A new ELIXIR handbook is now available for trainers and training facilitators seeking to improve the FAIRness of their materials. Released by the ELIXIR FAIR Training group, it offers step-by-step guidance and practical examples to improve the findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability of teaching resources. The SIB Training group, which collaborated on the project, is ready to help implement these guidelines.
What is the SIB Training group?
The SIB Training group coordinates the institute’s bioinformatics training and course offer. Throughout its activities, it ensures that the next generation of bioinformaticians and life scientists make the best of the latest advances in computational biology and SIB resources. The group is committed to providing open and FAIR materials by making their materials openly available to anyone, in a dedicated page on the SIB website, but also by making training materials of anyone more findable with Glittr.org.
To know more about the group’s activities, such as the upcoming courses or the e-learning offers, don’t hesitate to contact them.
Reusing training materials
One of the major obstacles in developing new training sessions is the time-consuming and often challenging preparation of materials, for both new and experienced trainers. Finding suitable and free-to-use online resources is difficult, as they are often scattered across different repositories or lack the metadata required to enable their reuse.
What is the SIB Training group?
The SIB Training group coordinates the institute’s bioinformatics training and course offer. Throughout its activities, it ensures that the next generation of bioinformaticians and life scientists make the best of the latest advances in computational biology and SIB resources. The group is committed to providing open and FAIR materials by making their materials openly available to anyone, in a dedicated page on the SIB website, but also by making training materials of anyone more findable with Glittr.org.
To know more about the group’s activities, such as the upcoming courses or the e-learning offers, don’t hesitate to contact them.
The ELIXIR FAIR training handbook provides step-by-step guidance and practical examples to improve the FAIRness of training materials and serves as a reference to learn about general best practices or to quickly look up specific how-to. Patricia Palagi, SIB’s Head of Training and co-author of “Ten simple rules for making training materials FAIR”, notes that this handbook “increases the value of our training materials by making them sharable with the rest of the life sciences field. It is an excellent way to contribute to the community and promote collaborations between institutions. It saves time, allows scientists to offer feedback to expand our general knowledge of bioinformatics, and is a rich resource for trainees to learn from.”
A collective effort starting here
The process of making training materials FAIR is globally recognised as essential for ensuring bioinformatics and data science training is effective and inclusive. SIB’s training team has extensive experience in making their materials FAIR and is ready to assist other trainers in implementing the necessary steps. For Geert Van Geest, Bioinformatics trainer and contributor to the handbook, “as the largest national ELIXIR node, we at SIB are at the forefront of the FAIRification process of both data and training materials. The handbook shows how to apply guidelines to make teaching resources easier to find and reusable for the benefit of all the bioinformatics community.”
