Improvements: Data Discovery

[njlyon0]

Summary

Teaching this module on Thursday (tomorrow) and need a dedicated place to store any discussion on useful improvements

Sub-Tasks

• Teach this module (see Teach: Data Discovery #31 )
• Identify improvements / desired changes

Resources

• Module link

[njlyon0]

10/08/2024 Design Team Meeting

Met and discussed this topic with the data team and the consensus was we need to survey students for more granular feedback (see #34 ) but there were some things we a priori felt confident identifying as areas for improvement.

Data inventory prep work was artificially simple

• All groups wound up making their own custom / more nuanced data inventories
• Should instead share our custom / more nuanced template with them for the outset with the caveat that they might not need all that information at the outset of the project
• Also, to increase the benefit of this module for asynchronous people we should embed a static copy of the data inventory (or a more detailed description of it) in the course website (so that it isn't saying "take this template you don't have access to")

[njlyon0]

Student Feedback

See "2024_phase-1-survey" for verbatim feedback but to summarize:

• Should happen earlier in the course
  • May be addressed by changes suggested in Module Re-Ordering Thoughts #43
• Consider exchanging the panelists for other scientists who have looked for data for synthesis projects rather than data providers
• Include more content framing data discovery as a decision-making tool for how to refine your question/project
• Some suggestion that this module might better after data harmonization/wrangling
  • Editorial note (NL): tough to leave this that late to re-order in this way

[njlyon0]

Other Thoughts

• Should introduce ecocomDP!
  • Another standard format that might make preliminary data operations easier
  • Nice features in the ecocomDP R package for actually searching for data that are compliant with this format
  • See here: ediorg.github.io/ecocomDP/articles/use.html