hello and welcome to this webinar on effective inclusive and scalable training in the Life Sciences clinical education and Beyond I'm Melissa Burke I'm the Australian biocommons training and Communications officer today I'm co-hosting this webinar along with Amy Niselle from Melbourne Genomics who is the genomics workforce lead there before we begin I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge the traditional owners and their custodianship of the lands on which we meet today in my case this is the turrbal and jagera people of meanjin and for Amy this is the wurundjeri people of the kulin Nation we pay our respects to their ancestors and their descendants who continue cultural and spiritual connections to Country and we recognize their valuable contributions to Australian and Global Society at the Australian biocommons and at Melbourne genomics training and continuing education are core parts of what we offer the community earlier this year the biocommons and Melbourne genomics were lucky enough to join more than 30 other trainers Educators and training providers in New York at the Banbury Center Think Tank style meeting where we try to imagine how we can help make career spanning learning in the Life Sciences inclusive and effective for all this project was initiated by Jason Williams and Michelle Trachtenberg and today we're thrilled to welcome our friend and colleague Jason to share some of some of the outcomes of this meeting Jason is the assistant director at the DNA Learning Center at the Cold Spring Harbor laboratory where he specializes in teaching bioinformatics and data-driven science to high schoolers PhD students researchers and more Jason is amazingly passionate about connecting communities globally and is the founder of the life science trainers an International Community and Forum that connects anyone and everyone who does short format training in the Life Sciences welcome to the webinar Jason I'm now going to hand over to you to get started with the presentation wonderful uh thank you uh Melissa and Amy and everyone and Australian biocommons Christina Melbourne genomics everybody uh for the opportunity to present so let me get started so we have as much time as possible um for questions and discussions and I am going to just put this into the correct uh screen here all right excellent and I'll also try to keep an eye on the time so that we don't spend too much time listening to me but perhaps uh have some questions so um I'll put this on at the end uh but uh there is a website called bikeprinciples.org which you're free to look at um it'll be useful halfway through the the presentation you know have it open but pay attention to me for at least three minutes before you get to that and then I'm on Twitter at Jason williamsny uh and then my email address will be at the end but um just want to make sure folks who have more questions can follow up and we'll get that facilitated as Melissa mentioned um this work is really the work of many many people and here are just about all of them uh gathered with us last May in New York at the Banbury Center which is a small unit within Cold Spring Harbor laboratory where I work and where I've actually worked with my colleague Amy before uh and it's really a a think tank as I said uh trying to bring people together across us multiple disciplines to work on interesting challenges and if you've decided to take a little bit of time to join us today then perhaps training is something that's interesting to you and I perhaps will provoke some thoughts so I want to just take a moment to acknowledge all of those people there's two slides where I have their names up right right up front I'll put them up for a moment I know it will not really capture all the gratitude for all of these people but I just wanted folks to know that this really is uh a a diverse swath of people that were involved in in this work I also want to acknowledge funding from the U.S National Science Foundation which supported this the work of the meeting and our time in developing some forthcoming manuscripts okay um so are we wasting our time with training I think every um good uh project starts with anxiety and uncertainty about uh something and this is a question that I I I've had um and why would I have that question well one of the reasons uh is this paper from 2017 uh which was an interesting look uh in the United States at Short format training for PhD students in the Life Sciences uh and they had this really nice and I guess um this is as close to a sensationalism that you need to have when you're in a proceedings at National Academy's paper it's really direct that they find when they were looking at these students who've taken short format workshops that that this group really couldn't detect evidence of the effectiveness of those workshops um and this is was uh alarming to me um nonetheless because I spent a lot of time including in Australia I visited previously for the sake of getting researchers and Educators involved in in bioinformatics and data and really the only vehicle I have to do that is short format training so it really was interested in in that question are there assumptions that we have about the effectiveness of something that we rely on in order to communicate our work new science and to get other researchers on board and at the same time for those of us and I suspect many who are on this call do training we've seen the evidence and the outcome of people who approach us people who we work with who do take our workshops and do find it to be beneficial so this is an interesting thing uh and then there was another paper as I was conceiving of a conference to really ask that question amongst a group of people who are smarter and more experienced uh and more diverse than uh I would would be as an individual um this paper uh which which is actually from the national viewer of economic research uh actually talked about the stem Workforce and it really made an argument which I do think is true that new technologies are coming along all the time and it turns out you know I think the same as in Australia as in the United States in most countries um it's very common to hear calls that we need to to produce more stem graduates um there's a shortage of stem graduates we need we need more um but what this paper made the argument was that in stem the rate of change the rate of new skills is so quick that actually what tends to happen is that uh people older graduates get to a point in which they're mature in their experience of work but they may not be up on the latest skills they may not have had continuing professional education to allow them to take on new