In April 2023, we received an Educational Grant from Pfizer to do our workshops and offer our ELearning courses in 10 AIIMS. We did six between July and August. We finished the last four later – Nov 7 in AIIMS Bathinda, Jan 29 in Bibinagar, Feb 24 in Bhubaneswar and April 11 in Mangalagiri.
It was a lovely experience running the program in ten AIIMS in the country. Apart from the fact that we had great feedback (you could see short video clips here), we ourselves learnt a lot – we got better and better at planning and executing every event.
But the biggest learning for us is – how difficult it could be to get an institution to say yes to take up our offer … to help them save time, and to lay a strong foundation for their research activities.
Even when we offered it for free, through this grant.
As we deliberated and applied thoughts, it boils down to what we call the “They don’t know what they don’t know syndrome” We actually wrote a blog post about this earlier.
Institutions seem to delay or say no to our programs (even if free) – because they have not yet found it important to prioritize the learning of correct literature searching skills.
We deliberated further. Why do brilliant people not understand this importance?
Is it because they have never been trained on how to use libraries right from school days? And also to give credits to the best resources when they write?
We are not sure, but believe that this may be the reason!
Practically every feedback video reveals that the person was never taught the basics of structured searching – starting from “understand the coverage of a resource”.
And so – our quest continues.
We just launched our latest ELearning course – “Reference Management with Zotero”
We are looking for more grants to cover more institutions.
But what we need even more is that institutions understand this need and subscribe to our courses – year after year – so that every student and professional gets a great learning experience.
We want all of them to save time, get a strong foundation in research skills, and produce good research, publications and the best evidence!