Information resources
Research, development and innovation

The Educational Technologies offer a regular course on information design to enhance the skills of the University's teaching and administrative staff in this area.

The university offers numerous qualification opportunities to strengthen one's skills in digital production in an academic context (e.g. design thinking, writing techniques, or project management).

The Transferable Skills program offers doctoral students many opportunities to strengthen their own digital production skills (e.g., writing techniques, information design, or filmmaking).

The University of Basel, together with the organization Innosuisse, offers a regular Entrepreneurship course to acquire or strengthen one's entrepreneurial and innovative skills.

In the Transferable Skills program, doctoral students will find opportunities to strengthen their skills in research, problem solving, and innovation (research techniques, good scientific practice, publication strategies, and career development, etc.).

The Faculty of Psychology presents the basic principles and methods of psychological research in this introductory course. The valuable recommendations in the in-house “Tales” format are also useful for other faculties.

RISE (Research Infrastructure & Support) runs crash courses and workshops on various software that support researchers in their work. Furthermore, RISE offers advice on project planning and implementation.

The Creative Commons Foundation supports open licenses. These allow users to freely copy and distribute written information, artwork, audio and video content in a copyright-compliant manner under certain conditions. Materials under Creative Commons licenses can in some cases also be freely modified and re-distributed.

Matthew Butterick offers an introduction to typography and typesetting for English texts on his website. In addition to purely typographic issues, it includes recommendations for designing websites, PowerPoint presentations, and even résumés. The very valuable bibliography lists some of the best resources in the field.

The documentation of LaTeX, a typesetting system, contains a lot of information about typography, typesetting, and information design. For example, the documentation of the  LaTeX package Novel contains useful chapters on fonts and book design.

The website of the Creative Commons Foundation includes a search engine  to find images published under one of the Creative Commons licenses. These images can in most cases be freely used, modified and remixed to produce your own materials. Another large collection of more restrictively licensed, but still mostly free images, can be found at unsplash.com.

Many streaming and download platforms can be searched for music and audio materials published under free licenses. Such resources can in many cases be freely used when producing one’s own materials. For example, the Creative Commons Foundation has a list of useful resources for finding free music or free sound effects.

A classic book on the fundamentals of visual communication is the Handbuch visuelle Mediengestaltung (available at the university library). A comparable source in English is Graphic Design and Print Production Fundamentals: the book can be freely downloaded as an open text book in various formats.

On the platform FutureLearn, the University of Auckland offers an excellent, free six-week online course on logical and critical thinking. Registration is required.

The Opening Science website provides useful resources for discovering the principles of Open Science. It also provides access to an introductory book on the subject: Opening Science, ed. by S. Bartling and S. Friesike.

The University of Dresden offers “Science 2.0 and Open Research Methods”, a freely accessible online learning resource to strengthen one's knowledge on open access, open data and open science.

The book Connected Curriculum Higher Education by Dilly Fung introduces a new concept for universities that emphasizes research, transdisciplinarity, and knowledge transfer. The book is freely accessible.