The de.NBI / ELIXIR-DE Training Network

Abstract

The 'German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure' (de.NBI) provides bioinformatics services and training to users in life sciences research, industry and biomedicine. Training activities of de.NBI are focused on supporting and training end users. Life science researchers will thus be enabled to exploit their data more effectively by applying tools, standards and compute services provided by de.NBI. To effectively coordinate training courses of the consortium, de.NBI has established the Special Interest Group 3 (SIG3 - Training and Education) also known as the de.NBI training platform. SIG3 is composed of training experts from each de.NBI unit. Different types of training activities are supported and organzied by de.NBI. First of all, the de.NBI summer schools provide training courses for undergraduate and graduate students in specific topics related to one or several de.NBI nodes. The respective nodes organize tool-specific training. These trainings can either be attached to existing conferences (where many of the potential training participants will attend anyhow) or organized independently. In addition, online training was introducted on the de.NBI website in 2016. Online training enables users first insights into bioinformatics tools. In addition to online training material, online hackathons for different software packages and webinars have been established by the service centers RBC and CIBI. Between 2015 to 2018, the number and diversity of training activities have increased significantly (2015: 329 Participants - 17 courses; 2016: 882 Participants - 40 courses; 2017: 1,489 Participants - 69 courses; 2018: 1,520 Participants – 77 courses). Since 2017, the number of training events has reached a plateau at ~1,500 participants and ~70 courses, whereas the number of training courses at larger conferences was increased. To further increase the number of participants and courses as well as the visibility of the de.NBI network, de.NBI support training course of external partners, e.g. UKE Hamburg. According to the recent administrative developments, Germany joined ELIXIR. The German ELIXIR Node will be run by de.NBI. As a result, de.NBI also joined the ELIXIR Training Platform and SIG 3 already started to establish collaborations with ELIXIR in training activities.