 Okay, I think it's about time to get started. I'm Cliff Lynch, the Director of the Coalition for Networked Information, and you've joined us for one of the project briefing sessions for our Spring 2020 virtual meeting, which is now roughly at midpoint. It will run through the end of May. Our presentation today addresses engagement through supporting research and student success through statistical consulting, and I think that this gets at several things that are really important as we look at how we support our teaching and learning and our research enterprise. One piece of this is about data science, and statistics is broader than data science, but certainly is intimately related to it, and the growth and interest around data science has certainly placed much more emphasis on statistics broadly. The other side is how we engage with support of the research effort, including student research, which is an important part of student success, I think, and of having a successful student experience at our institutions. And so I'm very eager to hear this talk. Jonathan Cain will be presenting, and he'll talk you through this, and at the end we'll take questions and try and answer them. Diane Goldenberg Hart from CNI will moderate the Q&A. I note we have a Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. Please feel free to use that at any point during the presentation. Ask questions as they occur to you, and we will come back to all of those at the end and try and address them. And with that, it just remains for me to thank Jonathan so much for doing this, and to thank you all for joining us. And with that, over to you, Jonathan. Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate you inviting me here today to give this project update, and I also want to take a moment and thank everyone who's taking from their day to come and learn a little bit about what we're doing in supporting research and student success through statistical consulting, especially considering the really unprecedented events that we've all been experiencing recently. So with that spirit in mind, I'd like to keep it a little informal and walk you through what we've been doing in a little bit and a bit of an experimental mode and really responding to the change in service delivery as well. So here's a really rough agenda for us today. We're going to talk a little bit about me, not because I am also important, but rather it gives a little bit of information about how the service was designed and some of the factors that went into it. We'll talk about the history of data services at the University of Oregon. We'll talk about partnership formation and the founding of our statistical service. Look at some of the guiding principles of the service, which ties back into the about me portion. And then some of the emerging challenges that we have faced along the way and are probably going to face moving forward. And then think about how we've been engaging the impact of our services because so much of what we do is about figuring out impact. And then ultimately we're going to talk about the future of the service, what it looks like now and moving forward in our really changed environment of higher education. So a little bit about me. My name is Jonathan Kane. I currently have the pleasure of serving as the head of data services and interim director of digital strategies in the libraries. My academic background is in anthropology, Africana studies, and then of course library and information studies. I have a certification on the certified data carpentry instructor or trainer, and I've been certified teaching the Tai Evers. The reason that I bring all this to the forefront is because it's not a traditional, at least a lot of the resumes I've seen, it's not a traditional data science focused background. It's heavy, yes, with biology and anthropology, but very heavy in the humanities and cultural studies. And I think this background with working in science libraries for some time has really influenced how I thought about developing service around statistical support and thinking about the communities that would need that sort of support from a space like the library. So a little bit about the history of data services at the University of Oregon. So data services is the founding, is the holding department for the statistical consulting service. And it is a relatively new service, it's less than three years old, and I have the privilege of being the first head of that department. And on some levels it was a response to definite emergent needs on campus. The idea of how do we support researchers who are creating data, how do we, in a really effective way, make our researchers more help our researchers be as competitive as possible by giving them the tools when seeking grants and other funding opportunities, and how do we also put our efforts into being a part of that research lifecycle and educating our students around the research process. And so we started the department that really focused on research data management and been pulling on my background with data sourcing and then working with R in particular for data cleanup and processing and preparation for analysis. And then we launched the Oregon, University of Oregon Data Science Initiative, which was a very multidisciplinary approach to data science on our campus on a very distributed campus. And so there's a lot of, there were a lot of strengths in doing this. I think it opened up the idea of data science to disciplines that people don't historically think of as part of data science. But it also produced a lot of, a number of challenges in, I would think, in getting all the requisites background to speak the same sort of language. And I thought there was an opportunity here for the, for the libraries to be a partner in some way. And so put forward data services as a part of supporting the data science initiative. So working on the idea of providing foundational workshops on research data management, working with data management plans, teaching the introduction to R and Python to support those efforts. As the data science initiative really matured on campus, one of the areas that was identified as needing more support is the idea of statistical learning. And historically, there's not been a centralized service for statistics at the University of Oregon. And so there have been other units that may have done it