Hello to all of you wonderful BCC2020 instructors,
This is another update for you. There is less than a month to go before the
workshops!
Online training tips and lessons
We have found some useful tips and lessons learnt for online, hands-on
training.
-
Tips for online training from the “Carpentries”:
https://static.carpentries.org/blog/2020/06/virtual-software-carpentry-work…
-
Some lessons learnt about online training from Darya Vanichkina of
Sydney University’s Bioinformatics Hub:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0DHye2M1IM.
-
In this video, Darya makes some really good points, including that
online training is really sloooooowwww. It really is worth watching.
Conference Discord Server
We have created a conference discord server and set up some generic
channels for discussions. There is a special channel for instructors to
join. This channel can be used to ask us any questions about the training
setups etc. You can join this channel at the following URL:
https://discord.gg/mePRjxC. We will be creating a channel specific to your
training session a week out for you to use for your group.
Instruction platform
We have decided to use Zoom as the conference platform and this includes
the training sessions. Here are some of the details:
-
Each training session will be allocated a Zoom meeting with it’s own URL.
-
There will be breakout rooms available in each session if you need one
of your instructors to start a subsession with a participant.
You may use another platform if you feel the added benefits justify
participants’ added learning curve. If you chose to do this then
1.
Please let us know
2.
You are responsible for all setup and fees, and we strongly encourage
you to help your participants get set up on the platform ahead of time.
Technology platform training
We will be offering training sessions for all instructors on the technology
platforms a couple of weeks before the conference. During these sessions we
will walk you through the operations of Zoom and Discord, and who to
contact if you have any issues during your session. Details and session
times will be emailed out in the coming weeks.
Contact with your participants before the conference
We are encouraging each training session to produce a short introduction
video letting potential participants know about any prerequisites that
might be needed for your training. E.g. Familiarity with linux terminal or
access to certain software etc.
We also encourage you to make yourselves available on the Discord server to
answer any questions that your participants may have from a day or so
before the sessions.
We can also provide you with an advance list of your participants and their
email addresses.
Please contact us for details of where to put your short introduction
videos.
Registration
As an instructor, you will need to register for the conference, but your
registration for training, and all other events, is free. To register,
please use this link:
https://bcc2020-register.eventbrite.com?discount=BCC2020-Instructor-0087
And please don’t redistribute that.
Cap your participants?
We can limit the number of tickets for any training session, and have done
that for 5-6 sessions already. Please let us know if you want
participation capped.
Additional Instructors
Online training requires more instructors than the equivalent in-person
material. Please consider additional instructors for your sessions, and
please let us know who you want to add.
Advertise!
We encourage you to advertise your session. If you are on Twitter, please
use the hashtag #BCC2020. We also encourage using/referencing @OBF_BOSC and
#UseGalaxy. The conference organizers are tweeting about each training
topic, starting last week.
Questions?
If you have any questions regarding the training sessions at BCC, please
feel free to contact us via email for now, and on Discord once we have the
instructor channel up.
Thanks for everything,
Simon G and Dave C
Hello BCC2020 instructors,
This is just an update for you all. The training schedule now has a topic
in every slot (that’s 225 hours of training). We have a couple of new
instructors on the list and so this update will repeat some earlier
information again.
bcc2020.sched.com
You should have received an email inviting you to login and edit your
profile. Please do log in and add a pic and maybe even a biography. Let
us know if you haven’t received an invite. Thank you to those that have
already done this.
Instruction platform
We have decided to use Zoom as the conference platform and this includes
the training sessions. Here are some of the details:
-
Each training session will be allocated a Zoom meeting with it’s own URL.
-
There will be breakout rooms available in each session if you need one
of your instructors to start a subsession with a participant.
You may use another platform if you feel the added benefits justify
participants’ added learning curve. If you chose to do this then
1.
Please let us know
2.
You are responsible for all setup and fees, and we strongly encourage
you to help your participants get set up on the platform ahead of time.
Conference Discord server
We are in the process of creating a conference discord server (a free, open
source chat server). If you wish you can have a channel dedicated to your
training session. We envisage that this will replace the earlier advertised
Gitter channel. More details will follow very soon.
Technology platform training
We will be offering training sessions for all instructors on the technology
platforms a couple of weeks before the conference. During these sessions we
will walk you through the operations of Zoom and Discord, and who to
contact if you have any issues during your session. Details and session
times will be emailed out in the coming weeks.
Contact with your participants before the conference
We are encouraging each training session to produce a short introduction
video letting potential participants know about any prerequisites that
might be needed for your training. E.g. Familiarity with linux terminal or
access to certain software etc.
We would also encourage you to make yourselves available on the Discord
server to answer any questions that your participants may have from a day
or so before the sessions.
We can also provide you with an advance list of your participants and their
email addresses.
Details about the Discord server and prerequisite video will be emailed out
soon.
Registration
As an instructor, you will need to register for the conference, but your
registration for training, and all other events, is free. To register,
please use this link:
https://bcc2020-register.eventbrite.com?discount=BCC2020-Instructor-0087
And please don’t redistribute that.
Cap your participants?
We can limit the number of tickets for any training session, and have done
that for 5-6 sessions already. Please let us know if you want
participation capped.
Additional Instructors
Online training requires more instructors than the equivalent in-person
material. Please consider additional instructors for your sessions, and
please let us know who you want to add.
Advertise!
We encourage you to advertise your session. If you are on Twitter, please
use the hashtag #BCC2020. We also encourage using/referencing @OBF_BOSC and
#UseGalaxy. The conference organizers will also tweet about each training
topic in the next few weeks.
Questions?
If you have any questions regarding the training sessions at BCC, please
feel free to contact us via email for now, and on Discord once we have the
instructor channel up.
Thanks for everything,
Simon G and Dave C