Short lessons, training various technologies useful to our work.
Lessons located at https://nbisweden.github.io/Training-Tech-shorts/.
This repository is intended to be used as a training tool, which compiles knowledge over time.
Issues are made for a core set of tools to be taught, and what the scope of those lessons should be. Each lesson should be about 30 minutes in length, and is taught through demonstration.
Learners are then asked to assign themselves to write up a part of the lesson. Another learner is assigned to be a reviewer of that text. This allows the notes to focus on what was important from the Learners' perspective, rather than the Teachers' (helping overcome the expert blind-spot problem). Once both learners agree on the text, the Teacher reviews it for accuracy. The text is then used as reference for recap lessons, and to guide future focus. For example if there was something the Teacher found easy to grasp, but learners had difficultly, the teacher can focus on that another time (highlighted through feedback and/or review process).
Lessons are aimed to be delivered weekly for regular practice. The lessons should take up no more than two hours per week for everyone, including preparation, writing, and review. The workload is intended to be shared by all to make this manageable.
The target is the whole team, including the managers, as well as the bioinformaticians. Having the managers there firstly highlights the importance of the regular training, but also informs them of the teams capabilities with the core technology stack (some of which may be useful to the manager too). Regular communication through this learning track is also meant to foster better collaboration and provide an environment where people feel comfortable asking questions.
The features provided by Github are useful to enable these actions. Issues are used to decide lessons. Branches are used to draft an outline with key points by the teacher. Learners can make a draft pull request to the lesson branch, where they can set themselves as assignee, and request reviewers. The code review panel allows for the learners and teachers to review the content before merging it back into the branch. Github actions takes care of publishing the notes into a presentable website for future reference. This would then be the first lesson to teach.
sequenceDiagram
box transparent Learners
actor Learner1
actor Learner2
end
actor Teacher
Teacher ->> GitHub: New branch for lesson
Teacher ->> GitHub: New lesson file
Teacher ->> GitHub: Add key points
Teacher ->> Learner1: Demonstrates tool
Learner1 ->> Teacher: Volunteers to write up keypoint 2
Learner2 ->> Teacher: Volunteers to write up keypoint 1
Learner1 ->> GitHub: Make branch from lesson branch
Learner1 ->> GitHub: Add notes for keypoint 2
Learner2 ->> GitHub: Add notes for keypoint 1
Learner1 ->> GitHub: Request Learner2 to review text
Learner2 ->> GitHub: Request Learner1 to review text
Learner1 ->> GitHub: Provide code review
Learner1 ->> GitHub: Update notes from review
Learner1 ->> Teacher: Request code review
Learner1 ->> GitHub: Update notes
Teacher ->> GitHub: Merges notes into lesson branch
Teacher ->> GitHub: Merges lesson branch into main
GitHub ->> GitHub: Automated website build