on and off. But I thought there was a great opportunity for the libraries to actually be a central place in a really distributed system to provide that sort of support. So to get started, I really wanted to understand what the campus research environment, the research and teaching environment looked like. So working with one of my graduate assistants, Avalon Mason, we did a scraping of the catalog of courses at the campus for 2017-2018. And we noted every class that had something to do with research or something to do with data. And as this visualization shows, research design, research methods, data analysis show up a lot of different places, mixed methods, data management, they all show up across disciplines. And so with that, I felt really confident that there's something unique that we can offer as one of the centralized services where everyone on campus can come and learn and use our resources to play a role in supporting data literacy and statistical literacy. But when thinking the program through, there were a couple of things that we were concerned about when I went to my supervisor, Mark Watson, and then Dean, Adrian Lim, about starting this service. And there were two big things. One, it's a pretty large expense. And then two, it is a, how do we get partners to actually invest with their time in the process? And so I did a proposal to the graduate school, which Dean Lim was fantastic and bringing the library and the graduate school together to try to get to fund the service. And so we started off as a one-year pilot on statistical consulting support service for U.S. students, which would be housed in the data services department, and then working with the graduate school to hire GEs to provide the consultation. So the consultation, the libraries would host, manage, and provide space for the pilot program through the data services department. They would partially fund it through the form of waivers for those two GEs. The libraries would hire a statistical specialist, a research analyst specialist, to serve as a staff member. And that would be the core of the team that would serve our campus of 20,000 people. And I think we came up with a pretty good model to support that active learning and research community. Overall, when we did our catalog scrape, we identified 141 classes pertaining to statistics, data analysis, or research methods at EO. And as you saw in that visualization, they ran the gamut from college, across colleges, schools, and departments. Another thing that I was really thinking about is how absolutely essential it is to have statistical knowledge or ability to analyze statistics and data in the modern world. And someone sent me this tweet about data literacy being a social justice issue. And I wholeheartedly agree. I think information literacy is an extremely important issue along those lines. And it becomes doubly so when we start to think about how much data science has some issues with representation. And so in designing the service and sort of the outcomes for me, one of the things that I really wanted to do was embrace the university. And I think now, to a lesser extent, higher ed intent to really address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion on their campuses in terms of curriculum, in terms of employment, in terms of community building. And so these were three big considerations that I wanted to really engage with as the libraries decided to invest in not only in data services, but in statistical consulting. So for the wider data science representation issue, how could we play a role in increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion? And then more importantly, for more immediately for us, how can we ensure that diversity, equity, and inclusion was a guiding principle that was present in the makeup of our program? So we wanted to think about who's going to be in the room? How do we help provide people a space to be in the room and then provide them the skills to be in the room once they leave our institution? And how do we ensure that everyone has the same opportunity to achieve at the same level, no matter where they started? When we think about underrepresentation of Black and Latinx students and women in STEM careers, a lot of times they talk about not having the foundational courses from high school. And we wanted to make sure that if just because your high school didn't provide you that opportunity or your undergraduate experience didn't provide you that opportunity to learn these skills, that you wouldn't be completely shut out of these opportunities. And so we designed for that work as well. So in order to do that, I really wanted us to include diverse experts. I wanted us to have an inviting and culturally competent curriculum. I wanted us to think about the whole learner because everyone's learning experience is not the same. Everyone's life experience is not the same. Our learners come to us from completely different backgrounds and we have to acknowledge that and we want to account for that because we want them to be successful. We wanted to make sure that we kept it low cost. Right now all of our offerings are free and I hope that we're able to maintain that in terms of supporting our students. We wanted to make it available, understanding that so many of our students or our learners are working either in the day or in the evening and so having the widest variety of times available to take courses is important. And make sure that we're able to provide accurate expectations of what one should know coming in or what we can provide in terms of support and knowledge coming out. And then we wanted to be able to demonstrate a value not only for ourselves to our funders and supporters but also demonstrate an actual value to the learners because we're asking them to give up their time that they can be doing something else to learn these skills and we're saying that it's totally worth it for them to do so. So how do we demonstrate that value? Our GEs came from a variety of backgrounds, anthropology, coming from public planning and management, PhD students, master students, backgrounds in statistics, background in GIS, econometrics, so trained different ethnic and gender backgrounds or representation, trying to make sure that we had as wide a tent as possible of our actual knowledge experts. And so this is the service that came out of that process. Data