ELIXIR is a pan-European intergovernmental organisation for life science that aims to coordinate bioinformatics resources in a single infrastructure across Europe; bioinformatics training is central to its strategy, which aims to develop a training community that spans all ELIXIR member states. In an evidence-based approach for strengthening bioinformatics training programmes across Europe, the ELIXIR Training Platform, led by the ELIXIR EXCELERATE Quality and Impact Assessment Subtask in collaboration with the ELIXIR Training Coordinators Group, has implemented an assessment strategy to measure quality and impact of its entire training portfolio. Here, we present ELIXIR's framework for assessing training quality and impact, which includes the following: specifying assessment aims, determining what data to collect in order to address these aims, and our strategy for centralised data collection to allow for ELIXIR-wide analyses. In addition, we present an overview of the ELIXIR training data collected over the past 4 years. We highlight the importance of a coordinated and consistent data collection approach and the relevance of defining specific metrics and answer scales for consortium-wide analyses as well as for comparison of data across iterations of the same course.

Barcelona Supercomputing Center INB Coordination node Life Sciences Department Barcelona Spain

CSC IT Center for Science Ltd Espoo Finland

Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology University of Chemistry and Technology Prague Czech Republic

Department of Genetics University of Cambridge Cambridge United Kingdom

Department of Informatics University of Oslo Oslo Norway

DTL Dutch Techcentre for Life Sciences Utrecht the Netherlands

EMBL EBI Wellcome Genome Campus Hinxton Cambridge United Kingdom

Faculty of Medicine Institute for Biostatistics and Medical Informatics University of Ljubljana Ljubljana Slovenia

Genome Research of Industrial Microorganisms Center for Biotechnology Bielefeld University Bielefeld Germany

IFB URGI Université Paris Saclay Centre de Recherche INRA Versailles France

Institute of Applied Biosciences Thessaloniki Greece

Institute of Biomembranes Bioenergetics and Molecular Biotechnologies Bari Italy

Institute of Computer Science University of Tartu Tartu Estonia

Institute of Molecular Biology and Pathology Rome Italy

Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência Oeiras Portugal

Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine University of Luxembourg Esch sur Alzette Luxembourg

MRC Human Genetics Unit The Institute of Genetics and Molecular Medicine University of Edinburgh Edinburgh United Kingdom

National Bioinformatics Infrastructure Sweden Science for Life Laboratory Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics Stockholm University Stockholm Sweden

SIB Training SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics Lausanne Switzerland

University of Debrecen Medical Faculty Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Debrecen Hungary

VIB Flanders Institute for Biotechnology VIB Bioinformatics Core Ghent Belgium

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A research data management (RDM) community for ELIXIR