[Music] okay I think it's about time to get started I'm cliff Lynch the director of the Coalition for networked information and you've joined us for one of the project briefing sessions for our spring 2020 virtual meeting which is now roughly at midpoint it will run through the end of May our presentation today addresses engagement through supporting research and student success through statistical consulting and I think that this gets at several things that are really important as we look at how we support our teaching and learning and our research Enterprise one piece of this is about data science and statistics is broader than data science but certainly is intimately related to it and the growth and interest of the around data science has certainly placed much more emphasis on statistics broadly the other side is how we engage with the support of the research effort including student research which is an important part of student success I think and of having a having a successful student experience at our institutions and so I'm very eager to hear this talk Jonathan Cain will be presenting and he'll he'll talk you through this and at the end we'll take questions and ant and try and answer them Diane golden Burkhardt from Siena I will moderate the Q&A I note we have a Q&A button at the bottom of your screen please feel free to use that at any point during the presentation ask questions as they occur to you and we will we will come back to all of those at the end and try and address them and with that it just remains for me to thank Jonathan so much for doing this and to thank you all for joining us and with that over to you Jonathan why thank you very much I really appreciate you inviting me here today to give this project a update and I also want to take a moment and thank everyone who's taking from midday to come and learn a little bit about what we're doing in supporting research and student success through statistical consulting especially considering the really unprecedented events that we've all been experiencing recently so with that spirit in mind I like to keep it a little informal and walk you through what we've been doing and a little bit in a bit of an experimental mode and really responding to the change in service delivery as well so here's a really rough agenda for us today we're going to talk a little bit about me not because I am also important but rather it gives a little bit of information about how the service was designed and some of the factors that went into it we'll talk about the history of data services at the University of Oregon we'll talk about partnership formation and the founding of our statistical service look at some of the guiding principles of the service which ties back into the about me portion and then some of the emerging challenges that we faced along the way and are probably going to face moving for and then think about how we've been engaging the impact of our services because so much of what we do is about figuring out impact and then ultimately we're going to talk about the future of the service what it look like now and moving forward in our really changed environment of higher education so a little bit about me my name is Jonathan Kaye and I currently have the pleasure of serving as the head of data services and interim director of digital strategies and the libraries my academic background is in anthropology africana studies and of course Library and Information studies I have a certification on the certified data carpentry instructor or a trainer and I've been certified teaching the Taber's the reason that I bring all this to the forefront is because it's not a traditional at least a lot of the resumes I've seen it's not a traditional data science focused background it's heavy yes with biology and anthropology but very heavy in the humanities and in cultural studies and I think this background with working in science library's role for some time it's really influenced how I thought about developing service around statistical support and thinking about the communities that would need that sort of support from a space like the libraries so a little bit about the history of and data services at the University of Oregon so data services is the funding is the holding department for the statistical consulting service and it is a relatively new service it's less than three years old and I have the privilege of being the first head of that department and on some levels it was a response to definite emergent needs on campus the idea of how do we support researchers who are creating data how do we in a really effective way make our researchers more can help our researchers be as competitive as possible by giving them the tools when seeking grants and other funding opportunities and how do we also put our efforts into being a part of that research lifecycle and educating our students around the research process and so we started the department that really focused on research data management in pulling on my background with data sourcing and then working with our in particular for data cleanup and processing input and preparation for analysis and there we launched the Oregon State University of Oregon data science initiative which was a very multidisciplinary approach to data science on our campus on a very distributed campus and so there's a lot of there were a lot of strengths in doing this I think it opened up the idea of data science to disciplines that people don't historically Finco as part of data science but it also produced a lot of a number of challenges and I would think in getting all the requisites background to speak the same sort of language and I thought there was an opportunity here for the for the libraries to be a partner in some way and so put for data services as part of supporting that data the data science initiative so working on the idea of providing foundational workshops on research data management working with data management plans teaching the introduction to RN Python to support those efforts as the data science initiative really matured on campus one of the areas that was identified as meeting more support is the idea of statistical learning and historically there's not been a centralized service for statistics at the University of Oregon and so there have been other units that may have done it on and off but I thought there was a great