Setup

Before You Attend

Essential Digital Skills is a foundation course for researchers and professional services staff working in digital research environments. You do not need coding experience for this course, but you will get much more from the activities if you arrive with access to your core university systems and one live project example in mind.

Core Access Checklist

Before the first session, make sure you can:

  1. Sign in to your university account without difficulty.
  2. Access Microsoft 365, especially Teams, OneDrive, Word, and Excel.
  3. Open SharePoint spaces you commonly use for project collaboration.
  4. Reach the systems discussed in the course, including RIS and UniCore, even if you do not use them every day.
  5. Join the course Teams space or any local communication channel used by the teaching team.

Device and Materials

Bring:

  • a laptop or tablet with a modern web browser
  • a charger
  • a spreadsheet tool, ideally Excel
  • access to your usual project documents, notes, or non-sensitive sample materials

Optional but useful:

  • a phone for QR-code polls or quick room activities
  • headphones if you prefer to work through short demos individually

Literature and Writing Preparation

The literature and writing activities in Digital Tools use a supplied question, fictional reference records and a short draft. Bring somewhere to make notes, or use printed copies. No EndNote, Zotero, Word, LaTeX or AI installation/account is required for these activities; a live literature search is optional.

For optional hands-on practice after the lesson, use UoN’s EndNote setup guidance or the Zotero quick start, and your existing writing tool. See Additional Material for that follow-up practice.

Bring a Real Project Example

Most activities work best when you can map them onto something real. Before each session, try to identify:

  • one project, dataset, or service you are currently working on
  • one collaboration challenge you want to improve
  • one governance, storage, or documentation question you are unsure about
  • one decision you need to make about tools, access, sharing, or documenting your work

You do not need to bring full project files. A short written description is often enough.

Work Safely During the Course

Use live examples without exposing sensitive material.

  • Do not bring confidential or special category data into open classroom activities.
  • Prefer anonymised, synthetic, or summarised examples where possible.
  • Use only examples you are permitted to share in the classroom or chosen service.
  • If you are unsure whether an example is safe to use, ask the instructor and switch to a lower-risk version.

Suggested Working Folder

Keep one folder for all course outputs so you can reuse them later in your own projects.

essential-digital-skills/
  notes/
  activities/
  templates/
  reflections/

This makes it easier to keep copies of:

  • folder structure sketches
  • DMP notes
  • FAIR checklists
  • search logs and source-linked reading notes
  • co-author review agreements
  • action plans from group discussions
  • records of checks made on citations, documents and workflows

During the Course

  • Keep all working files in one dedicated folder for the course.
  • Save outputs from practical tasks (templates, notes, summaries) to reuse in your own research projects.
  • Treat activities as prototypes for your own work rather than one-off classroom tasks.
  • Record decisions you make during exercises, especially around storage, access, documentation, and validation.

Session-by-Session Preparation

These light checks will help you get more from each topic.

Session theme Helpful preparation
Digital Tools Bring a search topic or use the supplied one; know where your team writes and reviews documents. The literature and writing tasks need only paper or notes.
Digital Delivery Bring a current project timeline, meeting rhythm, or planning challenge
Data Governance & Policy Think of one project involving personal, sensitive, or shared data
Research Data Management Bring an example of a dataset, folder structure, or DMP question

If You Are New to These Systems

That is completely fine. The course is designed to help you:

  • recognise what each platform is for
  • choose more appropriate places to store and share work
  • ask better questions of support services
  • make more defensible day-to-day research decisions

Course Navigation

Course Overview · Setup · Additional Material · Reference · Discussion