Training

Training is a major challenge to power life scientists with the nowadays indispensable capability to use bioinformatics tools for the analysis of their data, and to enable bioinformaticians to upgrade their skills and cope with the evolution of the domain.

IFB-core and platforms are working together to provide IFB end-users (life scientist, biomedical scientist, bioinformaticians) with a turnkey solution on training taking into account the wide diversity of needs and expectations:

• diversity of the skills for computing (no experience of command line, occasional use, familiar, a bit of programming)
• specific courses on new technologies or on biological applications (e.g. NGS, long reads, metabolomics...)
• generic methodological skills (statistics, best practices for programming...)
• advanced use of IT technologies (HPC, virtualization, cloud computing, interoperability, FAIR practices, integrative bioinformatics...)
• best practices in training (pedagogical approaches, reusability of the material)

To this purpose, IFB will develop a seamlessly integrated technical infrastructure to support training, relying on the following components :

• a network of trainers identified in the catalogue of resources (A1.4)
• training events of different formats (short and medium term)
• diverse training media and resources: static training material, videos, MOOCs
• diverse training environments: Web servers, stand-alone applications with user-friendly interfaces, command lines, specific packages (e.g. R for the statistics), virtual machines, Jupyter notebooks, containers with software for training (e.g. Galaxy training container)
• a powerful and flexible infrastructure enabling practical training that sometimes relies on important storage and computing facilities (e.g. NGS analysis, structural bioinformatics...)
• feedback mechanisms (satisfaction surveys, questionnaires at the end of each training and 6-12 months later to evaluate the impact of the training on their professional practice)

The impact and quality of IFB training will be systematically monitored and evaluated in order to regularly adapt the training programmes to the expectation of the users and to the evolution of the domain (cfr. WP5, “Implementation of the quality management system”).