Just to add a personal note on top of the official announcement: I’ve found that online courses are great for getting a first overview, but whenever I really wanted to use bioinformatics in my own projects, in-person workshops made a huge difference for me.

From a participant’s perspective, in-person courses have a few clear advantages:

• Faster troubleshooting - you can show your screen, error messages and data directly and get immediate, targeted help instead of going back and forth in a forum or chat.
• Deeper understanding, not just button-clicking - you can ask “why are we doing this step?” in the moment, and the trainer can explain it in the context of your workflow.
• Learning by doing (not just watching) - you actually type the commands, fix mistakes and see how to recover when things go wrong, which is exactly what you need back in the lab.
• Structured focus time - being physically in a room for 2–5 days, away from other duties, makes it much easier to really dive into the material without constant interruptions.
• Peer learning - you hear questions from others, see different datasets/problems and pick up solutions you wouldn’t have thought to ask about.
• Better long-term retention - the combination of hands-on practice, discussion and immediate feedback tends to stick much better than passively consuming content.

Online formats definitely have their place, especially to get started or to revisit specific topics – but for building confident, day-to-day bioinformatics skills, I strongly prefer in-person training.

Important update: We had to move our epigenomics course from Munich to Leipzig in May!