skills and so maybe they can't get the next promotion or they can't do the next research project as effectively as as others entering and so they made the argument it's that the skills were scarce and not the workers themselves um and some work that we did earlier at the Learning Center when we were looking a few years back at investigators who are funded by the national Foundation we found that of the different needs that those investigators had for cyber infrastructure and working with big data biology um the top three of a dozen or so needs were all in areas of training that they felt that those are the most unmet needs and so clearly there is an appetite for training uh and my question was is that something that we can make better one of the things that I've really come to believe in in thinking about some of the problems that surround what we're calling short format training which I'll Define now as saying uh training that is uh showing up for a webinar sometimes at a shortest perhaps where you might just have an hour to a couple of days of a workshop um that's not the same as what we traditionally think of in education as long format training when you are with a taking a semester-long course which most of us do during our formal degree and then not so much afterwards there are a number of features that contribute to making a long format teaching and a formal teaching in a classroom I won't guarantee that it's always effective as some of my education expert friends are but there are at least some features that almost all of it has in common one it's long so you're usually taking it for a quarter a semester the format oftentimes is lecture heavy although there definitely can be Hands-On and there's certainly move uh to increase the Hands-On in many cases in the Sciences um oftentimes they're articulated and enforceable prerequisites you can't take a 300 level class before you've taken a 100 and a 200 before it the Learners are often in the same track where they have pre-specified preparation and needs that are fairly uniform I'd argue and there's an expectation that the person who gets in front of the room is qualified to teach that they have some ability and experience and qualification to teach they may not have a degree in pedagogy but they they do there's that expectation there's also regulation there may be standards that the university enforces for instruction accreditation of certain programs there may even be legal requirements that the university must meet in order to call itself a functioning School um there's often a sequence which means that that learning takes place in the context of a major and a minor where there are other prerequisite or additional courses and uh when I this term I call variance makes uh when you when you take if I say that I'm a biology major at the University of Melbourne or I'm a biology major at um Princeton University or whatever University you'd like to name there's going to be a lot in common that you can predict about what those experiences might look like enter a short format training which is I've just marked it as a sort of blob because there are areas where and sometimes it it might look very much like long form training except for maybe the the time um and it really depends right a very experienced group of trainers like you're likely to find giving a pitch for uh Australian biocommons um that short format training may look very different than a one-off short format training done by two or three individuals who are just getting some colleagues together um so yeah it'll be short the focus often is on interactive Hands-On prerequisites often though are either unarticulated or unenforceable you really have to deal with who came to you Learners maybe various levels of preparation for the experience that you hope to deliver and you might not have much control the instructor there's an ex there's an expectation the instructor is a domain expert perhaps in science or medicine but not necessarily A pedagogical expert or even having any type of pedagogical experience and it's also a lot less likely to be regulated um in in many cases it may be more informal and that there wasn't a university approval process oftentimes other standards go by the wayside including for accessibility if there is a sequence available because there may often not be it might be one single course or maybe a two-part course it's really a lot of effort is placed on the learner and so I rate this experiences very as the variance of this experience as unpredictable and and not really repeatable right if I say I'm taking an rnac course with Australian biocommons they may not really resemble I'm sure there'll be some domain um overlap but it might not really resemble the same type of learner experience and teaching environment and attention to pedagogical rigor that you would get in a one-off workshop done by somebody who's never taught before at some in place who they're an expert but they've just never taught it one thing that all of these experiences will have in common is that there is formal evidence about teaching that applies and so how do we Infuse that how do we get that and other elements um to be applied to short format training maybe making it a little bit more regular well I'm going to obviously give you uh our pitch as as to what the answer is but I also like to keep in mind that um and there was a great question which I guess we'll get to because one of the pre-submitted ones about yeah I've gone to webinars people presented things how do we apply it right um and so what I want to say at the back is that this is going to be a big project to change any person's Behavior or to recommend people try something new so I think we will at this um in in this webinar I hope to communicate a few uh interpretable ideas uh if I'm successful uh but the real project is going to be around building communities and supporting communities around these principles which I'm going to talk about um because um you'll forget half the stuff that I could say at this webinar more than half maybe ninety percent um but if I can get across um some principles some ideas that resonate with you because you've probably been thinking themselves and maybe we've put a label on them that resonates um then I think that that's the first step to moving forward um I thought so too when I first started this project a few years ago as Melissa mentioned and I'll put in another plug for live SCI trainers.org this is a community online it's it's slack it's free there's there's it's all volunteer effort which was an attempt to say um having had a chance to travel the world being very privileged to meet so many wonderful