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Abstract
The importance of bioinformatics, computational biology, and data science in biomedical research continues to grow, driving a need for effective instruction and education. A workshop setting, with lectures and guided hands-on tutorials, is a common approach to teaching practical computational and analytical methods. Here, we detail the process we used to produce high-quality, community-authored educational materials that are available for public consumption and reuse. The coordinated efforts of 17 authors over 10 weeks resulted in 15 workshops available as a website and as a 388-page electronic book. We describe how we utilized cloud infrastructure, GitHub, and a literate programming approach to robustly deliver hands-on tutorials to participants of the annual Bioconductor conference. The scripts, raw and published workshop materials, and cloud machine image are all openly available. Our approach uses free services and software and can be adapted by workshop organizers and authors in other contests with appropriate technical backgrounds.
Highlights
Methods of biomedical data analysis are rapidly evolving, creating a crucial need for constantly up-to-date learning materials
We have described the approach adopted by the Bioconductor 2018 conference organizers to coordinate 15 workshops, contributed by 17 authors, and deliver these to participants over 22 total hours of instruction and hands-on tutorials
Advantages gained by this approach We were able to quickly develop a coherent and cohesive set of workshop materials that were appropriate for interactive sessions and as standalone educational materials
Summary
Methods of biomedical data analysis are rapidly evolving, creating a crucial need for constantly up-to-date learning materials. Workshops given by topical experts that combine didactic lectures with hands-on, guided tutorials are a common approach to teaching data analysis. The Bioconductor project organizes and hosts a scientific conference that features scientific talks, poster presentations, networking sessions, and hands-on workshops. We sought an organized approach to developing workshop materials that meets the goals of allowing multi-disciplinary content by multiple contributors, providing “literate” code[1] that is presented in context with its explanation and runs reproducibly, can be disseminated broadly in a self-contained format, and can be efficiently updated for the iteration. This article describes the approach adopted by the Bioconductor 2018 conference to coordinate 15 workshops, contributed by 17 authors, deliver these to conference participants, and freely disseminate a book of the materials. The book is available at https://bioconductor.github.io/Bioc Workshops/
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