The Steering Committee has formulated a proposal for a survey of trainers across the globe and we need your help.
What could a survey tell us? What could it do for us?
- How are trainers valued in their roles? Is training a full-time position, or mostly volunteer work?
- Who are life science trainers? What is the educational background? Do they work alone or as part of a team?
- What do trainers think about pedagogy? Are they following uniform standards? How do they develop the training materials?
- How do the trainers collect feedback or perform learning assessment?
These are just some of the possible questions we can ask to help define what we do. While other surveys have been done within organizations, the motivation here would be to get a diverse global perspective. Ultimately we want to establish the life science trainer as a critical role within the community and to identify how we can make our work more impactful and rewarding.
What volunteer effort is needed and what is the time frame?
We want to incorporate as much expertise as we can from this community. To that end, we are forming an ad hoc survey committee and asking for a minimum of 4 hours of your time. That would be enough for you to 1) attend an orientation meeting (60 minutes); 2) read through and comment on an initial draft survey (120 minutes); 3) attend a synthesis meeting to help shape a final draft.
Other roles for members of the committee or other community members might include:
- Literature search
- Distribution, advertising, and circulation of survey
- Analysis of results
- Manuscript preparation
Time frame and publication
We would like to assemble committee members by mid-August and have a survey draft ready to circulate at the end of September 2020. We would hope to complete the survey by December 2020 and work on a manuscript for publication in Q1 2021. Anyone who contributes to volunteer effort to the survey effort would be invited as co-author on the publication.
To volunteer
Complete this signup form: https://forms.gle/gbas9A5gszmkrhFP9