The Research IT Agile Methods Working Group within our Research Software Engineering (RSE) department, in collaboration with University College London (UCL), has secured funding from DisCouRSE Network+ to deliver free Agile project management training to digital research technical professionals (dRTPs) across N8 universities (including the University of Manchester) and UCL.

Did you know that Research IT provides a wide range of training courses that are free to all researchers and PGRs? Our short, focused training courses can help you with a variety of digital research problems.

Research IT recently hosted Mike Croucher from MathWorks for a workshop demonstrating how MATLAB can go from sluggish to lightning-fast. Through smart code optimisations and GPU acceleration, Mike took a calculation from 80 days down to just over 4 minutes — showing that MATLAB can be a serious contender in high-performance computing.

To help researchers adopt modern software architectures and enable them to use the vast range of existing containerised tools, our Research Software Engineers have developed an interactive course which introduces the basics of container usage.

At the end of March, members of our Research Software Engineering (RSE) team ran a Carpentries-style training course for environmental science researchers in how to create research software. Could we offer something similar to YOUR PhD students and early career researchers?

Apply now to learn about best practices in software development – especially if you already code but Virtual Environments, Testing, and Continuous Integration seem like advanced techniques to you.

At the end of March, members of our Research Software Engineering (RSE) team ran a Carpentries-style training course for researchers in the environmental sciences. The training took place over five days, and introduced the researchers to intermediate-level software development skills and practices.

Earlier last month, members of our Research Software Engineering team ran a Carpentries-style training for the Henry Royce Institute. The training took place over two days, where day one covered Introduction to Python and day two covered Data Analysis and Visualization.

Several members of our team are providing expert training for earth and environmental science researchers and PGRs in March next year. Apply now for a place!

The pandemic has brought many challenges, not least conducting training.  Our Training team have recently used Amazon Service Workbench to teach Python remotely online.

A call from the Research Lifecycle Programme prompted researcher Saskia Lawson-Tovey to get in touch with us with an idea to improve REDCap data management training at UoM. This ultimately resulted in Saskia being awarded an Elixir fellowship.

Members of Research IT are contributing to the current series of Carpentry workshops for researchers, postgraduates and staff at the University of Manchester, which was kicked off early in June with an online Library Carpentry workshop.