We thank everyone for their support during the Plant Transcriptome Analysis using Galaxy workshop that took place online in the week of the 19th of April. The workshop offered a complete crash course in Galaxy and built towards miRNA and single-cell RNA topics that were tailored for Arabidopsis genomes.

Plants flavour: plants.usegalaxy.eu

A special flavour of the European Galaxy Server was set up for this workshop, filtering the tools by their relevance to the plant research field.

Format

To better empower those who require more flexible time schedules, the workshop was designed in an asynchronous way: recordings and tutorials were made available online for the participants to consume at their own pace. After the workshop, the tutorials will stay available in the GTN and the recordings on the Galaxy Project YouTube channel.

During the training week, 24 experts from different time zones were available in chat to answer the questions. A huge shout out to all of them for the support!

Participation

Participants attended from all over the globe, enabled by the flexible learning resources provided, with a particular interest in the RNA-based tutorials available in the Galaxy Training Network (GTN).

The registration was over 460 participants and close to 200 join the chat platform. The career stage by country indicates enrichment in postgraduates, master and PhD students.

Feedback

Despite the limitations of the online settings and the occasional questions in chat, the videos on YouTube were popular with around 1700 views and 183 hours of watch time.

In the feedback survey, participants indicated that the training was useful, met their expectations and was well organised. In terms of the format, there seems to be a slightly higher preference for videos than only tutorials.

The general missing piece was the lack of face-to-face interaction. We got some nice comments about what was the best part of the workshop:

• “Overall comment: great job! Given the difficult times we are living in, this was great!”
• (The best thing about this workshop is) “that you could do everything at your own pace, some days I had lab work but I could still start in the afternoon or evening. This was very nice.”
• “The tutorial text and the videos are great. Each one complements the other. The galaxy platform was friendly too. I can remember the commands/tools lesson by lesson. Also, the availability of the materials after the workshop is great!!”

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the instructors and helpers for the help, and all the sponsors that made possible this workshop!