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In October of 2020, in response to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, our team hosted our first fully online workshop teaching the QIIME 2 microbiome bioinformatics platform. We had 75 enrolled participants who joined from at least 25 different countries on 6 continents, and we had 22 instructors on 4 continents. In the 5-day workshop, participants worked hands-on with a cloud-based shared compute cluster that we deployed for this course. The event was well received, and participants provided feedback and suggestions in a postworkshop questionnaire. In January of 2021, we followed this workshop with a second fully online workshop, incorporating lessons from the first. Here, we present details on the technology and protocols that we used to run these workshops, focusing on the first workshop and then introducing changes made for the second workshop. We discuss what worked well, what didn't work well, and what we plan to do differently in future workshops., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

This coupled with various other barriers such as access to training resources, access to skilled trainers, remote locations, and the relatively high costs associated with training activities act as major barriers to delivering training in LMICs. Bioinformatics training is required at every stage of a scientist's research career. Funding for training is often available through dedicated grants for training or through explicit budget lines in research projects that aim to build bioinformatics capacity. One of the important strands of these initiatives is a drive to organize and deliver valuable bioinformatics training, but organizing and delivering short bioinformatics training workshops in an LMIC present a unique set of challenges. [Extracted from the article]