Fifteen Years of AuthorAID Training

In March 2008, Dr. Barbara Gastel facilitated the first AuthorAID research writing workshop in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Workshops in other countries followed. In 2011, we piloted an online course to build on the success of our workshops and expand the reach of our training initiative.

Over the next few years, we offered our online research writing course to small groups of learners, and we collaborated with a variety of organisations to develop customised versions of this course. For example, we worked with Pure Earth to develop a thematic course for researchers working in environmental health, and we supported institutional partners in Sri Lanka, Tanzania and elsewhere to take on the course and run it on their own learning platforms.

In 2015, we updated the learning materials to reflect our growing understanding of the challenges faced by researchers in the Global South. The same year, we ran the course as a massive open online course (MOOC) for the first time, in response to the increasing demand for training of research writing. Meanwhile, we started working on a social science version of the course.

Since 2019, we have offered our Research Writing in the Sciences and Research Writing in the Social Sciences MOOCs on a regular schedule.

Since 2019, we have offered our Research Writing in the Sciences and Research Writing in the Social Sciences MOOCs on a regular schedule. The former typically run twice a year (with a proposal writing module included in one of the rollouts) and the latter once a year. For each MOOC, we have a team of volunteer guest facilitators who respond to participants’ questions on the forums. This guest facilitation model is a distinguishing aspect of our MOOC approach, and we described it most recently in the open access book Digital Technology in Capacity Development.

Since 2008, AuthorAID training has taken many forms: workshops in different countries; small-scale online courses; cascading training through institutional collaboration; MOOCs for a global audience; and training programmes delivered by partners and friends. It would be difficult to distill one or two lessons from all this experience, but I would say the AuthorAID team has always tried to balance the training needs of early career researchers, the services we can reasonably provide based on funding and strategy considerations and the opportunities presented by our growing network and digital technology. In a future post, I will share further reflections on the different forms of AuthorAID training.

We are now carrying out a major revision of our online course content to develop a single, unified research writing MOOC, which should be ready for rollout in the next few months. Follow the AuthorAID blog to be notified when enrolment is open. As usual, the MOOC will be open to all and free of charge!

Ravi Murugesan joined the AuthorAID team in 2011 and has enjoyed a variety of training responsibilities.

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Would you like to share your reflections on AuthorAID training as a participant or facilitator? Post a comment below.