Research Data Management Tutorials for Undergraduate Students

Teaching RDM at the RWTH Aachen University in an inorganic chemistry lab

Basic concepts of research data management (RDM) are becoming more and more important in the course of digitizing laboratories. Recently, the RWTH Aachen University taught RDM to 5th-semester students as part of an advanced inorganic chemistry course, introducing the topic to aspiring chemists before they start their bachelor thesis. To make general RDM concepts more accessible, short videos were produced, helping the students to familiarize themselves with RDM in chemistry. Furthermore, the acquired knowledge was applied to a practical experiment (the synthesis of ferrocene), using the electronic laboratory notebook Chemotion. We are currently evaluating a survey of the students to further improve our RDM videos, which are available on the NFDI4Chem YouTube channel.

Figure 1: Screenshot of one of the recorded teaching videos, explaining the types of research data in chemistry.