opportunity for the libraries to actually be a central place in a really distributed system to provide that sort of support um so to get started I really wanted to understand what the campus research environment the research and teaching environment looked like so working with one of my graduate assistants Evelyn Mason we did a a scraping of the catalog of courses at the campus for 2017 2018 and we noted every class that had something to do with research or something to do with data and as this visualization shows research design and research methods data analysis show up a lot of different places mixed methods data management they all show up across disciplines and so with that I felt really confident that there's something unique that we can offer as one of the centralized services where everyone on campus can come and learn and use our resources to play role in supporting data literacy and statistical literacies but when thinking the program through there had there were a couple of things that we were concerned about when I went to my supervisor Mark Watson and then Dean and Riaan Lim about starting this this service and there were two big things one it's a pretty large expense and then two it is a how do we get partners to actually invest with their time in the process and so did a proposal to the Graduate School which Dean Lim was fantastic and and bringing the library in the Graduate School together to try to get to fund this service and so we we started off as a one-year pilot on statistical consulting support service for us students which will be housed in the Data Services Department and then working with the graduate school to hire GES to provide the consultations so the consultation the librarians would host manage and provide space for the pilot program through the data services department they partially fund it through the form of waivers for those two GES the libraries would hire a statistical specialist a research analyst specialist to serve as a staff member and that would be the core of the team that would serve our campus of 20-some thousand people and I think if we came up with a pretty good model to support that active learning and research community overall when we did our Kent our catalog scrape we identified 141 classes pertaining to statistics data analysis or research methods at you oh and as you saw in that visualization they ran the gamut from college across colleges schools and departments another thing that I was really thinking about is how absolutely essential it is to have statistical knowledge or ability to analyze statistics and data and that's in the modern world and I just saw someone sent me this tweet about data literacy being a social justice issue and I call heartedly agree I think information literacy is an extremely important issue along those lines and it becomes doubly so when we start to think about how much data science has some issues what representation and so in designing the service and sort of the outcomes for me one of the things that I really wanted to do was embrace the university and I think now to a lesser extent higher Ed's intent too really address issues and diversity equity and inclusion and they're in there they're on their campuses in terms of curriculum in terms of employment in terms of community building and so these were three big considerations that I wanted to really engage with as the library decided to invest in not only in data services but in statistical consulting so for the the wider data science representation issue how could we play a role in increasing data diversity equity and inclusion and then more importantly for a more immediately for us how can we ensure that diversity equity and inclusion was a guiding principle that was present in the makeup of our program so we wanted to think about who's going to be in the room how do we help provide people a space to be in the room and then provide them that skills to be in the room once they leave our institution and how do we ensure that everyone has the same opportunity to achieve at the same level no matter where they started when we think about under representation of black and Latin X students and women in STEM careers a lot of times they talk about not having the foundational courses from high school and we wanted to make sure that if just because your high school didn't provide you that opportunity or your your undergraduate experience didn't provide you that opportunity to learn the skills that you wouldn't be completely shut out of these opportunities and so we designed for that work as well so in order to do that I really wanted us to include diverse experts we I wanted us to have an inviting and culturally competent curriculum and I wanted us to think about the whole learner because everyone's learning experience is not the same everyone's life experience is not the same our learners come to us from completely different back and we have to acknowledge that and we want to account for that because we want them to be successful we wanted to make make sure that we kept at low cost right now all of our offerings are free and I hope that we were able to maintain that in terms of supporting our students we wanted to make it available understanding that so many of our students or our learners are working either in the day or in the evening and so having a widest variety of times available to take courses it's important and make sure that we're able to provide accurate expectations of what one should know coming in or what we can provide in terms of support and knowledge coming out and then we wanted to be able to demonstrate a value not only for ourselves to our funders and supporters but also demonstrate an actual value to the learners because we're asking them to give up their time that they can be doing something else to learn these skills and we're saying that it's totally worth it for them to do so so how do we demonstrate that value our GES came from a variety of backgrounds anthropology coming from public planning and management PhD PhD students master students backgrounds and statistics background in GIS econometrics so tranked different ethnic and gender backgrounds or representation trying to make sure that we had as wide a tent as possible of our actual knowledge experts and so this is the service that came out of that process data services with the consultations there were