Following up from Galaxy Training Network BOF at GCC/BOSC 2018

[bebatut]

Over lunch of the 28th June 2018 (during GCC/BOSC), we organized a BoF (Birds of Feather) with around 20 persons.

We covered quite a lot of ground over some main topics: Content, Infrastructure, Contribution, Feedback, Mentoring of trainers.

Thanks Simon (@Slugger70) for the notes

Content

1. The content of the training material

   We should audit some the current tutorials to check the content (running or not, meaningful) and the format. We also discuss about maybe having on the long-term an editor-in-chief.

   We also agree that the English of the tutorials should be improved (and simplified) to ease understanding and automatic translation of the tutorials.

2. Number of tutorials

   Do we want lots of tutorials? Or some for each topic? Should we target different audiences?

3. Deprecation of topics

   • Should we still support old tutorials with out of date tools?
   • How do we keep them up to date?
   • How to keep people to maintain the topic and tutorials?

4. Modular piece of tutorial

   Having some "mix and match" pieces would make easier to update the tutorials.

5. Videos/Visual learning aids

   A lots of discussion around this were going back and forth! Summary as follows:

   • There were discussion about should we embedded videos in tutorials or GIFs could be enough?
   • A lot of people likes to have videos: support visual learners, etc
   • Short videos are much preferred over long ones (better for short attention spans, can be modular for easier updates)
   • One the main question is: How to keep them up to date (really needs to happen)
   • We all agree that if we support video, we need for transcripts of any video

6. What to do next at the end of a tutorial

   We discussed about how to support learners at the end of a tutorial to support the learning process:

   • Add link to

     • Advanced tutorials on the topic
     • Other interesting tutorials recommended in a "curriculum" (potentially in other topic)
     • Other resources

   • Take (recommended) real data and repeat analysis

   • Self examination section with questions and "scored" answers

     We discussed if we could have the learners submitting their history and have some automatic testing against expected output

Infrastructure

• Metadata of a tutorial in the same Markdown file as the tutorial

  We agree it would be way to simplify the contribution.

• Automatic testing of the tutorials on usegalaxy.*

  We discussed about the effort to make the tutorials running on usegalaxy.* (tools, data, etc) and to have some automatic testing to check if the tutorial is running by testing the workflow.

• Automatic notification to maintainers of tool updates

  To keep the tutorials up to date, we discussed about the possibility to automatically inform authors/maintainers if a tool has been updated. Automatic testing could check if the new version works in tutorial: check outputs are similar, and highlight the necessary modifications

• Creation of a tutorial skeleton from a workflow

  There is ongoing work on a script that will take a workflow and create a hands-on-tutorial template based on the steps in the workflow. It will also create the correct tool.yaml file etc.

  It would be part of the "Planemo" for tutorials

• Measurement of use

  Can we get an idea of how many people are using the tutorial automatically?

Contribution

• Keeping authors and maintainers engaged

  Keeping authors and maintainers engaged is difficult but needed (they are the one knowing about the content). We discussed how we could do that. We do not know any methods for doing this.

  To give motivation to authors and maintainers, we are working on a publication for each tutorial (motivation for authors and moderators): ongoing work

  To keep people engaged, we are starting a series of online CoFests: every 3 month on the 3rd Friday (more about the 1st one: https://galaxyproject.org/events/2018-08-gtn/) on a specific topic

• Ease of contribution

  To simplify the contribution, we need some scripts to create skeleton of a new tutorial/topic, a "Planemo" for templating/boilerplating tutorial content much easier. We are working on that by combining and extending existing scripts.

• Getting more people to contribute

  To engage people and learners to contribute, we can point out how to fix simple errors during training courses and give them some confidence to contribute

• Spoke about what is contribution and who should contribute

  We really want domain experts to be contributing to and maintaining the material. It's not a job for an intern.

Feedback

The Current feedback isn't working that well, not many people are filling and submitting in the form.

We discussed if we could include a very simple feedback interface at the end of the tutorial, with simple questions with "Smiley" type buttons plus a couple of comment submission text boxes (good and bad).

This could also allow us to get an idea of how many people are actually getting to the end of the tutorials

Mentoring

We should have a meeting on a regular basis to help mentor trainers and encourage people.

We need to have some method of acknowledging trainers.

GTN

We discussed about the GTN boundary. Maybe we could list in the GTN the individuals (to acknowledge them) and not only the institutions.

Conclusion (of Simon)

The GTN repo is ace!

[bebatut]

The next GTN meeting is tomorrow: #954