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.

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Tips for online training from the “Carpentries”: https://static.carpentries.org/blog/2020/06/virtual-software-carpentry-works... -

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:

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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