Record setting global Galaxy training event
The largest-ever Galaxy training event, “GTN Smörgåsbord: a global Galaxy course” was run last month. It attracted 1189 registrations from 76 different countries, and engaged 583 live on Slack (chat platform). The event was completely asynchronous, meaning that all training materials - pre-recorded videos, slides, hands-on manuals, and the compute to run tutorials - were available online at any time people wanted to participate.
Over 60 instructors volunteered to be available on Slack throughout the week to answer questions. Several Galaxy Australia and Australian BioCommons team members made themselves available, and combined with instructors across the world, continuous support was available for anyone who needed it regardless of their location.
This course was made possible through the support of the 3 largest Galaxy servers, Galaxy Main (US), Galaxy Europe, and Galaxy Australia. The teams behind each of those Galaxy servers invested a lot of time and effort to ensure all necessary tools were available and running smoothly, and that sufficient resources were available to handle such a large number of participants at the same time. Given the computational load was spread over multiple sites participants could use the server nearest them for the best experience.
Originally planned as a small 20 person European workshop, then an online course when the pandemic struck, Galaxy Australia offered to co-host the event in order to make it more accessible to researchers in our time zone. Thankfully the generous Galaxy community responded with “Sure! We’ll open this up to everyone!”. We joined with instructors and organisers from the CINECA project, the Gallantries, and the worldwide Galaxy community to offer this amazing global, 24/7 training event covering all time zones.
The event was deployed using the same innovations tested for the 2021 Galaxy Admin Training course. This global event for 88 participants was rolled out online for the first time in January using methods described in a recent Gallentries blog post.
The feedback from participants (and instructors) of the Smörgåsbord was excellent and there are calls to do it again. You can view the collection of 43 video tutorials created for the training event that cover a diverse sample of the Galaxy Training Network materials.
The feedback from participants (and instructors) was excellent and there are calls to do it again. You can view the collection of 43 video tutorials created for the training event that cover a diverse sample of the Galaxy Training Network materials.
The Galaxy Project YouTube channel also has snackable videos that share how to get involved in the Galaxy Community and what the Galaxy Training Network has to offer. You’ll also find short narrated introductions to the Galaxy interface and a variety of Galaxy functionalities, as well as longer webinars to introduce new advanced features.
For further information, there’s a comprehensive summary of the GTN Smörgåsbord: a global Galaxy course written by the organisers on the Gallentries blog.