

- I wonder if for some of the questions/course topics there whether there
are existing resources that people can be signposted to - or which can be
embedded in a small wrapper to contextualise them, without needing new
content to be created;

- Is the school of data course format always going to be the best one for
these modules? If find it to be quite text-heavy - whereas for some of
these themes I wonder if more slide-show based and audio-visual approaches
would be better (albeit with the greater complexity of translating video
materials).

On a more specific note about prioritisation, I would suggest higher
priority to:

  - *The limitations of aid data thus far* - there are already many people
  aware of the main players, but without a good understanding of the
  capability and limitations of current aid data. Starting from this would
  fill a gap in the knowledge environment: no-one else is addressing it.
  Whereas giving information on the main players is not as much as of a
  dev-toolkit niche.

On a related note - it might be worth thinking about which general School
of Data courses act a pre-requisites for working with particular aid data
sources. E.g. if you want to work with IATI data through the data store CSV
export, but you know nothing about data and data structures, which couple
of course should you take to get up to speed.

Hope these reflections are useful,

All the best

Tim

On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 12:53 PM, Zara Rahman <zara.rahman at okfn.org<mailto:zara.rahman at okfn.org>> wrote:

>  Hi all,
>
> A little toolkit update for you: we've put up a first iteration of an Aid
> Data curriculum up online:
> http://wiki.okfn.org/Projects/Open_Dev_Toolkit/Training/Plan - and, a
> little request for feedback, if you have a couple of minutes ;-)
>
> Due to funding and time restrictions, we'll probably only have time to
> write 6 or so modules in this curriculum within the next couple of months,
> though there is a fairly comprehensive list compiled here; *do you think
> the ones marked 'Priority 1' are the right ones to prioritise? And are we
> missing anything critical in these 6 modules? *It's up on a wiki to
> encourage your comments and feedback so please go ahead :-)
>
> We wanted to include all of the modules that came to mind for
> completeness, hoping that in the future there will be more resources to
> write these modules too. They'll be written in the style of School of Data
> courses, which you can see online here. <http://schoolofdata.org/courses/>
>
> There's also some more information about the Toolkit and other ways to get
> involved on the Project page on the wiki, here:
> http://wiki.okfn.org/Projects/Open_Dev_Toolkit
>
> Thanks all for any feedback and thoughts on this (and of course, any
> contributions of people wanting to join in writing the courses, share
> materials, or test out modules once they're written, are all very much
> welcome!)
>
> Zara
>
>
> --
> Zara Rahman
> Open Development Toolkit Lead | skype: zara.rahman | @zararah<http://www.twitter.com/zararah>
> Development Initiatives <http://devinit.org<http://devinit.org/>> | *Development Initiatives
> is committed to ending poverty by 2030*
> The Open Knowledge Foundation <http://www.okfn.org<http://www.okfn.org/>> | *Empowering through
> Open Knowledge*
>
> Open Development Toolkit http://opendevtoolkit.net <http://opendevtoolkit.net/> | @opendevtoolkit<http://www.twitter.com/opendevtoolkit>| Tools and training around open development data

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