Ten Simple Rules for Developing a Short Bioinformatics Training Course

This paper considers what makes a short course in bioinformatics successful. In today's research environment, exposure to bioinformatics training is something that anyone embarking on life sciences research is likely to need at some point. Furthermore, as research technologies evolve, this need will continue to grow. In fact, as a consequence of the introduction of high-throughput technologies, there has already been an increase in demand for training relating to the use of computational resources and tools designed for high-throughput data storage, retrieval, and analysis. Biologists and computational scientists alike are seeking postgraduate learning opportunities in various bioinformatics topics that meet the needs and time restrictions of their schedules. Short, intensive bioinformatics courses (typically from a couple of days to a week in length, and covering a variety of topics) are available throughout the world, and more continue to be developed to meet the growing training needs. The challenges, however, when planning, organising, and delivering such courses, are not trivial [1], especially considering the heterogeneous backgrounds of participants. Here, we address such challenges and present a consensus of rules derived from the shared expertise of several bioinformatics trainers. While the rules apply broadly to bioinformatics training, aspects addressing specific audiences are also discussed in order to make these rules pragmatic and applicable to a wide range of readers. Delivering bioinformatics training is both crucial to facilitate the use of, and to exploit the investment in, bioinformatics tools and resources, and an excellent opportunity to solicit user evaluation and feedback to improve them. One point of crucial interest to the training course community concerns material preparation and distribution. Preparing effective materials (slides, notes, references, etc.) entails a huge effort that would be enormously facilitated if course developers could start from a body of available materials, for example if they could gain access to repositories of materials deposited by trainers of other courses. This was one of the reasons motivating the Bioinformatics Training Network (BTN) to set up the BTN website (http://www.biotnet.org/), which has been planned as a vessel for the training community to share and disseminate course information and materials. Course developers are warmly welcome to subscribe to the site and make available their materials to the community [2].