This page provides guidance for contributors, instructors, and maintainers involved in developing and sustaining Bioconductor training materials. It consolidates expectations, best practices, and processes across all Bioconductor training modules. Our goal is to ensure that lessons remain high‑quality, accessible, consistent, and easy for the community to maintain.
BiocManager::install() for all packages.Maintenance team Each Bioconductor lesson has at least one maintainer, and more generally a team of instructors that built and adviser on the maintenance of the lesson collaboratively. The maintainer is the person that takes responsibility for merging the PRs and fixing build issues if/when they happen. The Carpentries Curriculum Advisory Committee Consultation Rubric provides a template as to how to address changes to the lessons.
Contributing and handling minor changes For minor changes such as typos or simple rephrasing can be submitted directly through a Github pull request. The lesson maintainer can assess the PR, ask for clarifications or amendments and eventually merge the pull request.
Contributing and handling big changes For more substantial changes, we advise to first open an issue to discuss these changes with the maintainer, the team that created the lesson, and other instructors that have experience teaching the episode. A pull request for such a more substantial change (and here, we deliberately don’t define them explicitly and leave it to the lesson maintainer to assess the importance), would be discussed in (1) the Github pull request and/or (2) on the bioconductor-teaching google group and/or, if necessary (3) during a Bioconductor teaching monthly meeting. For the latter, it would be recommended that at least 2 to 3 people that were part in the design of the lesson and/or that have teaching experience would be present in addition to the lesson maintainer. The PR submitter is also welcome to join the discussion.