services with consultations, there were free statistical, excuse me, free statistical consultations for graduate and undergraduate students. And it's important to stress that because as a part of our programming, we were not designed to give that consultative support to faculty members. So the pilot program staffed by one halftime classified position, that's our statistical consultant, two part-time graduate student statistical consultants, one data services GE that is not a statistical consultant, but is the data services GE that is closely aligned with that program focusing on data science, GIS and programming. And then two non-tech faculty librarians who are providing logistical and instructional support. So some really quick numbers when we launched basically in early October up until the end of November, these are what our initial numbers looked like and we were really excited about that. So 164 student consultations, 39 of those consultations were unique visits from graduate students. 60 percent of our users came back more than once and our students came from across disciplines. You can see the wide variety of programs that are represented in less than stellar graphic, but I wanted to give you an idea that they're coming from all over campus. One of the things that I spoke about briefly was making sure that we had a curriculum that was really reflective of people who were coming in and working to make people feel welcome. So you can see a wide variety of the workshops that we offer in addition to our consultation service that teach basic skills, GIS, Python, R, statistics. But I also want to highlight that one of our GEs really found a market teaching R in Chinese, an introduction to R in Chinese, which was a really unique opportunity for us, which shows hiring for a diversity of experience is really important. This has been a really popular workshop series. We've run it every term and it was the first workshop series that we had that had zero percent melt, meaning that everyone who signed up actually attended the session. And moving into this term, as we've made our transitions, in its final term, I think we had 35 initial signups and 35 attendance, I believe. So I think this illustrates the importance of hiring really a wide spectrum of folks to do the work. I think we are able to reach a far wider audience than we would if we hadn't done that planning in the beginning. So of course, in the beginning of this term, corona, it caused some real changes in the way we operate. And so I wanted to address that. We've moved from in-person to online, like most institutions of higher learning. And I think that our transition was made far easier by the fact that we were designing for an online presence already. You saw the size of the department staff and the university actually has more than one campus. So we were trying to figure out how do we reach our Portland campus, for example, or our Charleston campus, for example. And we're thinking about moving online and we have begun to build scaffolding for that. And so when the directive came that we were moving to a remote environment, we were able to swing that way pretty easily. So we set up a virtual service for making a request for appointments or just actually stopped by a virtual help desk. And we can see some of the out, we've started to get some data back about that. We've seen a, I've been informed, we've seen a small drop off in undergraduate students coming, but that's been an uptick in graduate students with far more, more dissertating and master thesis writing students taking advantage of our consultation services, or actually sorry, utilizing our services. And I think we've seen an increase in time moving up to an hour for most consultations at this point. So while the overall numbers have not changed, the way those numbers are represented has changed the way people have responded to using the service has changed. As I was saying, our drop in service has dropped, has become a smaller portion. So 80, almost 88% of our interactions are based on scheduled appointments rather than drop in service now. And I think that also speaks to our users in terms of what part of the research process they're in. And it is later in the academic year, so people probably have established relationships with consultants rather than finding them for the first time at this point. But there are some questions about the future of the service. So we were initially, we were initially renewed for a second year of the pilot program, but there's been a general hiring freeze. So we are now facing a reduced staffing. So we're thinking that this is going to lead to a reduction in live and new workshop content and really switching to a self-directed, a less than based methodology that we're hosting on our learning, campus learning management system. And we're currently recording the sessions now and editing them and adding exercises to try to replicate something of that experience. We're also thinking of eliminating the drop in service, at least initially, because we're not going to have three of the positions that were initially staffing that service. And then we are hoping to make up for that by expanding our connections to curriculum. So there's a greater emphasis on providing the service that's immediately needed right then and thinking about beginning a fee-for-service system for folks that are pursuing grants so that we can support our faculty members as well. But I think this is me approaching time and I wanted to leave room for questions, but I wanted to give you a really brief but high level overview of what we're doing, why we designed it the way we have, and the way that we've responded to the challenges of the COVID epidemic and its effects on institutions moving from in-person experiences to remote experience. So with that, I'm going to say thank you and look forward to answering any questions that you may have. Thank you, Jonathan. Thanks for that overview. And for the description of what a really interesting project and congratulations sounds really successful, and I'm very sorry to hear that it's undergoing some strains now given the current circumstances. So I hope that all will be well there. I really also appreciate the background, your own personal background that you shared with us to help us think about how people from a variety of backgrounds can come into this kind of work