Using Glittr.org to find, compare and re-use online materials for training and education.

Abstract

A wealth of excellent training and educational materials for the computational life sciences are scattered around the Internet, but they can be hard to find. Many materials reside in public Git repositories that are hosted on platforms such as GitHub and GitLab. Glittr.org is a manually curated database of Git repositories, which enables users to find educational materials that would otherwise be hard to identify. With the application, users can search and compare educational materials based on topic and author, but also on engagement metrics such as stargazers (bookmarks) and recency (days since last commit). Glittr.org currently contains 664 entries, which are assigned to six different categories within the domain of computational life sciences. By analysing the database, we reveal insights in the availability of materials per topic, collaboration patterns of developers, and licensing practices. This knowledge helps to understand in which areas open educational materials are scant, the importance of Git for collaboration on educational materials and how licensing can be improved to enhance sharing and reuse. Taken together, we show that Glittr.org contains a wealth of connected and openly available metadata. Therefore, it enhances adherence to the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles, which benefits learners, teachers and trainers in the entire life sciences community and beyond.