trainers across countries it was just a place to put together a a forum for people to exchange as many or as few ideas as they would like it just so happens I I picked a slack question this was a free thing you know I didn't know I was doing this today for Melissa but there was a question for Melissa and this exactly my dream of what this uh slack would be maybe there could be more but really for somebody to just throw out hey I have a question there are not all that many people in the world that concern themselves with short format training professional development for life scientists how can I ask them on that question so please everyone feel free we have monthly calls and uh there are questions at the end I can come around to that but building a community which is great I can put up a slack for free we can have a little website um that that's a first step and so how do we actually support the community with tools or begin to support the community of tool which is all of you with tools that could actually um you know achieve more so hence uh this project on what has now come to be known after the meeting that we had in May and this idea of the bicycle principles and as you kind of will guess there are two cyclic uh sets of ideas uh and it so happens that a bicycle is a nice metaphor for that so I'll try to introduce this um one step at a time um but I will mention yeah that that the idea here the key idea is turning to reinforce that idea of effective short format training what might that look like inclusive short format training um how are some I think every one of us might be excluded in one way or another and how can we fight against uh that that uh circumstance to become inclusive and also career spanning uh where we think about the context of the needs of individuals across their entire career especially in world where science and scientific domains medicine uh changes um on a monthly basis in ways it might be difficult to predict okay so the first part is that this needed to be a Community Driven strategy no one cares what I think as I'm reminded in many ways including my donk who does not come often unless there's guarantee that I've got food um so how do we actually develop a strategy that really comes from all of you so whether you were at that meeting or not in in the Banbury Center the hope is is that what we presented actually captures things that you're doing and and brings you uh to the table by by just sort of saying we we're with you um and so hence that meeting that was mentioned uh and then that is also acknowledging here as wasn't an earlier slidey uh the organizing committee which again uh spanned a global effort and as you can imagine and things that happen at meetings there's all sorts of loops and and ideas and plans uh there's virtual especially since we were hybrid uh Post-it notes I don't think you can have an agreement of mines or that Post-it notes and there was even a lunar eclipse that begun the meeting so that we had really everything that we could possibly have to try to get uh some success out of this and so what we came up with uh really was a set of principles we've known since Moses uh that you know people can remember five or ten things and you put them on a tablet and maybe people will understand and remember at least that there's this there's a few of them but as I said um it's really there to label and capture the best of what many but not everyone might do so I suspect that many of these will resonate but some of these may be areas where you're you'll say to yourself you know I do want to do that but I don't know exactly how um the principles are also there to provide a path for individuals or groups to develop a more predictable experience of what short format training could be um some people will be functioning groups like biocommons like Melbourne genomics but others will be really sort of on their own at their own institution so a set of principles could be a potential guide no matter what your context is and then finally the principles are are a mechanism to enshrine values and practices which may get lost due to scarce resources so by its nature you have limited time um limited experience uh often and maybe even limited awareness if you're doing it on your own you may not know what other groups are doing and how you could benefit from them so these are some maybe not all but at least some that came to mind in writing this talk uh of what the principles could could do for us um so let me State the core principles uh and then I'll I'll say what the bicycle is so we do have these uh short Punchy statements and then I'll try to come back around to them um for people well and in the next slide I'll tell you when it's useful to Veer off to the website because you've gotten tired of me and maybe you'll just put me in the background as you look for yourself but one there are these sets of core principles which we believe every short format training experience uh should work towards uh so one that all a training really needs to use the best evidence uh uh in in developing the the pedagogical core of that training um there are recommendations existing bodies of literature about how to design a teaching experience long or short effectively whether that's learning outcomes whether that's um taking measurement of the progress of your learners which I'll mention next but using committing to an evidence-based practice and for short format training interestingly um there will be a lot of areas where there isn't published literature but there's the experience of your colleagues uh who have done things and tried them and so although much of that work uh unfortunately doesn't get captured in in formal Publications um it is out there and our recommendations also uh address that number two is uh this idea of catalytic learning and simply stated what we mean there is that there there's a formal responsibility to think about the learner and what they're going to do after um your your training your Workshop in some cases your your your your short format training may be just in time on training where there's only a single skill a very simple thing like hey here is the new website for using uh blast uh We've made these three changes and you know what ninety percent of the people that website that webinar would probably be all that they need in order to move to the next step but oftentimes we are providing our Learners with more where what we give them at the workshop is not going to be enough to really do everything that they need so how do we think about preparing them to to be catalytic how do we uh demonstrate to our Learners that that the experience that they've had