Extra Exercises
How To Use These
These exercises are designed for instructors who want extra practice material, catch-up tasks, or stronger consolidation activities. Most can run in 10 to 20 minutes with a short plenary.
Exercise 1: Tool and Workflow Audit
Best fit: Digital Tools or Digital Delivery
Ask learners to map one live workflow from “idea” to “shared output” and identify:
- which system is used at each stage
- where files move between systems
- where duplication or confusion appears
- one change that would reduce friction immediately
Debrief question: Which platform decisions are historical habits rather than deliberate choices?
Exercise 2: Data Risk Triage
Best fit: Data Governance & Policy
Give groups two or three short scenarios and ask them to rank the risks from lowest to highest. They should justify the ranking using factors such as:
- identifiability
- sensitivity
- number of people involved
- external sharing
- cloud processing
- unclear ownership or roles
Debrief question: Which risk factor was most often overlooked on first reading?
Exercise 3: Escalate or Decide?
Best fit: Data Governance & Policy or Research Data Management
Provide a list of decisions and ask groups to sort them into:
- decide locally
- check with project lead
- escalate to specialist support
Useful prompts:
- choosing a file naming convention
- selecting a lawful basis
- sharing data with an external partner
- uploading material to an AI tool
- defining a retention period
- deciding whether ethics review is required
Debrief question: What makes a decision suitable for local judgement rather than escalation?
Exercise 4: DMP Rewrite Sprint
Best fit: Research Data Management
Take a weak DMP paragraph and rewrite it to include:
- what data will exist
- where they will be stored
- who has access
- how they will be documented
- what sharing conditions apply
- how long they will be retained
Debrief question: Which missing detail made the original paragraph least useful in practice?
Exercise 5: Folder Rescue
Best fit: Research Data Management
Present a messy shared project structure and ask groups to redesign it. They should explain:
- how raw, cleaned, and derived data are separated
- where documentation lives
- what naming rules they would use
- how versioning will be handled
Debrief question: What problem would the redesigned structure solve first?
Exercise 6: FAIR in 30 Days
Best fit: Research Data Management
Select one dataset and ask learners to produce a short improvement plan under the four FAIR headings:
- Findable
- Accessible
- Interoperable
- Reusable
Limit them to one month and realistic changes only.
Debrief question: Which FAIR improvements are low effort but high value?
Exercise 7: Evidence and Document Handover
Best fit: Digital Tools
Use the learner practice resources and ask pairs to exchange a reading note or document plan. The receiving partner should identify:
- the original source or authoritative document
- the claim, decision or revision being proposed
- the check already made and anything still unresolved
- the owner of the next action
Debrief question: What could you verify from the handover alone, and what still required the original source?