You might know that we offer training courses on using the Ensembl browser, but did you know that we also offer Ensembl REST API and Ensembl Train the Trainer courses? We can come to you to deliver any of these courses at your institute and we don’t charge any fees. If you’re in a low-middle income country, we don’t even charge you for expenses.

Browser courses

We’ve been offering our browser courses for many years now, and deliver about fifty of these a year worldwide. In these hands-on courses, you can learn about the background behind Ensembl data, and how you can access it through different interfaces and tools. They’re great for molecular biologists and geneticists who want to use Ensembl in the most efficient way to get the data to steer and analyse their experiments.With over 98% of participants saying they would recommend our courses, we think they’re pretty good.

REST API courses

We offered courses in our Perl APIs for many years now, followed later by courses in the REST APIs, but these were never very portable. They required multiple developers to teach them and installation of virtual machines and other software on host computers. As a result, these courses were mostly held locally.

Our recent update to our REST API courses makes use of online Jupyter notebooks, which means they can be deployed on any machine, without any need to install anything. This makes it much easier for us to deliver these courses anywhere in the world, in computer teaching rooms or using participant laptops. They’ve also been shortened, with the focus shifting towards coding-dabblers, rather than software engineers. The new courses don’t cover Ensembl data in any detail, so they’re best held in conjunction with a browser course, which provides the background to the data.

Train the Trainer courses

While we love delivering training, we know we can’t be everywhere at once. To get more people working effectively with Ensembl, our new Train the Trainer courses empower local trainers to deliver Ensembl training in future. The courses are designed to follow on from a browser workshop, building on the knowledge learned there, with further information about how to discover, create and deliver training materials.

How do I find out more?

Our training site gives more information about all our training courses. If you think you’d like to host some courses, send us an email.