and help others grapple with the technologies and these strategies. So thank you for that context. I want to go ahead and invite our attendees who might also welcome. Thank you so much for carving out part of your day to spend at CNI's 2020 virtual meeting. And please with that, share with us your questions, comments. There's a Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. If you want to go ahead and type your question or your comment in there, I'll be happy to read it aloud. And Jonathan will address your questions live. You can also type them into the chat box. While we're waiting for folks to type their questions in, I just want to remind everyone that this is part of CNI's spring 2020 virtual meeting. And I've just chatted out there to you a direct link to the schedule. The meeting will continue through the end of May. So please take a look for plenty more offerings. And with that, I will read now our first question, which comes from Marcel Fortin. Marcel writes, thank you, Jonathan. Are you following the carpentries curriculum or have you developed your own? Thank you, Marcel. I think that's a really good question. And the answer is it's a blend of the two. So we've started with the carpentries curriculum. And for some things, for example, SQL and Git. But we've also tailored it based on some of our experiences with our particular learner communities. And we've also been using the tidyverse curriculum to teach the tidyverse. So I think we are working at expanding the number of folks that are carpentries certified. And I think we will rely more heavily on the curriculum as we expand the number of people who are participating as trainers and helpers on our campus. So a bit yes, but we've also developed our own. Thank you for that question, Marcel. And thank you, Jonathan. And I was just curious to know who is working on that curriculum. Who has designed that? Is that something by committee or yeah, who's working on that? So a number of people. I want to say RGEs have been fantastic. So Yuan Fang, who developed the curriculum for R& Chinese, Jay Matante, who's been working heavily on our Python and introduction RGIS work. And Alicia DeLuis, who's been doing a lot of work around introduction to statistics with R. Cameron Mulder, who has been doing a heavy lift with consultations and doing work on surveys. And of course, Gabrielle Hayden, our reproducibility librarian, working with Git and SQL. Myself a bit around our tidyverse and working with tidy data, more of the data munching stuff, a librarian-y, can I be? But it's been very much a team effort in going out. But by and large, those people that I mentioned, excluding myself, that have been doing such a tremendous lift to get us to be in a position of offering around 26 individual workshops per term, which is really impressive. I really appreciate their work. That's great. Okay. Thanks. We have another question now from Kiri Karini, who asks, what was your experience in getting the word out across campus about your services? And do you feel like you reached the students that you were hoping to get? Thank you, Kiri. That's a great question. Our experience has been fairly mixed. They've been really high-touched, right? This is our first year. And so we relied a lot on personal relationships to get the word out. So writing individual faculty in, for example, like psychology and computer science and sociology, reaching out to the subject specialist and asking them to spread the message on their behalf was really fortunate to work with the folks over at their scholars program and sort of getting our services in front of them early on, which was really great and helped us reach part of those communities that I was really interested in and bring in because a lot of times I don't think we all know what's available to us on campus. I certainly didn't know when I started. Also, we were able to really reach out to existing tutoring services on campus. And while we don't do tutoring, we found a really nice relationship with tutoring services where the high level questions that were beyond their scope, they would start to send to us. And we would send a lot of the first-year experience questions around interest stats to them. And that worked out really well. But we are hoping to have a far wider outreach moving forward. And it's definitely a learning experience. Hopefully year two, we will get greater, greater acknowledgement and other communities that we just haven't gotten yet. Great. Okay. Thanks. Thank you, Kiri. And thanks for that answer, Jonathan. And we have another question from Jane Scott now who asks, do you have any policies around author contributor attribution with these consults? Does your staff get author attribution for their assistance? It's a great question. And we've not tackled that. They're not doing, ideally, they are not doing work at that level. We're hopeful that people are saying they came in and got help with analysis. But let me pause. We're not doing the analysis for them. We're helping them determine whether this is the proper way to go. And hopefully that is being acknowledged. But we haven't actually tackled that question about author attribution. I don't think that was a pressing thought when we were developing the service. But I think as this term, now that you bring it to the front of my mind, as this term has developed, and we're starting to see an increase in our dissertating students, and maybe something that we should talk about inside our team. That was a great question, Jane. Yes, it was. Thank you. All right. Well, great questions. Thanks to our attendees. If you have any other questions, please feel free to type them in. And I also just want to invite anyone who would like to speak directly with Jonathan or make a comment live. You can raise your hand, your virtual hand in this environment. And I can unmute you. And you can share your thoughts, chat with Jonathan about what it takes to get some kind of consultative program like this off the ground if you're interested in exploring something like that for your institution. I'm sure he would be happy to chat with you about that. And I'm not seeing any more questions or any more hands. So and that given that we're a little bit past the end time for this webinar, I'm going to thank Jonathan once again. Thank our attendees for coming. So with that, I will thank you again, Jonathan.