The Bio-IT training Catalogue
We want you(r training requests)!
New year, new resolutions. It has always been central in the Bio-IT’s mission to plan and deliver a curriculum of training courses designed on the needs and wishes of the (biocomputational) community at EMBL. From this year, we have a tool to collect them in a systematic way: the Bio-IT training catalogue.
The platform was initiated, and developed to an advanced state, from Bio-IT’s summer intern Emily Simons, who joined us through the DAAD RISE project. She designed a database now hosting data about the Bio-IT courses that happened between 2014 and 2022. Each course (course type) might have happened multiple times, each instance of a course is defined in the catalogue as an event. Courses are further classified based on the topics that they covered, the skills that they taught, the number of hours spent on each, and details about the audience, trainers, location, timeframe and format. In addition, each event is linked to the Bio-IT summary and training materials when available. The user interface, also largely developed by Emily, provides a way to visualise this data. The homepage features a list of all the 2014-2022 courses that can be filtered using the window on top (see the figure below). Each course and event title links to a page featuring a short description of the course, the timeline of its events and number of hours spend on the Bio-IT competencies (see the figure below).
We encourage you all to explore the platform! For trainees and in general all the Bio-IT community, there are two specific features of the platform that we would like to highlight:
- The courses are linked to their training materials, when available. This would allow you not only to have a clearer understanding of what the course is about, but also to consult them at your own pace, for asynchronous trainign.
- From the course page, you can express your interest in us organising a new event of each course. You will just need to fill a very quick form. We encourage your extensive usage of this feature, to design this year’s training programme in line with your needs and desires.
Expressing interest
See for example how to express interest for a future Introduction to R course.