our training is actually effective in other words uh proving to the learner and often really the evidence comes from assessment or evaluation a learner that they've actually can demonstrate um that a skill that you try to communicate in your Workshop is is something that they now walk away being able to do so being effective means giving that evidence to a learner and then the final core principle is to be inclusive to really think about how your training can maximize the ability of all Learners to participate and benefit so that's the set of what we call Core principles but as I said there's another set of principles that one could use and these are what we call Community principles and these apply when your training is going Beyond just reaching a single group or a single experience at a single institution but when you're actually trying to take that training or those learning materials and scale it to either other people who will do that training for you or who will take what you've written and move it to other groups and when you're trying to reach large numbers of Learners so anything where you're now going to a space where the training is going to be collaborative so uh the first of three there is reach um you should work to include new types and larger audiences of Learners and um doing that requires perhaps modifying training materials or thinking about how those materials were developed and that might not have been where you started when we talk about scale and that means supporting uh the the trainers themselves so if you think about training the trainers would be an example of working with larger numbers of instructors and instructional developers who again may have a different set of needs in the learners and then finally sustaining um once you've develop training materials how can you use practices that might increase or at least maintain the availability or the usability and the relevance of those materials on the reliability we know things go stale pretty quickly in The Sciences what are other infrastructures that you need in order for something to be made sustainable how can we consider that and and plan for that and do the best that we can or seek support especially when a training is valuable to another community so um if you are a small group and you're not really looking to scale you might just be using a unicycle where you use just the core principles and if you're a larger group uh there's the bicycle and that's where you have to think about entire communities of people working together to reach scale and sustain that training so what comes next from this you know you have a set of principles is actually the principles are very high level obviously they're open to interpretation but there's many layers of guidance that you now need to think well how do we actually turn something that's a bit abstract into something that's a little bit more concrete um well what the group Next developed and is still in the process of uh you know developing enriching fleshing out is recommendations to help individuals Implement those principles and this is what I'm very much excited to know what you think in the audience and I'll mention at the end the mechanisms that we're doing right now to collect feedback and and help make things um much more concrete again we've known since in this case and yes in my second religious metaphor uh you've known since Martin Luther uh you can make lots and lots of statements uh and then how people follow them there's a variety of outcomes some good some bad um so I'm going to go through them and as I go through these recommendations I've become fascinated with these text to image AI generators if you've ever seen them where you enter a couple of words of text on a website and then the artificial intelligence actually draws a picture uh and so almost all of my recommendations are not really concrete and so you could just look at text which is a little bit boring I think but do go to bikeprinciples.org and you can see the full text but so that I have an image that goes with it and then possibly doesn't violate copyright from trying to find some image to represent an abstract concept for 14 different recommendations that I have I each um recommendation I'm about to show you and they're 14 of them will be accompanied by an artificial intelligence generated uh image and the image will have a prompt so you know what I what I wrote in the machine so I wrote in you know scientist and lab coat riding a bicycle and it literally drew that so that's awesome because if you've ever needed to put images in your slides and you can't find just the right image if it's not if it's not a figure of course this is my solution for okay so credit to that website which is at the bottom so let me go through the recommendations rather quickly because I'll I'll try to keep to just 10 seconds about saying them and give you time for the image okay uh okay so uh recommendation a uh was about uh The Prompt is a doctor studying a textbook and you see the image okay you get it it did a good job this is a cartoon version uh this idea of professionalizing uh the training a short format training instructors and instructional designers uh so this is a lot to unpack uh let me try to just say it in a sentence or two um there are almost all of us have taken a workshop or taught a workshop uh but for those of us who are instructors um we may or may not have gotten training in short format training there will be other instructors that come along after us how can we professionalize that process so that all instructors who do short format training have access to training materials themselves that can work across many different contexts as you'll see in this whole uh you know the last few minutes here as I'm wrapping through these very little of it it's specific to the life sciences so there's lots of things that are are broadly available and they also have people um like Melissa and Amy who are on the call who are instructional designers who may help the instructors to design the curriculum or support them in very various ways how can we professionalize that process and that includes not only learning materials for those for those folks but even rewarding them and acknowledging their work in a way that really makes that a cohesive and important component of the research community so that was run recommendation now the next one was uh centralizing infrastructure for short format training assessment and evaluation so one thing that tends to happen not as well as you might hope for short format training is assessment most workshops do end with some type of assessment how did you like the workshop uh was