BioCommons bioinformatics training program making great progress

With all the talk about 'hybrid' training these days, we were happy to recently publish our own unique hybrid method that we've used since 2016 in PLoS Computational Biology. Our application of a bioinformatics training delivery method for reaching dispersed and distant trainees is a practical 'how-to' description of the method we developed over the years to make our hands-on training easily accessible to a national audience. Pivoting to completely online training in 2020, we engaged 363 registrants in 8 workshops and recorded 17 webinars which have clocked up over 6000 views. We're about to hit 1,000 subscribers on our YouTube channel too.

All of our training activities are made possible by the participation of a raft of enthusiastic volunteers from around Australia and beyond. The list grows with every event, and you can see the huge amount of goodwill in our community from the many names and affiliations on our trainers page.

The enthusiasm that we and our partners have for sharing training resources and opportunities has inspired us to form the Bioinformatics Training Cooperative. We've begun offering collaborative workshops that are open to anyone in Australia - connecting researchers directly with expert trainers they wouldn't normally have access to. Via the co-op we have recently worked with Melbourne Bioinformatics and Pawsey Supercomputing Centre to offer a multi-day workshops on both RNA-Seq analysis and using containers in bioinformatics', and next up we're bringing a series of workshops in variant calling in viruses, bacteria and eukaryotes led by QCIF.

If you think your organisation could contribute to the Bioinformatics Training Cooperative please let us know. 

Keep up to date with new collaborative training opportunities as soon as they are announced by following @AusBioCommons on Twitter or subscribing to our monthly newsletter.