CARTA holds 3rd Joint Advanced Seminar for Cohort 3 fellows at University of Ibadan, Nigeria

Consortium for Advanced Research Training in Africa held the 3^rd Joint Advanced Seminar (JAS-3) for its Cohort 3 fellows at the University of Ibadan (UI), Ibadan, Nigeria. The one-month long workshop was held between August 3 and August 26, 2015, at the University College Hospital (UCH) and attended by 19 Cohort 3 fellows.

JAS 3 in the CARTA series provides the fellows with protected space to analyse and write up their thesis, present sections of their work, critique their own work, offer collegial critique to other fellows and make use of the resource people available to sharpen any of the skills they have gained through the fellowship program.

The Consortium aims at building a vibrant multidisciplinary African academy that is able to lead world-class research that makes a positive impact on population and public health. “CARTA believes that research evidence should not be sitting in shelves but should reach the targeted end users who are decision makers. This is because decisions made without evidence are never resulting in programs that address the needs of the people,” remarked Dr. Alex Ezeh, CARTA Director during the opening of JAS 3.

Researchers need to reach out to policy makers with evidence from their work in order to be able to influence desired changes. Policy makers on the other hand need to clearly understand what evidence is coming from research and their implications in order to be able to make relevant decisions. This kind of engagement between researchers and policy makers call for effective presentation of research data in a manner that can be easily understood and consumed. Researchers hence need to equip themselves with certain presentation skills and tactics that will ensure effective policy engagement.

The four-week workshop focused on data presentation, doctoral dissertation, and scientific writing and communication skills to facilitate results dissemination and policy engagement and academic success. There were a variety of facilitators at JAS 3 drawn from a number of countries in Africa, USA, and the UK amongst other nations. The facilitators had wide range of expertise and experience ranging qualitative to quantitative research methods.

During JAS 3, facilitators had numerous one-on-one sessions with fellows apart from facilitating various joint and group sessions. There were numerous scientific blitzes that stimulated interesting debates on issues like homophobia; publish or perish; confounded p value amongst others. According to the cohort 3 fellows, JAS 3 was the best JAS for them and they could not quantify how they benefited from the four-week workshop.

There were also organized sessions during JAS 3 that are very specific to JAS 3 including:

Manuscript clubs (MCs)

During the JAS, there were organized manuscript clubs (MCs) that assisted fellows in articulating their thoughts by editing scientific manuscripts for language usage, punctuation and organization. The MCs are designed specifically to answer the request of many fellows and they are meant to impart skills are useful for scientific writing. The MCs are intended to provide an environment that optimizes the interaction of fellows and their mentors during the process of preparing a manuscript for publication by minimizing the time they spend on basic writing skills.

Diagnostic sessions (DGs)

Diagnostic Sessions (DG) are purposed to support fellows in identifying their needs and accessing one-to-one support during the JAS. The sessions are run in small pre-assigned groups with a facilitator. From the DGs, fellows get clarity about how to make progress each week with their analysis and write up, and also get to know which facilitator to access for one-on-one support. The DGs enables fellows to clearly map out how to complete their PhD write up before the next JAS (JAS4).

Support clinics

Clinics offer fellows the opportunity to make appointments with resource people who provide them with support and advice. Fellows’ needs are be addressed by facilitators with expertise in the area of the fellow’s interest. During the support clinics, expert facilitators with skills in Writing and conceptualizing, demography, research logistics and study design, bio-statistics and qualitative research methods are brought in to offer hands-on support to the fellows.

To mark the end of JAS 3 was a public lecture titled “In Search of Relevant Research for Development" by Prof. Sola Akinrinade on August 26. Over 130 people attended the lecture that was also attended by University of Ibadan’s Deputy Vice Chancellor (DVC) Academic affairs Pro. Gbemisola Oke and Prof. Babatunde L. Salako, Provost (Dean) of the University College Hospital (UCH) Ibadan. Provost is equivalent of Dean. It was clear from the lecture that African nations need to invest in research because it is the foundation for socio-economic development, and that universities should up their game in research.

“Universities should seek tangible ways of rewarding lecturers who undertake research because currently most universities do not have a functional reward system for researchers,” said Prof. Gbemisola Oke, DVC Academic Affairs at the University of Ibadan while giving his remarks after the lecture. 

African libraries that adapt can take the continent’s knowledge to the world

South African librarians were shocked in 2013 when one of the top researchers at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology claimed that he no longer needed the library to do his research.

Professor Johannes Cronje’s paper echoed an increasingly common way of thinking. Why, after all, do we need libraries when the Internet does such a good job of providing us with information?

But libraries are not just collection points for information. The best ones also help create it - and those which embrace this role will flourish in a completely changed world. This is particularly true for African libraries: there is more of an opportunity than ever before to bring the continent’s knowledge to the world.

A dual role

Libraries collect information and make it available to a particular community or communities. Some, like church libraries, specialise in collecting certain kinds of information.

The Internet can do exactly the same thing. Anyone can create a collection of information online and make it available to users. And who needs librarians when search engines like Google are on hand to help track down information?

Such technological advances mean that the traditional library is losing customers who just want to find information.

Libraries fulfil another crucial role, though. They help to create information. Modern libraries offer many services that help their users to put information online. Most academic libraries, for instance, have repository services that collate a university’s research output and make it publicly available.

They are extending this service to research data, which will save future researchers from collecting the same data and taxpayers from paying for it again.

These services are becoming common in public libraries as well, through an innovation called makerspaces. Here, users can make items of information. They can create music, produce items using 3D printers or engineer complex designs.

In makerspaces, librarians aren’t helping users to find information from the world. They are helping users to find information in themselves. Libraries should continue to develop services that help people create information.