the coffee good was it strong enough but in a lot of cases we don't do rather rigorous assessments for for various reasons but there are ways and approaches and principles where we could do better job and this is related to another recommendation which would come later and one of the first things we can do is centralizing that effort by providing resources that instructors could turn for for help with developing their own assessments Next One support micro credentialing for short format training instructors so if you are an instructor providing the the ability for you to get a credential in that area would be a way to demonstrate to others that you are really an accomplished instructor uh it would be a signal um to Learners that you really are caring about the discipline and so that's something that is uh the ability to um within our realm of possibility I'll also comment here since I had to write a female student that the AI is a bit sexist uh so I had to instruct it at certain times because it wasn't getting quite a bit of a balance okay upper this is oh this is many syllables operationalize Equitable and inclusive practice in short format training as an ethical obligation okay what do I mean here uh well I think all of us have a desire to work towards inclusion and also accessibility but oftentimes it really is uh an afterthought unfortunately we are we have an hour to teach something we have half a day to teach something we are very focused on the science but if we really were to consider the ethics and inclusion aspects of our training as ethical obligations then that really um you know increases the level of attention and even the level of resources that we should command I have available to us so that we can include everyone in in the training events that we put on uh deploy short format training to counter inequity uh so one of the things I also care about is the ability of short format training to take researchers uh scientists clinicians who are in one position in their job and in their career who might be seeking to go to that next position and and acknowledging that our colleagues across the globe and often cases don't have the same opportunities even though they may have the same degree there may be skills that they haven't had the chance to get and so thinking about how all training in some way could contribute to the effort of reaching the those who are not yet reached uh and making sure that scientists uh like I said the whole group of stakeholders has a better chance at uh getting achieving their career objectives by making sure that training is accessible to them and that we actually direct resources to accomplish that this next one is the golden bicycle because the funders have the money and so uh thinking about ways to present the bicycle principles in ways that funding agencies can incorporate into their requirements uh as you I think you know everywhere funding agencies are becoming very serious about data sharing and there are policies and plans in place on that level but funding agencies also support a great deal of training and and professional development that is in the short format category and so uh if these principles really are of the community and have the support of the community then it's in the funders interest that when they support and fund short format training that it follows principles like these to make it inclusive and effective and career standing the next one is this idea of economic models that enable short format training uh short format training is not alone in areas of Academia where it relies upon labor that may be uncompensated um and so there's also conflict with some of the other recommendations because we also do want training to be free so that everyone can get it so there is a wider discussion that needs to be have here needs to be undertaken here and while compensation doesn't necessarily always need to be money there are other ways to make sure that we acknowledge and and think about areas which things that we depend upon in short format training might actually required laborers and efforts that are currently uncompensated and how can we work to make that more equitable almost done there the next one is the idea of High Fidelity sharing so there's my Hi-Fi radio set drawn in an anime style did a good job uh what we mean by this is that there are different groups who know how to increase the reach and the scale of their short format training they know how to sustain short format training but oftentimes the their models for doing so again I I keep throwing a praise to Australian biocommons those models may not be shared with everybody or communicated in ways that everyone immediately knows how to apply to their own context so creating ways to document that creating ways to share those efforts with Fidelity in other words that when we do replicate things in other new contexts for new audiences that we don't lose what made the original set of training effective and inclusive uh there's also the idea of applying Fair principles to training materials so I guess somehow sharing training materials is like sharing lollipops that's what prompt I thought of uh and what we mean here I think many people are aware of the idea of fair that uh in in this case data should be made findable accessible interoperable and reusable uh other groups including uh this one have been working to do the same for trading materials and we think that that's a great practice that everyone should really consider how they can make training materials something that everyone can benefit from and enjoy and share uh the other thing is is the idea that training should be registered in ways that people can find it uh and there may be training that happens in Australia that's interested uh of interest to people in Argentina uh and vice versa but oftentimes those training lists of training opportunities and training materials are siled and isolated and not connected and while we don't think it's realistic to say that there should be one truth source for all trading materials everywhere um there are ways by technology that training material Registries that are created could be made to be exchangeable and interoperable so that people could build and share um as often as they would like the next one is for the learners and it's to communicate to Learners uh by creating systems of badging in other words if a if a certain training meets a recognized uh criteria for being inclusive uh doing things like using a code of conduct living up to that code of conduct well that training should get a badge that Learners can use to differentiate a high quality instruction from instruction that might