Beta readers?

[liv]

ETA: You guys are amazing. I was really not expecting to get so many volunteers! I have more than enough people for now. I'm happy to add any additional names to the list for future opportunities. I can't add any more volunteers for this course, otherwise it would end up being all my friends which isn't great for diversity.

My awesome job involves creating free online courses about genomics. The first course I've been fully in charge of is about to go live, and it needs some final quality checks. It's quite exciting IMO: it's about using genomics to identify and avoid antibiotic resistance.

We need people who can put in a couple of hours in the next week, and just play around with the course and see if there are any obvious problems, whether that's technical issues like display problems for your particular hardware and software, or conceptual problems like confusing instructions or something that doesn't make sense. We are definitely not expecting any one individual to go through the whole course in detail, and we're not looking for copy editing or proofreading. I mean, if you have the sort of brain that can't help spotting typos, we don't mind reports of those, but we're mainly looking for something more general than that.

We want people from all backgrounds, so a mix of people who know something about microbiology and genomics, and people who have no idea. I will say that the course is fairly technical, though, so you probably don't want to volunteer if sciencey stuff is hateful or scary to you. We are especially happy to have beta readers who aren't completely fluent in English to be more representative of our target audience.

Other than doing some good for the world, what you get out of it is a £25 Amazon voucher. So in order to get paid you need to be in a position to receive and spend an Amazon voucher. We might possibly be able to acquire vouchers for other countries' versions of Amazon, or else I can informally arrange to swap to something more locally useful. But it's not employment, it's a volunteer thing with a small token of appreciation.

Feel free to ask questions in the comments, but if you actually want to sign up you need to interact with my work persona, so I'll ask you to PM me about arranging that. You're also welcome to pass the request on to anyone else who might be interested. The number of available slots is somewhat flexible, probably in the range of 3-5.

Comments

[naath]

Supposing all backgrounds includes ish colleagues a)I'm happy to give it a go, on my Linux laptop for extra 'your thing is insufficiently platform independent' points :) b)you should mail chat

[liv]

Definitely in favour of ish colleagues – in fact, that's where we're looking apart from personal social media. I'll take the risk of making myself look foolish by claiming that it should Just Work on Linux (unless you have something very exotic, I guess), because the system we've built on is supposed to be Linux friendly. But hey, if you or anyone else want to take that as a challenge so much the better.

I don't know what you mean by "mail chat", sorry?

[naath]

I meant "send an email to chat@sanger" because that is one of the ways to find victims, um, volunteers. Are you lot on chat? the EBI are. Anyway, I'll PM you so you can send me details.

[cosmolinguist]

Do you want an assistive-tech user at all? I'm happy to try it with my magnification/screenreader.

[liv]

Oh my gosh, that would be amazing! If you can spare the visual processing spoons to do something altruistic we would benefit a lot form your feedback. Theoretically everything is supposed to be "accessible" but I have a suspicion that mainly means that all the images have alt text. Can you PM me a suitable email address so I can contact you from my work account?

[cosmolinguist]

Done. :)

[sporky_rat]

I'm willing to try.

[liv]

Thank you so much for offering. I have more than enough testers for now, so I think I'm going to have to say no thank you for this time.

[kht]

Yes! I know almost nothing about microbiology or genomics, and have a typo-spotting brain. Xubuntu or Windows 10.

[liv]

I bet you would be really awesome as a tester, but I have already signed up more than my 'share', so I think I'll have to leave you off for this time. Having too many volunteers is a good problem but it's a shame to turn people away.