Rothamsted Feedback, Andrew Mead & Caitriona McInerney
AM: Massively lacking in numbers of statisticians, some institutes don’t
take it as seriously
Needs to be sea change in attitude towards statistics courses – seen as
‘for students’, needs to be
GenStat – been used for c. 40 years, hasn’t evolved
Make courses more widely known – currently mainly internal attendees
eLearning a good opportunity to free up time to go back to research –
what should the audience be?
- current attendees
- not currently outside of Rothamsted, policy wasn’t to go outside
to look for external attendees, need to start building that up
- potential to train industry with new building on site which will be
part occupied by agricultural industry companies – grey area re
KEC
- shouldn’t have to mould scientific courses to fit industry
requirements
eLearning
Rothamsted maybe to be pilot for eLearning functionality on online
platform – take existing material and turning it into eLEarning courses
WHAT EXISTS ALREADY?
Statistical training – 4 established courses, 1 course to be written –
running for c. 10 years
Developing Bioinformatics courses, including shadowing
Bioinformaticians “Geek for a Week”, other than that nothing really in
the pipeline
Concern that some courses are aimed at people who already have
grounding in certain disciplines, whereas there is a massive gap for
training in the basics
WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE DEVELOPED?
Basic statistical analysis courses – more joined up Bioinformatics/
Statistics training courses, e.g. Bioinformatics pipelines, statistical
components being used as black boxes without fully understanding what
it is they can do and that they need to be developed/evolved, rather
than used as they are without thought
Courses will show people how to use tools correctly and give them the
means by which to adapt tools for their own use rather than using it
without thought for context – “training people to be aware of what they
can do”
Easy to write courses for people with some knowledge, rather than write
courses to persuade people who don’t have knowledge, that they need
the knowledge
Peer review process not doing its job in highlighting spurious data in
publications
A lot more information could be extracted from datasets using different
methods and correctly, rather than narrow-minded attitude to using
same methods and extracting basic data
HOW DO YOU THINK THIS ONLINE PLATFORM WILL HELP?
Collaborative blog for presenting ideas that are maybe a little
controversial
Ability to put courses online and concentrate more on research
Provide access to some of the more basic training or training provided at
another institute
Not sure it will have a strong presence internally – will appeal to a
broader audience and will identify opportunities to either attend courses
elsewhere or even go and teach elsewhere
Finance will always be an issue – how is training budget allocated? Not
like at TGAC where individuals have their own training budget.
Rothamsted it is done via HR, not training and they are also responsible
for sourcing non-institute training
Not actively frowned upon to attend training outside of institute but
quite unusual to do that
One of the aims of training coordination is to ensure information about
courses available is easy to find – to ensure people know they can find
information easily
Identify overlap to ensure efforts aren’t duplicated, e.g. same courses
being run at several institutes
Importance of context to training, e.g. plant science vs life science,
pupils need to understand context and therefore training needs to be
flexible to adapt it to different disciplines
Keywan-Hassani joined the meeting
Online platform will give you ability to put as much material on there as
you want/need
Need to consider best medium for training courses, ‘blended learning’ –
using novel ways of getting ideas across
Maybe use games for courses – need to make people want to learn
Longevity of eLEarning courses is very important – online mentoring for
people running courses
Needs to be some kind of ongoing maintenance to ensure materials
online remain relevant and support for people using training resource – I
answered that institutes will be responsible for maintaining relevancy of
content of materials but we will provide technical support
Life Cycle of Courses????
Depends on type of course, but courses do get changed dependent on
nature of material – continuing support for people using courses should
help remind that coruses need to be updated – needs to be something in
the system to send out reminders
Generic contact email, e.g. training@Rothamsted to send out reminders
that courses should be updated, e.g. to a generic email address that
someone checks regularly
Forced versioning – will this apply to all file types, or just source code???
Develop ontology – I answered that the ELIXIR project, Defining a
Common Vocabulary for training will be used to feed into the platform
so that people can search for specific courses
Will it always just be BBSRC? I answered that ELIXIR and GOBLET will
feed in and at some point, it will be accessible to people outside of
BBSRC – currently this is funded by BBSRC just for BBSRC and can’t go
outside that remit
PhDs have to attend certain amount of training and probably will be
attending courses for the sake of attending them.
What are the other institutes doing for training? I don’t know, that’s the
purpose of my visits to ensure any overlap is captured and collaboration
is encouraged – institutes running essentially the same course will be
encouraged to collaborate to ensure the same material is used for each
of the courses
Copyright issues??? I don’t know, I will need to come back to people on
that – need to ensure that people don’t use your training material for
courses they charge for, need to ensure proper licences are used
Rothamsted is part-funded by industry so there will be different training
offered – need to ensure scientific training only on platform, no industry
training will be hosted to avoid element of profit and commercialism
SEND THEM COPY OF OUR TRAINING PROGRAMME
I asked Keywan what he would like to see in bioinformatics training –
maybe Metagenomics for Clinicians, I answered there will be Train the
Trainer for courses that are very popular – Genotyping by Sequencing is
another one that would be very popular, R and Python for basic skills
training – I answered we are doing all of those at TGAC and materials
will be available and potentially the ability to train trainers
‘Conceptual Framework’ – means by which people will understand that
the training is right for them and that they will be able to apply the
training correctly
HAVE FEEDBACK FUNCTIONALITY ON THE PLATFORM – AFTER THE
COURSE, PEOPLE CAN BE SENT A LINK SO THAT THEY CAN PROVIDE
FEEDBACK WHICH WILL BE COLLATED AND STORED ON SERVER,
INCORPORATE INTO RATINGS SYSTEM – LEVELS OF UNDERSTANDING,
SATISFACTION WITH TRAINING
Sounds like their training facility is not big enough – only 12 people,
stationary computers – 350-400 people on site, not actually used that
often as people use meeting rooms and laptops for training!!???? Also
doesn’t encourage interaction amongst students, dangerous also from
H&S perspective especially if external people are involved
Current room does not lend itself to encourage external training as it is
not fit for purpose – maybe use BBSRC recommendation as means by
which to ask for more money for better training facilities
Current thinking in Rothamsted is that their training is for internal
people only, BBSRC expectations are that their training should be made
available to external people and their attendance encouraged – view of
the institute to this point has not been to encourage external attendees
of courses, it will need to change
Statistics courses outside Rothamsted are being run by non-BBSRC
people whereas there is the expertise within BBSRC to run this training
and it should be encouraged, e.g. Andrew coming to run Stats training,
rather than external people
Realisation that eLearning is only part of the BBSRC
recommendation…didn’t realise that before!