Following a pre-release in April 2016, ELIXIR UK released in July the production version of ELIXIR’s Training e-Support System, TeSS. The portal collects, disseminates and organises information about bioinformatics training from ELIXIR Nodes and various third-party providers.
TeSS currently contains more than 3,000 resources (training events and materials) from 22 content providers. Users can browse the training providers and the resources they offer, create their own training packages, and design workflows to visualise learning pathways. The portal also supports linking of TeSS contents with external resources, such as bioinformatics tools and data services in Bio.tools, and standards and policies in the BioSharing registry.
TeSS’ development team (Aleks Nenadic, Niall Beard and Milo Thurston) said, "The portal is a result of an extensive piloting phase. We tested and refined the user interface and functionalities of the portal, working with ELIXIR Nodes and other content providers to ensure their training resources are described using a common standard (Schema.org and Bioschemas) and that the portal is automatically updated as they publish new materials."
The TeSS portal is available at: https://tess.elixir-uk.org/.
If you’d like to include your training materials in TeSS, email tess@elixir-uk.info or niall.beard@manchester.ac.uk to find out how.
FAIR Training
The TeSS portal fully supports Open Science and Open Data principles. Adopting the FAIR principles for scientific data, TeSS makes bioinformatics training resources Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable:
"A great deal of material is available to train life scientists in computing, statistics, data manipulation and analysis. However, much of it is scattered and disorganised," says Chris Ponting, co-lead of the ELIXIR Training Platform. He adds, “TeSS enables users to discover training materials from multiple sources and combine them according to their specific needs."
ELIXIR Training Platform
TeSS has been developed by teams from the University of Manchester (led by Carole Goble and Terri Attwood) and Oxford e-Research Centre (led by Susanna-Assunta Sansone), and is part of the ELIXIR Training Platform. The mission of the Training Platform is to establish an interactive, pan-European training community to deliver bioinformatics training. It aims to provide developers, researchers and trainers in ELIXIR Nodes with the skills to effectively exploit the services offered by ELIXIR.
More information: www.elixir-europe/training