free – statistical excuse me free statistical consultations for graduate and undergraduate students it's important to stress because as a part of our programming we were not designed to give that consultative support to faculty members so the pilot program staffed by one halftime classified position that's our statistical consultant to part-time graduate student statistical consultants once data services GE that is not a statistical consultant but is the data services GE that is closely aligned with our program focusing on data science GIS and programming and then to none to your track faculty librarians who are providing providing logistical and instructional support so some really quick numbers when we launched basically in early October up until the end of November these are what our initial numbers look like and we were really excited about that so 164 student consultations 39 of those consultations were unique visits from graduate students 60% of our users came back more than once and our disciplines came our students came from across disciplines you can see the wide variety of programs that are represented and less-than-stellar graphic but I wanted to give you an idea that they're coming from all over campus one of the things that I spoke about briefly was making sure that we had a curriculum that was really reflective of people who are coming in and working to make people feel welcome so you can see a wide variety of the workshops that we offer in addition to our consultation service they teach basic skills GIS Python our statistics but I also want to highlight that one of our GES really found a niche excuse me a market teaching are in Chinese and introduction are in Chinese which was a really unique opportunity for us which shows hiring for really a for a diversity of experience is really important this has been a really popular workshop series we've run it every term and it was the first workshop series that we had that had 0% melt meaning that everyone who signed up actually attended the session and moving into this term as we made our transitions in its final term I think we had 35 initial sign ups and 35 attendants I believe so we I think this is illustrates the importance of hiring a hiring really a wide spectrum of folks to do the work I think we are able to reach a far wider audience that we would if we hadn't done that planning in the beginning so of course in the beginning of this term Korona it caused some real changes in the way we operate and so I wanted to address that we've moved from in-person to online like most institutions of higher learning and I think that our transition was made far easier by the fact that we were designing for an online president's already you saw the size of the department staff and the university actually has more than one campus so we were trying to figure out how do we reach our Portland campus for example or our trust and campus for example and we're thinking about moving online and we have begun to build scaffolding for that and so when the directive cam that we were moving to a remote environment we were able to spleen that way pretty easily so we set up over a virtual service for making a request for appointments or just actually stopped by a virtual help desk and we can see some of the out we've started to get some data back about that we've seen a benefit seen a small drop-off and undergraduate students coming but that's been an uptick in graduate students with a far more more District ating and mass pieces to writing students taking advantage of our consultation services or actually sorry utilizing our services and I think we've seen an increase in time moving up to an hour for most rotations at this point so while that overall numbers have not changed the way those numbers are representatives change so because the way people have responded to using the service has changed as I was saying our drop-in service has dropped has become a smaller portion so any almost 88% of our interactions are based on scheduled appointments rather than drop-in service now and I think that also speaks to our our users in terms of what part of the research process they're in and it is later in the academic year so people probably have established relationships with consultants rather than finding them for the first time at this point but there are some questions about the feature of the service so we were initially we were initially renewed for a second year of the pilot program but there's been a general hiring freeze so we are now facing a reduced staffing so we're thinking that this is going to lead to a reduction and live a new workshop content and really switching to a self-directed Alliston based methodology that we're hosting on our learning at campus learning management system and we're currently recording those sections now and editing them and adding exercises to try to replicate something of that that experience we're also thinking of eliminating the drop-in service at least initially because we're not going to have three of the positions that were initially staffing that service and then we are hoping to make up for that by expanding our connections to curriculum so when there's a greater emphasis on providing the service that immediately needed right then and thinking about beginning a fee for service system for folks that are pursuing grants so that we can support our faculty members as well but I think this is me approaching time and I wanted to leave room for questions but I wanted to give you a really brief but high level overview of what we're doing why we designed it the way we have and are the way that we've responded to the challenges of the kovat epidemic and its effect on our institutions moving from in-person experiences to remote experiences so with that I'm going to say thank you and look for it to answer any questions that you may have thank you Jonathan thanks for that overview and for the description of what a really interesting project and congratulations sounds really successful and I'm very sorry to hear that it's undergoing some strains now given the current circumstances so hope that all will be well there I really also appreciate the background your own personal background that you shared with us to help us think about how people from a variety of backgrounds can come into this kind of work and help others grapple with the technologies and