not have reached that level of quality yet and so this gives an opportunity for Learners to have more of a voice because often they won't know enough just walking into a situation to ask for what they would like but by creating standards that everyone can agree on and that are transparent then you empower the Learners to decide uh and then when certain trainings don't have certain badges that gives them the the encouragement and motivation to achieve that badge because Learners can decide what they would really insist on um the idea of catalytic learning that was mentioned earlier uh needs implementation health and so uh doing actual research because it's a novel construct uh was one of the recommendations and we've got two more one uh the the integration of diagnostic assessment so this is related to what we said earlier uh that we need to assess our Learners um this one is more instructor focused or instructor centered because instructors can be prompted to do that individually whereas the earlier recommendation on assessment was would be for interoperable and centralized resources which would be a larger project and finally evidence-based guidance to support career spanning learning so here is my I don't know maybe it could be like a Pokemon map our trail map or something or guide so that one in the anime style could work the idea here is is that uh we often focus a lot of efforts rightly so on early career um whether it's trainees uh whether it's early career faculty but really uh you know I think scientists are loose are useful for decades in in most not all cases but we want to make sure that across the careers span there really are places where people can look for especially if they are working in an interdisciplinary context that might not even existed when they started their career so really thinking about providing those guidance okay so that was a tour through the recommendations accompanied by an AI generated image um so how do we share these ideas and move to next steps uh one as I said uh go to the website we will post announcements there as we're doing things and there is also a way for you to give us some feedback so every one of these recommendations is accompanied by a summary a little bit of a vignette on how this might work um it talks about related principles potential benefits to Learners incentives to implementation and also potential barriers uh there's also a survey where we have an idea from different stakeholders what they think have we have we described these correctly is are we missing something um and then to build out the community further uh one of the things that you can do today uh on the website or um well through this link or QR code if you care to is uh we have a course on the website a forum where people can ask questions uh openly it's great to do it that way because other people may have the same questions as you we have a mailing list so that you can be advised especially as the Publications become available um we're also doing some focus groups and additional surveys so if you're interested in giving us feedback perhaps you can say a little bit more later but I will have the privilege of traveling in person um to Melbourne in a few weeks and there'll be some activities around this but even before that people can let us know if they'd like to give us more feedback if they if they have questions comments ideas and all of these things would be um to set the stage for future funded efforts to find which of these recommendations and have the most traction and and what the uptake in the community might be so we really invite you all to share and join in um this really is meant to reflect the best of what all of you do because like I said I know that there are quite a number of trainers who would come to something like this so with that I will end my talk there uh leaving us a little bit of time for time and discussion I always end typically end with this quote uh about uh the really just the need for continuous relearning and acknowledge my home institution uh and also one of my project cybers which contributed to that and my Twitter and my email there at Williams cshl.edu and with that I will stop sharing and then um hand off to discussion so thank you everyone thank you so much for that Jason I just adored that walk um Melissa did you want to wrap up the talk and then I'll um ask a couple of the questions that were pre-submitted I think if I find to go straight into questions but I'll just remind people that if you do have a question and we're getting lots of Applause coming up on the screen as well if you do have a question pop that into the Q a box and we'll do our best to answer it for you so while people are possibly um popping some questions in we did get a few um beforehand Jason um I'll run through those now the first one is is there a plan to promote the principles through the research data Alliance communities um these acronyms are new to me so I apologize if I'm saying them wrong ethrd and IG all beyond that uh so uh the answer to all of that will be yes I don't always know how uh but I think that um we are very eager for people to take this back to their communities because all of you will have more reach than the initial set of us and of course um the the publication which is forthcoming would be a major sort of stake in the ground to or flag in the ground to let people know and signal that so my hope is is that we move to a place where we've articulated things really clearly and we Empower individual people who can believe in the principles themselves and may have their own take on them to go out and do that work for us uh that being said we also hope to attract funding for various agencies so if people are interested in digging in or are interested in promoting um we can support that work wherever and however we can so please make make sure you leave comments like that on the feedback Forum ideas already starting to come in from various ways and I'll I'll keep notes from this um this experience so that we know who to reach out but we we love your opinions and your help in reaching those communities mentioned and any others that might be interested in adopting this I can attest to that when I was sitting in the meeting at Banbury I think I was one of the only people in the room that was coming from a clinical genomics perspective and it was fascinating constantly applying my thoughts about how these would work in my world and um and you've supported us and Australian biocommons are supporting you to come to Australia and then we're leveraging that so we're doing one of those activities in Melbourne in December and some of the people online today