[Biojava-l] Biojava course help.

[David Huen]

On Tuesday 18 Jun 2002 12:56 pm, Witold Eryk Wolski wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I am a student of bioinformatic on the free University of Berlin. I
> started to work with the biojava API. I found biojava quite interesting
> and usefull. Also the idea of open source tools in science is quite
> important. Therefore i wanted to learn more about biojava.
> To do this i am trying to organize an biojava course during the summer
> hollidays on our faculty.

Thanks for your interest in BioJava.

<snip proposed content>

> I posted the idea on the mailing lists of our faculty and got a lot of
> e-mail from students that are interested in such a summer course.
> Now i am thinking how to make the course more attractive to attract even
> more students to join the course.
>    It will be great if some of the core developers will be interested in
> visiting Berlin this Summer and give for example a broad overview to all
> parts of biojava during one weekend as a start of this course and help
> to work out a schedule for such an course.
>    I already talked with the administration of our faculty. They are
> willing to support the course at least by making the computer pool and
> lecture rooms available. Our faculty has also some money to pay for
> example a part of the traveling cost's.
> Wasn't there a biojava course this spring in England? If yes it will be
> grate if someone is willing to share his experiences with me.
>
My apologies for the delayed reply - I was hoping one of the other 
mantainers would pipe up first and volunteer to run it.

I can only speak for myself.  I did some of the instruction at the BioJava 
Bootcamp at Hinxton.

I think the biggest problem will be to get enough instructors - I discovered 
somewhat belatedly that it's very hard work teaching, preparing and running 
tutorials :-).  Teaching the one and a half sessions I did cost me a week 
of preparation and tutorial debugging.  All the instructors have other day 
jobs which makes setting time aside for a course difficult because you not 
only have to make time to prepare for the course, then there's the course 
itself and finally the necessity of catching up with the backlog of work 
when returning to your job.  The other problem is that work tends to get 
planned in advance and I'm already committed to end-Nov so i can't be of 
help for something intended for this summer.  I think some of the other 
core developers are similarly tied up in their various ways - unlike me, 
some even have jobs in the real (better-paid but more time-demanding) 
world!  I suspect it's not feasible to run the course without at least 2-3 
instructors because of the workload - it is a very intensive course.  A 
further issue is that BOSC will happen this summer and some potential 
instructors will be there and having taken time out for that, I wonder 
whether they can afford another week on this course.

I hope your course can and will be run eventually but I think this summer 
may be overoptimistic.  Please don't be discouraged, it may prove feasible 
at another time, particularly with more advance warning.

Best wishes,
David Huen