21 June 2022, DocEnhance partners had the pleasure to meet in person for the project’s annual meeting in Manchester.
Bärbel Tress from Tress Academic and project Advisory Board member opened the session with a keynote talk on “Increasing the take-up and impact of skills courses”. Encouraging students’ or graduates’ participation to courses requires efforts on behalf of the organiser to increase the message reach, help beneficiaries to understand the relevance and benefits of the course, and have them enrol in the course.
Six months before the end of the project lifetime, partners then presented progress of their work packages:
- Project management
- Skills investigation and intelligence
- Course concept and design
- Implementation of pilot courses
- The DocEnhance Platform
- Communication, dissemination and exploitation
- Evaluation
Evaluation of the first round of pilot courses showed a high satisfaction with the course design and structure, requesting more interactive or experimental approach to the courses and further development on specific aspects.
The DIOSI project, “Developing and Implementing hands-on training on Open Science and Open Innovation for Early Career Researchers”, was presented to consortium. The DIOSI project proposes a full cycle concept on doctoral education, from the development of a new joint doctoral educational programme, through the provision of training on Open Science and Open Innovation & Entrepreneurship for doctoral candidates and early career researchers (DCs and ECRs), to the measurement of impact of such training, by creating an impact and graduate-tracking framework.
A session was then dedicated to the career-tracking survey conducted by DocEnhance. Julia Boman from the European Science Foundation presented the main findings of the survey implementation. Representatives from the Technical University of Munich Graduate School, NOVA Doctoral School and Univerzita Mateja Bel provided feedback on the implementation of the survey, sharing the main findings for their oganisation and how the results will be applied.
The annual meeting ended with conclusions from the project’s Advisory Board.
The consortium now has six more months to go before the project end and the launch of the DocEnhance platform. A final event end of November 2022 will take place in Lisbon, and will showcase the benefits of DocEnhance’s courses, training module, and career-tracking survey.
