Livre d'Or

So back in that weird twilight zone between the Before Times and the Time of Isolation, I asked for volunteers to beta read a new free online course I was producing at work. During the weird 10 months since, we have been working somewhat interruptedly on new material, and we now have two new courses for release in the coming weeks. I'm looking for beta testers again.

The two courses are at approximately opposite ends of the spectrum of what we do. Course A is a very gentle introduction to scripting and the command line, aimed at life scientists with little computing background, or at least little experience with Linux and Free Software. You don't need any real biology to test this course, but if you hate science you probably won't find it an enjoyable experience. In terms of Linux experience we would like some testers who, like our target audience, have never worked in a command line, and some who understand the technical part enough to spot errors in the code or the explanations.

Course B is a broad overview of why genomics has lately become important in medicine as well as science, mainly aimed at GPs. It assumes a clinical audience, and uses a lot of unglossed medical jargon. It doesn't explain the basic biology, just jumps straight in to modern cutting-edge genomics. You probably need some interest in medicine and at least high school biology, but if it's too technical for a generally scientifically literate but non-specialist person that's something we'd want to fix.

We need people who can put in a couple of hours, and just play around with the course and see if there are any obvious problems, whether that's technical issues like display problems for your particular hardware and software, or conceptual problems like confusing instructions or something that doesn't make sense. We are definitely not expecting any one individual to go through a whole course in detail, and we're not looking for copy editing or proofreading. I mean, if you have the sort of brain that can't help spotting typos, we don't mind reports of those, but we're mainly looking for something more general than that.

Course A (intro to Bioinformatics) is a bit of a rush job and if you volunteer you need to be available to get your comments back to us by the end of next week. Course B (genomics for GPs) needs testers in the next couple of weeks and will still have to be done on a fairly tight turnaround.

Other than doing some good for the world, what you get out of it is a £25 Amazon voucher. So in order to get paid you need to be in a position to receive and spend an Amazon voucher. We might possibly be able to acquire vouchers for other countries' versions of Amazon, or else I can informally arrange to swap to something more locally useful. But it's not employment, it's a volunteer thing with a small token of appreciation.

Last year I had way more volunteers than I actually had space for, so thank you all for being awesome. Since there are two courses concerned I can now take on up to 8 people. I will give priority to people who wanted to help before but were turned away since we had too many volunteers.

Feel free to ask questions in the comments, but if you actually want to sign up you need to interact with my work persona, so I'll ask you to PM me about arranging that. You're also welcome to pass the request on to anyone else who might be interested.