Overview
In order to know whether we are providing what researchers need and thereby to improve our services to researches, we rolled out a short anonymous survey* back in May 2018 that has been open to all UTS researchers, research assistants and HDR students.
We have received 41 responses so far. The two bar charts below show the distribution of their research positions and the distribution of their research fields respectively.
What researchers say
In qualitative comments from the survey, we received feedback that:
“Hacky hour is the best thing about UTS. I would love to have more than one session per week if resources allow: Monday and Thursday for example. Sometimes when dealing with a coding problem what I can't solve it seems like Thursday is so far away. Thank you for your support so far.”
However, we did not meet the needs of all. One suggestion was to:
“Provide services at a time not in business hours for part time students that cannot come to workshops/support services in business hours.” There were also a few grumbles about our HPC/iHPC that are beyond our budget to fix although the staff who run them came in for high praise. Overall the tone was: “You guys do a great job. Keep it up.”
The most commonly voiced criticism was that eResearch services were difficult to locate:
“Information about what services were available, where to go to access these services, regular reviews and updates on these services would be helpful. Currently services like lab archives etc I found out about by lunch room chat.”
We have tried a variety of avenues of communication, such as workshops, Staff Connect, Service Connect, our website, UTS library website, faculty research mailing lists, GRS mailing lists, on-campus screens advertising Hacky Hour, Hacky Hour and even this blog. None of these methods will satisfy everyone. In fact, one comment read “PLEASE STOP SPAMMING US WITH YOUR EMAILS”, illustrating the frustration with which researchers face a deluge of emails.
Another participant noted that a solution would be:
“one pathway to lead to accessing advice rather than multiple lines of inquiry to get to Hacky hour as the place for expert sharing of advice in research design using Lime survey and CloudStor etc.”
eResearch is therefore excited to be involved in ResHub which, even if it begins simply as a one-stop directory to researcher services, will be meeting a widely-voiced need.
Usefulness and Delivery of eResearch Services
In general, the participants find many services useful for their research, and think the delivery of the services have been satisfactory.
Specifically, for each service we asked researchers to provide feedback on, the chart on the left shows to what extent they think the service is useful for their research, and the chart on the right shows how they think the service is delivered (N/A means they have not used the corresponding service yet).
Research data management services (e.g. Stash, Cloudstor, REDcap, eResearch Store, Gitlab, Omero, eNotebooks)
Other data services (e.g. data archiving, data publication, data visualisation, data arena)
Survey platform services (LimeSurvey, REDcap)
UTS HPC services (e.g. UTS-HPCC, FEIT ARClab)
External HPC services (AWS, Nectar, NCI, Intersect)
eResearch consulting services (e.g. grants/ethics advice, collaboration tools, research data consultation, data security)
Training services through Intersect (e.g. REDCap, R, Python, Excel)
Training through UTS library (e.g. Research Data Management, eNotebooks)
"Hacky Hour" researcher support
ResBaz Sydney 2017
*: Study data were collected and managed using REDCap, a secure, web-based software platform designed to support data capture for research studies.