these strategies so thank you for that context I want to go ahead and invite our attendees whom I also welcome thank you so much for carving out part of your day to spend at CN eyes 2020 virtual meeting and please with that share with us your questions comments there's a Q&A box at the bottom of your screen if you want to go ahead and type your question or your comment in there I'll be happy to read it aloud and Jonathan will address your questions live you can also type them into the chat box while we're waiting for folks to type their questions in I just want to remind everyone that this is part of CN eyes spring 2020 virtual meeting and I've just chatted out there to you a direct link to the schedule or the meeting will continue through the end of May so please take a look for plenty more offerings and with that I will read now our first question which comes from Marcel Fortin Marcel writes Thank You Jonathan are you following the carpentras curriculum or have you developed your own Thank You Marcel I think that's a really good question and the answer is it's a blend of the two so we've started with a the carbon trees curriculum and for some things for example I guess that's QL and get but we've also tailored it based on some of our experiences with our particular learner commit communities and we've also been using the Thai diverse curriculum in to teach the Thai diverse are so I think we are working at expanding the number of folks that are carpentry is certified and I think we will rely more heavily on the curriculum as we expand the number of people who are participating as trainers and helpers on our campus so a bit yes but we've also developed our own thank you for that question Marcel and thank you Jonathan and I was just curious to know who is who's working on that curriculum who has designed designed that is that something by committee or yeah who's working on that so a number of people I want to say our GES have been fantastic so you one thing who develop their curriculum for RN Chinese je ma tante who's been working heavily on our Python and introduction ArcGIS work and Alicia de Louise who's been doing a lot of work around introduction to statistics with our cam and Mulder who has been doing a heavy lift with consultations and doing work on surveys and of course Gabriel hidden our reproducibility librarian working with git in SQL myself a bit around our anti D verse and working with tidy data more than data munging stuff a librarian II can I be but it's been very much a team effort and going out but by and large is those people that I mentioned excluding myself that have been doing such a tremendous live to get us to be in a position of offering around 26 individual workshops per term which is really impressive I really appreciate their work that's great okay thanks we have another question now from Carrie Carini who asks what was your experience in getting the word out across campus about your services and do you feel like you reach the students that you were hoping to get oh thank you Carrie that's a great question I our experience has been fairly uh fairly mixed they've been really high touch right this is our first year and so we we relied a lot on personal relationships to get the word out so writing individual faculty and for example like psychology and here at science and sociology reaching out to the subject specialists and asking them to spread the message on their behalf it was really fortunate to work with the folks over at McNair Scholars Program and sort of getting our services in front of them early on which was really great and it helped us reach part of those communities that I was really interested in it and bringing in because a lot of times I don't think we all know what's available to us on campus I certainly didn't know when I started um also if we were able to really reach out to existing tutoring services on campus and while we don't do tutoring we found a really nice relationship with tutoring services where the high level questions that were beyond their scope they would start to send to us and we would stand like a lot of the first year experience questions around insurance attached to them and that worked out really well but we we are hoping to have a far wider outreach moving for and it's a look it's definitely a learning experience hopefully year two we will get greater greater acknowledgment and other and other communities that we just haven't gotten yet great okay thanks Thank You kiri and thanks for that answer Jonathan and we have another question from Jane Scott now who asks do you have any policies around author contributor attribution with these consoles does your staff get author attribution for their assistance it's a great question and we've not tackle that they're not doing ideally they are not doing work at that level we're we're hopeful that people are saying they came in and got help with analysis but look let me let me pause we're not doing the analysis for them we're helping them determine whether this is the proper way to go and hopefully those that is being acknowledged but we have actually tackle that question about author attribution I don't I don't think that was a pressing thought when we were developing the service but I think as this term now that you bring it to the front of my mind as this term is developed and we're starting to see an increase in our dissertate students and maybe something that I we should talk about insider our team that was a great question Jane thank you all right well great questions thanks to our attendees if you have any other questions please feel free to type them in and I also just want to invite anyone who would like to speak directly with Jonathan or make a comment live you can raise your hand your virtual and in this environment and I can unmute you and you can share your thoughts chat with Jonathan about what it takes to get some kind of consultative program like this off the ground if you're interested in exploring something like that for your institution I'm sure he would be happy to to chat with you about that and I'm not seeing any more questions or any more hands so and that given that we're a little bit past the end time for this webinar I'm going to thank Jonathan once again thank our attendees for coming [Music] so with that I will thank you again Jonathan thanks to all our attendees ul everyone [Music]