are going to be part of that so to the person who wrote that question I've taken that question and inserted is there a plan to promote these principles through the clinical genomics education communities and the answer is yes and it's um it's an individual who can make that happen as Jason said um the next question is how much do you rely on participant feedback to gauge the effectiveness of a training session and this popped into my mind as well when I saw you put up that particular recommendation I noticed that your description of Effectiveness focused on actually the learner knowing that the program was effective for them and I always think of Effectiveness as also being the stakeholders know that it was effective as well so either the funders or whoever it was so the question was how much do you rely on participant feedback to gauge effectiveness yeah so uh if I'm just answering that really directly in terms of how you know how it might happen for any short format training um uh you know the I think the idea there and there were a number of experts uh in assessment and education is that um it's it's kind of a it's a conversation both the learner and the instructor wants to know that if I've if I've taught something that that you've gotten it uh and that you you can demonstrate that skill and also you coming to the course when you first do that the thing that you learned on your own I mean that's the evidence that you know you you can do it now um so what what I think you know none of that is new what I think um we are trying to make a push for is to sort of say there's a lot of short format training where we only capture um sort of a sentiment analysis do you feel that the training was a good training do you feel that um the experience was pleasant and those are important uh qualitative things to capture but we also know from the research that people aren't always the best judge of of what they think that they learned uh and so it's an area you know that that truth be told doesn't happen in a long format where you do have a test and unfortunately you can get an F I've gotten them it's not pleasant right um so how can we balance those needs and and a realistic assess a realistic understanding of the time and context to do a bit more and to think about how we structure the the teaching process so that there are assessment diagnostic assessments to use the more general term built in to the to the training a few you know a multiple choice question um a challenge exercise what are the more approachable things that we can integrate so I hope that then answers the question but yeah I think both groups oftentimes um I guess we have this this day saying in the states and maybe it's also in Australia that uh the customer is always right uh so I think demanding that the learner can can prove to themselves um we hope by extension uh is is means that the the instructor can prove to themselves that learning has has taken place in the in the way that they hoped yeah and it's also often a funding or a timing issue you know being able to extend your evaluation so far that you're getting workplace feedback that they've accomplished and implemented what they've learned in your program in your short format training it's sometimes not possible we all strive to get to that point that may not be feasible and the last question that was pre-submitted was the new approach Insight or information from a webinar or a one-soft lecture is really applied it's a bit of a depressing statement can this ever be overcome yeah uplifters Jason say yes so I mean the question is do we want to take responsibility for that as instructors um and if we do uh what would that mean so I think it's uh except for some few you know very basic skills like in that just in time training where I literally just need that five minutes of a YouTube video that shows me what command to enter or that reveals something that I just didn't pick up from from reading through instructions you know that's sort of I guess the trivial case what I think that this question is speaking to is how can you um with short format training really move someone along um a Continuum of path and their professional development and so does that actually mean that uh funders and unit universities who support uh or projects who support short format training are are doing a disservice by sponsoring or thinking about the way they deliver short format training as just isolated one-offs and not saying if we're doing short format training and the level of the topic is is of such a level of sophistication then we actually need to make sure that there are multiple trainings or that there are trainings plus the additional teaching materials post Workshop that the learner could feasibly achieve this on their own because you've just gotten to that point that's one of the um that's what the catalytic um recommendations about in the Catholic principle is to really consider that in many cases just for the sake of being practical and honest we won't be able to do as Grand a sort of um all-encompassing entry into short format training that we would like to present to the learners but there might be other realistic things that we can do to support them in ways that we kind of don't think about sometimes because we just sort of say everyone had to win on their own um and that's true and you know people will a subset of people will but some people won't or um some people you know the the the progress of the science may be slower and in my mind I always thought like what we saw with the pandemic there's so many interesting and even pressing scientific challenges if we can make something happen ten percent faster that may not mean a lot um so I'm all for you know rethinking some of what we've come to accept and especially as science becomes more interdisciplinary and more challenging I was just thinking as well as as Jason was replying that maybe we need to shift our perspective on webinars and lectures a little bit and what makes them effective it could be that these are more about giving people a taster of a topic so that they can decide if they do want to pursue more training on that and that is actually an effective and useful thing for those people rather than it being the way that we try to get people to apply skills so we as trainers we need to be thinking about what type of event are we doing and what do we want to get out of it and do those two things match up as well I agree so much with that um because I think that the very first thing is to be honest the learner has no idea how complicated or how how easy uh a given subject might be if they've really had no exposure to it but we