Making handouts

Goal of a handout

The goal of a workshop handout is to reiterate the key message(s) from your workshop and direct attendees to further materials they can use to make their work more reproducible or to learn about the research behind the workshop materials. Handouts should be positive and actionable meaning researchers will actually be able to use them for something concrete in the future.

Handout content

While there are many things you could potentially put in a reproducibility handout, you’ll want to keep the handout as short as possible (max 2 pages - 1 page printed). If space allows, you should credit the institutions that organized the workshop or direct readers to a website with more information about the workshop and it’s organizers.

With these limitations, you won’t be able to cover all of reproducibility on your handout, but the following questions should help you narrow down the content you choose to include:

Question 1: Who is the audience?

If you’re giving your workshop to scientists who do mostly computational work, it may not make sense to include a lot of messaging about and links to wet-lab resources in your handout. Alternatively, if you’re giving your workshop to a group of scientists who do very little computational work, it may not make sense to include a lot of computational resources on your hand out. Think about the types of research tools your audience members use and tailor your handouts to the needs of the audience.

Question 2: What does your audience want to know?

You should think back to your workshop proposal or to your invitation to give your workshop, In your proposal, did you highlight a specific aspect of reproducibility or did those who invited you ask for something specific? If so, you should make sure you include the specific component of reproducibility in your handout.

As part of preparing for the workshop, you hopefully also sent out a pre-survey. At least one of the questions from the pre-survey should have explicitly told you what types of things the workshop attendees wanted to know. The most popular of these things should be included in your handout.

Question 3: What is your main message?

The answer to this question may, again, come from your proposal, but you should reiterate this message as succinctly and as explicitly as possible in the handout. This message should have been the focus of the workshop and should be strengthened by the remaining contents of the handout. In this handout from a workshop at CalTech, the organizers specifically and concisely enumerate their messages on the second page.

For a crowd that is new to reproducibility and fearful of the consequences of irreproducibility, a good, positive message might be as simple as:

“There are many tools available to make biological research more reproducible.”

Specific points for the post workshop handout

Actionability We mentioned it above and we mention it throughout this how-to guide, but one of the most important goals of your workshop should be to provide attendees with ideas, tools, and resources that they can actually use. That is, you want to make your workshop actionable. One of the best ways to do this is to provide attendees with a post-workshop handout that acts as a tangible reminder of what they can do with what they’ve learned in the workshop. Ideally the post workshop handout will provide attendees with ideas for actions at 3 different time scales:

• Near term - things that attendees can do as soon as they get back to the lab (e.g. start uploading protocols to protocols.io or begin to depositing plasmids with Addgene)

• Medium term - things that attendees can do when designing their next experiment (e.g. incorporating more statistics to make sure they're using proper sample sizes)

• Long term - things that attendees can do when applying for their next grant, job, or when developing a new research program (e.g. pledge to publish pre-prints or register experimental designs with the OSF)

Remember, while your attendees may have been inspired during the workshop, that inspiration can be easy to lose in the thick of experiments and other responsibilities. Your post workshop handout should provide a constant reminder of all of the many reproducibility opportunities available.