Eli Neiburger from the Ann Arbor District Library talks about what libraries can do to survive.

In a way, these “new” developments really aren’t that different from what libraries have always done. Libraries curate and disseminate information. In the past, librarians curated information from foreign creators and disseminated it to a local community. Modern librarians curate local information and disseminate it to a foreign community. The flow of information has flipped.

Opportunities for African libraries

African libraries have been slow to embrace this evolution. There are twice as many repositories in Asia as there are in Africa, and ten times as many in Europe. But the continent is slowly gaining ground.

The University of Cape Town is the first in Africa to offer a Masters of Philosophy in Digital Curation. Early in 2015, the University of Pretoria opened up a makerspace, the first educational one on the continent.

The altered role of libraries is a great opportunity to showcase African knowledge. Getting information into the world is easier and cheaper than ever. African libraries need to take up the responsibility of being partners in information creation.

This means that policies must be altered - and, of course, that budgets must be increased. University leaders, decision makers, governments and library users need to understand and support the changes that are reshaping libraries.

Librarians, too, must embrace these changes. They will require new skills to support the creation of information. Many library schools are already responding to these new needs by offering advanced degrees in digital curation.

It will be also be important to reconsider the very physical space of a library. Paper-and-glue book collections are shrinking and, in some libraries, disappearing. These collections have long been the symbol of quiet thinking. Will libraries still be silent spaces of learning without them? How will libraries retain their users' trust if they are turned into cool cybercafés?

These are some of the tough questions that librarians must answer if they expect their funding to continue and to rise - and if they want to remain relevant well into the future.

This article was first published at the Conversation Africa.

Five things to think about if you’re considering a doctorate

I was chatting recently to a group of PhD scholars who are about midway through their journey. They are all studying part-time, juggling this with full-time jobs, family commitments and other responsibilities. All agreed that the PhD is a difficult process which requires an enormous amount of time and energy.

But I noticed that they could be roughly categorised into two groups. Those in the first group spoke of their PhDs only in negative terms and viewed them as a constant burden that offered little gratification along the way. Their PhD was a boulder they were bound to endlessly push up a steep hill without ever being able to stop and contemplate the view.

The second group expressed pride in their work. They had a strong sense of being part of something important and contributing to something meaningful. They spoke enthusiastically about what the PhD had already offered them in terms of self-development and improved skills.

Some of these scholars probably moved between the two groups depending on how they were progressing at the time. But I wondered whether there might be a way to spend more time in the second, happier group - after all, four or more years of satisfying and challenging engagement sounds great but the idea of spending all that time feeling grim and despondent is perfectly horrible.

I decided to do a bit of sleuthing to figure out what might lead people to the second group and way of thinking. To do so, I collected reflections on the PhD journey from 28 doctoral scholars. Each discussed their own ways of working, their views of their own doctorates and their experiences of getting stuck and then unstuck again.

None of the findings are earth shattering, but there’s some good advice within their responses about how to do a doctorate and actually enjoy it.

1. Make sure you’re doing it for yourself

There are lots of reasons to do a doctorate: the status, the improved employment opportunities, as a requirement for a position or promotion, to advance a field of study, to answer an important question and to make new knowledge.

All those who said they’d really enjoyed their PhDs had a strong sense of the doctorate as being part of developing their own identity. They were deeply invested in their growing capacity to contribute meaningfully in their disciplinary community.

There was also a sense from these scholars that the doctorate was their own space. It was the place in their lives where they could make the decisions, be creative and for which they could legitimately fence off time from other responsibilities for their own growth. They framed the PhD as something they did for themselves.

2. The magic of momentum

Nobody can sustain an enormous PhD workload relentlessly over the duration of the degree. This was especially true for these scholars who squeezed the doctorate into the gaps between work meetings and after getting families fed.

But those who enjoyed the PhD all referred to working on the doctorate almost every day. Sometimes the only input that was possible on a given day was an hour spent reading through an article or 20 minutes writing a brief reflection note in a research journal.

The regularity of input, more than the quantity and quality, seems to be key.

Those who bemoaned their PhD as a constant liability admitted that weeks often went by without them working on it. Rather than enjoying the respite from the doctorate, all this time was spent feeling guilty - and when they finally did get to it, it took hours or even days to get back into what they had been thinking and writing about.

3. Celebrate small successes

Some scholars spoke of sharing the completion of a chapter with their PhD colleagues through a WhatsApp message. Others stuck a list of milestones to the fridge and their family made celebratory dinners whenever one was met.

The notion of deadlines was closely linked to the idea of regular successes. The PhD is a massive project with no clear deadlines along the way, which is why some are able to put off working on it for days and weeks at a time.

Many of the same scholars who trumpeted their small successes set very clear deadlines for themselves and shared these with supervisors, relatives or academic colleagues. Some also used external deadlines like seminar and conference presentations as a way of forcing themselves to engage with a particular aspect of their study by a certain date.

4. Be kind to yourself

Some scholars seem to be able to keep looking ahead instead of beating themselves up about poor progress or less than positive feedback from a supervisor.

They constantly expect better of themselves and then put in the hours needed to attain these goals. Rather than berating themselves for what they haven’t managed to do, they happily share what they have achieved and what they are working on.

5. Find a community

One thing was very clear: even though it’s an individual piece of work, the doctorate doesn't have to be a lonely endeavour. Those who seemed to be most enthusiastic about their doctorates had found fellow travellers and developed ways to regularly engage with them.

Sometimes these were virtual friendships online with others researching in the same area. Sometimes people met other scholars over coffee and cake to share readings and support each other. It seems that sharing the process increases the chances of enjoyment - and since you’re giving years of your life to this enormous academic project, it seems important that you should enjoy large parts of it.

A version of this article originally appeared on the blog Doctoral Writing SIG