probably as instructors probably do have some sense and if we're being very honest to sort of saying listen and in fact I I often have Workshop slides that say here's what I cannot teach you you are not going to get this in the next couple of hours for me and and here's here's all I can give you so I'm honest about that but here's how you can get there once you're done with what I am able to get you and just sort of that mindset change I think even though it might sound simple I think it's potentially quite valuable because I have you know um is there anything more desperate than uh well don't want to shout anyone down but is there anything more desperate than a graduate student trying to finish their thesis and you are what's standing in the way that that one technique or that one thing they really are coming to you because they they they saw what you had is exactly what they believe they need but we don't want them to believe that what we are giving is all that they need because oftentimes it's not and so really having that humility and being transparent with them and saying listen I know where you're at I know you can make it here's what I have to give you to help you there and then here's a clear explicit set of things that are are likely to get you you need to go if we can not only say that but also ourselves get evidence and gather evidence so that we have a lot of confidence and what we're saying is going to get them there that would be amazing thanks Jason so moving on to the questions that have come in live today this the first one uh that is both a comment and a question so I'll read it out for you it's I feel each of the recommendations is an entire lecture or long format training in itself the one that I feel is important to drive progress is make the bike principles actionable to funders can you comment on how we do this or where we can go for some self-directed learning in this space all right thank you very much for that question um so I agree with you these uh the the bike principles right now the website is at Stan is a bit of a brain dump um it's it's still the edited version of a much larger brain dump of a really 30 fantastic um uh bright people that were in that meeting um but each one of those let me answer the question in two parts uh and it's slightly related to the next question that I see from Paul that we'll get to in a moment which is uh we are working on also a sort of a road map which further digests the principles and tries to provide some more concrete ways where people can get started but the for each of each of those recommendations there are some recommendations that that individual instructors could feasibly do by themselves and there's some that they're not that it would take actually a group of people coming together um so that being said the answer about make the by principles actionable to funders um that have that will happen in many different ways um so one for a funder to actually say yes I want to mandate that my awardees use the bicycle principles they're going to need evidence so they may be willing to actually fund um you or me or others here to test out some of the bicycle principles and do a bit more research to show that they really are achieving their aims so I think that's why we have the um the Forum that's there why we're going to continue to use various spaces like these to see who's interested in helping us because each one of those principles may be relevant to one community and in one context and perhaps not so much of interest to another at the moment so for for now we hope that the website will be an important touch point to go and look at and see what's happening what where their movements or where communities coalescing on those so uh we're trying we're very much at the beginning of this and then could I possibly answer calls pretty quickly um who's finding the the principle is quite abstract I definitely agree with that I'm suggesting that case studies and things would be very helpful as well yeah so I'll just reinforce because I know we have to go to wrap up that we're working on those um but for now there's at least a a body of work I don't suggest you read them all unless you really have nothing to do with your life uh but actually find the few that are most interesting to you and go from there um and then we we will have other more digested versions that we hope people will be able to see themselves in through those case studies but I'm going to stop talking and turn it back to Melissa because I know she has some final comments for us I do unfortunately we are going to have to wrap it up for today but this is actually a really good point to segue into the wrap-up because in December Jason well rather at the end of November and in December Jason is coming out to Australia and he's going to join us for a couple of focus group style workshops where we're going to pick and choose some of those principles and really think about what can we do to put those into action in our own training settings and kind of take them from the abstract to their kind of imaginable and doable thing so there are two of these the first one is being hosted by Melbourne genomics on the 5th of December and we'll have a focus on clinical genomics education if you'd like more information about that one please get in touch with Amy and then the following day we will have a very similar Workshop but for people working in the Life Sciences and digital research space this one is being hosted by Australian biocommons and the details and registration link for that are up on our website following on from that and continuing our collaboration with Melbourne genomics on the 7th of December we will have another webinar which will be looking at variant calling and taking it from the clinic to the lab and Back Again we have two different speakers joining us for that and they're going to offer quite different perspectives on the way that they're working in this clinical genomics space again the details for this webinar are up on the Via Commons website to finish so thank you so much Jason for joining us and for joining us in hours that are not your usual working hours you are based in the US like currently we're really looking forward to having you here in December as well thank you to everybody who's come along today live as well if you would like to stay up to date with what's happening in Australian via Commons and Melbourne genomics you can follow us on Twitter and you can also sign up to our newsletters and you'll find subscribe options on our websites thanks again for joining us and we hope to see you again soon until then have a great day and goodbye for now
2022-11-09