155We have continued to respond to feedback from trainees and trainers, which is collected using online evaluation forms

covering all areas of the course: content, administration, trainer quality and the materials provided. The general feed- back in all these areas has been positive: 92.5% of those completing the evaluation form rated the courses 'useful' or 'extremely useful' to their work and 91.3% of them would recommend our courses to their colleagues. We have trialled providing a CD containing the course materials, in addition to or instead of a printed training manual. In response to our trainers’ requests, we now make all training materials publically available online.

Over the past year we have streamlined our procedures for maintenance, management and coordination of the IT training room, including health and safety (James Watson) and the implementation of a new registration system consistent with that used by the EMBL Course and Conference Office (Janet Copeland). OTT is increasingly involved in supporting events other than hands-on courses. Future efforts will define a structure to provide a consistent level of support to anyone organising an event in the IT training room, which is now reaching capacity with an average occupancy of 82% each month. We are especially grateful to the hard work and support received from the EBI systems team for helping us to maintain our hardware and update our software.

We have started to investigate a new promotional procedure in consultation with the EMBL Course and Conference Office. This allows us to reach and target specific users to make them aware of courses potentially relevant to them. We are extremely grateful to all those, both within and beyond the EBI, who have actively supported us by helping to advertise the hands-on programme.

Roadshows: we travel to the trainees

Vicky Schneider, Janet Copeland, James Watson, Cath Brooksbank

The successful completion of our training deliverables for the FELICS Integrating Infrastructure Initiative, and new financial support through the EU-funded SLING Integrating Action, have brought some changes to the roadshow programme. The SLING grant continues our partnerships from FELICS, with the EBI working in collaboration with the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), the European Patent Office (EPO) and the BRENDA database at the University of Braunschweig. SLING provides funding for our trainers to travel to host institutes, enabling them to host a roadshow with minimal costs. This allows us to reach out to areas of Europe we were unable to target before. We have defined a strict set of eligibility criteria (see www.ebi.ac.uk/training/roadshow/sling_new.html) to ensure that our SLING funds are targeted to researchers in the newer EU member states and those who are only just beginning to make use of Europe’s core data resources. The underlying concepts and aims of the roadshows remain the same: to combine presentations and hands-on practical sessions to guide users through selected databases and tools by expert trainers. The roadshow web pages have also been redesigned to provide a full list of past, ongoing and future road- shows (www.ebi.ac.uk/training/roadshow/).

The demand for roadshows remains strong: we have run 18 roadshows from September 2008 to August 2009 and are already taking bookings for roadshows in 2011. Although our priorities lie with SLING roadshows, where possible we are continuing to train researchers beyond SLING’s target zones. In these cases the costs associated with trainer travel are borne by the host institution.

Roadshow logistics and administration are managed by OTT’s Logistics and Admin sub-team. The scientific pro- gramme for each roadshow is coordinated by the training programme project leader Vicky Schneider with support from scientific training officer James Watson.

eLearning

Vicky Schneider, Cath Brooksbank, James Watson, Victoria McKenna

The eLearning pilot project has proved to be an excellent starting point to acquire a complete understanding of what it will entail to build, launch and maintain a comprehensive elearning portal for EMBL-EBI. This has led to the crea- tion of a new position devoted specifically to this challenge, filled in June 2009 by our eLearning content developer Victoria McKenna.

Through the pilot project we had the chance to gather essential feedback from the trainers who built our pilot training materials, the trainees using the courses and the technical staff involved with the installation and maintenance of the existing platform. After a thorough survey of the e-learning platforms available and the extent to which they meet the EBI’s requirements for such a platform, we have now begun to test how well these meet the requirements of trainees, trainers and our web team. The next challenge will be to consolidate the disparate e-learning resources currently avail- able in different parts of the EMBL-EBI website, and to develop a robust means of adding and maintaining courses of a consistently high standard.

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Monitoring user training in 2009

James Watson, Holly Foster, Vicky Schneider, EBI’s Administration Team

Over 138 EMBL-EBI personnel have participated in 280 unique training-related events during 2008–2009 consisting of: 110 demonstrations/hands-on training events, 73 posters and 220 presentations. Including the audiences reached through demonstrations and talks at conferences, we have reached more than 24,000 people. Audiences are predomi- nantly PhD students, postdoctoral researchers and other academics, but there has also been a substantial amount of outreach to industrial researchers. The tracking of all training-related events remains a non-trivial and substantially time-consuming task; therefore we will be reviewing the systems used to collect these statistics and improve future data collection.

Staff and student education

Vicky Schneider, James Watson

Our trainers: in March 2009 we piloted our first ‘user training feedback forum’, where a selected group of OTRs together with the training programme project leader, scientific training officer and freelance training expert Frances Scott spent a day discussing training techniques and strategies. As a result of this forum, OTT has facilitated the creation of a shared space for trainers to exchange materials and ideas, and all the delegates came away with a shared understanding of how to get the most out of interacting with their trainees.

EMBL EBI PhD student training: OTT continues to provide ‘Primers for Predocs’, a series of events designed to familiarise our new PhD students with the data resources and tools available to them at the EBI. In 2009, ‘Primers for predocs’ comprised a week of lectures and practical sessions. Feedback from this event has influenced the next series, which will focus more on accessing data programmatically. OTT also supports the EBI's second year PhD students in the organisation of, and teaching for, an annual bioinformatics course run specifically for the EMBL PhD students. ELIXIR training

Vicky Schneider, Cath Brooksbank, James Watson, Bren Vaughan, in collaboration with the ELIXIR training committee

We have been involved in developing the bioinformatics user-training strategy for ELIXIR (www.elixir-europe.org). The stakeholder consultation phase of ELIXIR has now concluded and the full report, containing the ELIXIR training committee’s recommendations and the rationale behind them, is available at www.elixir-europe.org/files/documents/ reports/WP11-Training_Strategy_Committee_Report.pdf. Initial research for the report involved gathering infor- mation from trainers and trainees throughout Europe on regularly held bioinformatics user-training courses. With technical support from the EBI’s External Services team we created an online database for collecting this data. One of its outputs is a map that displays where the courses are held, and another is a calendar of user-training courses available in Europe, see www.elixir-europe.org/page.php?page=user_training_map and www.elixir-europe.org/page. php?page=calendar. Although the stakeholder consultation phase is now complete, we will continue to maintain the database as a service to the bioinformatics user community.

Course funding and support

Vicky Schneider, James Watson, Cath Brooksbank

We continue to seek external funding for our user-training courses; this enables us to invite external trainers and to subsidise our course fees, making our courses accessible to early-stage researchers from around the world. We are delighted to have received EMBO funding for two new practical courses in 2010: one on systems biology and one on structural bioinformatics. We have now run three joint EBI-Wellcome Trust Proteomics workshops and OTT will be leading future applications for similar courses in the future.

The Experimental Network for Functional Integration (ENFIN) project has sponsored several of our hands-on courses and will continue to support future courses.

EBI training collaborations

Vicky Schneider, James Watson, Cath Brooksbank

We are working with OIPA, EICAT and the EMBL Course and Conference Office to pool resources and share exper- tise whenever this is practical. We have developed similarly strong relationships with the Wellcome Trust Course and Conference Programmes. A new campus-wide portal (www.hinxton.org) was launched and now provides a directory of scientific events on the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus. We continue our fruitful established collaborations with the University of Cambridge, the Gulbenkian Institute, ICGEB and other organisations that hold regular bioinformat- ics training courses with EBI trainers regularly contributing to these events.

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