Orchestrating a community-developed computational workshop and accompanying training materials

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Research
• Computational Biology
• Data Science Education

Background:

• Growing importance of bioinformatics, computational biology, and data science in biomedical research.
• Need for effective educational strategies for practical computational and analytical methods.
• Workshops with hands-on tutorials are a common teaching approach.

Purpose of the Study:

• To detail a process for producing high-quality, community-authored educational materials.
• To make these materials publicly available for consumption and reuse.
• To describe a robust method for delivering hands-on tutorials.

Main Methods:

• Coordinated effort of 17 authors over 10 weeks.
• Utilized cloud infrastructure, GitHub, and literate programming.
• Developed 15 workshops presented as a website and an electronic book.

Main Results:

• Produced 15 comprehensive workshops.
• Materials are available as a website and a 388-page electronic book.
• All scripts, raw and published materials, and cloud machine image are openly accessible.

Conclusions:

• The described approach effectively produced high-quality, reusable educational content.
• The method utilizes free services and software, making it adaptable.
• This model can be adopted by workshop organizers and authors in various contexts.