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: Governance or RDM sessions

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: RDM or organising data sessions

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: Chart Critique and Repair

Best fit: Making Sense of Data

Show a poor chart and ask groups to identify:

  • what the chart is trying to say
  • what design choices make interpretation harder or misleading
  • what context is missing
  • how they would redesign it for a specific audience

Debrief question: Did the redesign change the story, or just make the original story clearer?

Exercise 8: From Insight to Action

Best fit: Insight to Impact

Give learners a short finding such as a survey result, metric shift, or usage pattern. Ask them to produce:

  • one insight
  • one possible action
  • one likely constraint
  • one follow-up question

Debrief question: What separated a strong action from a merely interesting observation?

Exercise 9: AI Verification Drill

Best fit: How to Use AI in Research

Provide a short AI-generated output and ask groups to mark:

  • which claims can be accepted quickly
  • which claims require source checking
  • which claims are ambiguous or unsupported
  • what prompt change might have reduced the problem

Debrief question: Where did the burden of checking become most visible?