Forum:Free Ensembl Courses

Question

[Emily]

Host an Ensembl course

The Ensembl team will send out trainers to give a free Ensembl course at your institute. The only cost to you is the expenses of the trainer (travel, accommodation and subsistence; if you're far away from our Cambridge base, you may wish to team up with other institutes in your area and split the cost).

We can hold browser courses, which typically last a day and take participants through the online browser, the data available, where it comes from and how to access it. These are hands-on courses, with talks, demos and exercises to work through. This requires a single trainer and is great for wet-lab scientists. An Ensembl course can cover:

• An introduction to the Ensembl project
• Genes and transcripts in Ensembl
• Using BioMart
• Variation data in Ensembl, including the VEP (optional)
• Comparative genomics analysis in Ensembl (optional)
• Regulatory data in Ensembl, including ENCODE (optional)
• Uploading custom data to Ensembl (optional)

We also hold API courses over multiple days where the Ensembl developers will take you through different aspects of the Ensembl API. These vary in length and require multiple trainers depending on how many modules you are interested in. Usually these courses consist of:

• The Core API - the basics of accessing data in the API and getting gene and transcript data
• The Variation API (optional)
• The Compara API (optional)
• The Regulation API (optional)

There's more information about Ensembl courses on our course page. If you are interested in holding either (or both!) of these courses, please get in touch with me on [e-mail].

Online courses

If you are not able to host a course, you might want to look at one of our freely available online courses. We have four courses available on EBI Train Online, a Quick Tour giving you an overview of Ensembl, a longer course which walks you through the website, a filmed version of our browser workshop, with exercises and a filmed version of our API course, with exercises and sample scripts.

We also have a number of short video tutorials on our YouTube channel (and YouKu for those in China). These are between 1 1/2 and 25 minutes and guide you through specific aspects of the Ensembl browser.

Everything we have is free for you to download and manipulate as you like. If you would like to run your own Ensembl course in house, we will happily send you our training materials, just get in touch.

[Eric Normandeau]

Great resources in the spirit of open source, thank you and the Ensemble team!

[Emily]

See our blog post about our perspective on open data.

[Buttonwood]

We'll happy to see if there are more useful docs about the API usage.

[Emily]

Have you seen our online course?

[CuteDriving663]

Looks great!