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.

Fig 1. Snapshot of Glittr.org.

Two tags are selected, ‘Transcriptomics’ and ‘R’, showing the top 2 of 25 repositories with both tags. By default, results are sorted based on number of ‘stargazers’, i.e. bookmarks.

Fig 2. Key Glittr.org statistics displayed by category.

Overview of number of repositories by category (A), distribution of number of contributors per repository by category (square root transformed; B), number of repositories per tag (C), per author or organization (D), per license (E) and per country (F). Colours are according to category as depicted in (A). In C) only the tags with more than 10 repositories are displayed and in D) only the authors/organizations with five or more repositories. At time of writing Glittr.org contained repositories authored by 242 authors/organizations with less than five repositories. For A), D), E) and F) the plots are coloured according to the category of the main (i.e. first) tag.