An Evaluation of Cyberinfrastructure Facilitators Skills Training in the Virtual Residency Program

Abstract

Cyberinfrastructure (CI) Facilitation amplifies the productivity of researchers engaged in computing-intensive and data-intensive investigations. CI Facilitators help researchers to adapt their workflows to CI resources, and teaches these researchers how to use these systems, bridging between researchers and technology experts. The importance of CI Facilitators is well understood, and there is broad consensus about their need for ongoing training, especially because of not only their highly diverse career backgrounds and domains of expertise, but also the rapid advancement of CI technologies. The Virtual Residency Program (VRP) has been addressing this training gap since 2015, offering summer workshops that teach key CI Facilitation skills. These workshops are community driven and community developed. The 2020 VRP workshop, for the first time, featured an external evaluation of the efficacy and value of the workshop. This paper examines the results of that evaluation, to determine the value of the VRP to the CI Facilitator community, and thus to the many researchers these CI Facilitators serve. Since 2015, all VRP activities collectively ave had a total of 953 participants, from 381 institutions in every US state and 3 US territories plus 12 other countries on 5 continents.