NI4OS- Europe expands online learning options and facilitates national webinar events to respond to COVID-19 challenges

In light of the current trends towards online from working home, the transformation of traditional training workshops into a number of webinar series is one of the activities that enable NI4OS-Europe to adapt to the situation by taking advantages of the features of its training platform. The NI4OS-Europe training platform has been setup as a learning management system that not only enables tracking training materials using courses categorization and tagging, but it also supports all training related activities that can be done online. One of its main features is the support for organization of webinars and webinar series courses, as well as for recording, so that the videos are continuously available to training participants. The webinars and recordings are blended with all related training materials and an open forum for communication and discussion, all packed within a training course created for a specific topic.

The initial training plan for NI4OS-Europe included this approach as a means to efficiently organize the project “train-the-trainers” events, so that all NI4OS-Europe partners’ representatives and trainers from different institutions share their knowledge and experience in an effort to provide guidance for the national trainers to instill their knowledge within their respective countries. The FAIR and EOSC promotion train-the-trainers events held so far in the framework of the NI4OS-Europe were attended by more than 60 participants that provided very positive feedback about the quality of their experience during the webinars. With the development of the COVID-19 pandemic, the NI4OS-Europe training platform will continue to support he organization of the following train-the-trainer events in the form of webinar series, and, in addition, it will offer the possibility to transform the previously planned national workshops into national webinar events.

In addition to the support for webinars, the training platform also provides a number of online self-paced courses that provide additional training information on topics related to the project. By self-enrolling in these courses, one can further deepen the knowledge on open data and research and related services. The courses track the activities of the user and incorporate assessment test that mark the progress of learning. The NI4OS-Europe training team will continue adding new training materials and courses to the platform in order to provide the interested trainees with a variety of options for online learning.