Abstract
Interdisciplinary curriculum development is challenging in the sense that materials from more than one discipline have to be integrated in a seamless manner. A faculty member has to develop expertise in multiple disciplines in order to teach an interdisciplinary course, or the course has to be team-taught. Both approaches are difficult to implement. There are administrative issues, such as proportional posting of expenditures across departmental budgets for the courses taught collaboratively, or courses with students from multiple departments. This paper describes the development and teaching of a sequence of bioinformatics related interdisciplinary courses for incorporation into undergraduate biology curricula. Three courses were developed with collaboration between the Departments of Biology and Computer Science at Tuskegee University. Each course contains contents from different subjects, traditionally considered to be virtually independent of each other. The courses have contents from biology, computer science, statistics, mathematics and biochemistry. The first two courses, Introduction to Bioscience Computing and Biological Algorithms & Data Structures, cover the computing and computer science fundamentals necessary for the informed use of bioinformatics tools. The third is an introductory course in bioinformatics. The focus was on teaching the effective use of bioinformatics tools, as compared to development of bioinformatics tools which is more relevant at the graduate level. Administrative issues encountered are also discussed. This work was supported by a NSF HBCU-UP grant.
Highlights
The past several centuries have been characterized by differentiation of knowledge into different fields and further subfields
This paper describes the development and teaching of a sequence of bioinformatics related interdisciplinary courses for incorporation into undergraduate biology curricula
Graduate level bioinformatics curriculum has the capacity for detailed coverage of computer science, mathematics, statistics and biology topics, and the early bioinformatics curricula were offered at the graduate level
Summary
The past several centuries have been characterized by differentiation of knowledge into different fields and further subfields. This paper discusses interdisciplinary curricula development in the context of modern biology. Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field that focuses on the discovery of biological knowledge using computational techniques. The paper first discusses the overall considerations for the contents of the sequence. This is followed by presentation of rationale for the selection of computing environment and contents for each course. This paper focuses on the development of undergraduate courses that equip undergraduates with the tools they would use in the industry, while laying a solid foundation for in-depth graduate studies. The paper focuses on the successful integration of these courses into existing undergraduate curricula that are constrained by credit hour requirements
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