Explora
The Digital Research Alliance of Canada and its distributed workforce provide researchers with the training they need to effectively use Canada’s digital research infrastructure (DRI). Through a national network of institutions, organizations, and expert groups, the Alliance supports a broad range of training opportunities, including workshops, webinars, and bootcamps. These events cover essential topics such as advanced research computing (ARC), research data management (RDM), and research software (RS).
By aggregating and promoting training offered by this distributed network across Canada, the Alliance ensures that researchers—regardless of discipline or career stage—can access the knowledge and skills necessary to conduct cutting-edge research. This collaborative effort, made possible by the contributions of a diverse community of trainers, strengthens national research capacity and fosters a more connected and skilled research ecosystem.
The software driving Explora is called TeSS. TeSS was originally developed as part of ELIXIR, Europe's distributed infrastructure for life-science data. One of the goals of ELIXIR is to train research scientists to better use available computational infrastructures to address critical research questions. This requires access both to face-to-face training opportunities and to disparate training materials and resources, currently dispersed across Europe.
Events
Events in Explora are defined as face-to-face or online training opportunities that have set start and end times. These primarily take the form of workshops, courses, webinars, etc.; but Explora also collects information about conferences, meetings and hackathons, as these may also provide opportunities for learning.
Explora collects event information from 9 content providers, supplementing the data with geolocation information found using Nominatim.
Discover Events
Subscribe
Explora also provides a subscription feature to help users to stay informed about courses, workshops and conferences of interest to them. The service may be customised by selecting the relevant filters, and initiated via the subscribe button. Users may choose to receive email notifications about upcoming events, or have them automatically added to their preferred calendar application.
Any event search can be subscribed to. Simply go to the events search page and after chosing search terms and/or the filters you would like, click on the "Subscribe" button to get email alerts, or to track events in your calendar application.
The subscriptions manager page may be used to change the frequency of, or to remove, subscriptions.