Abstract
Bioinformatics has become an indispensable part of life science over the past 2 decades. However, bioinformatics education is not well integrated at the undergraduate level, especially in liberal arts colleges and regional universities in the United States. One significant obstacle pointed out by the Network for Integrating Bioinformatics into Life Sciences Education is the lack of faculty in the bioinformatics area. Most current life science professors did not acquire bioinformatics analysis skills during their own training. Consequently, a great number of undergraduate and graduate students do not get the chance to learn bioinformatics or computational biology skills within a structured curriculum during their education. To address this gap, we developed a module-based, week-long short course to train small college and regional university professors with essential bioinformatics skills. The bioinformatics modules were built to be adapted by the professor-trainees afterward and used in their own classes. All the course materials can be accessed at https://github.com/TheJacksonLaboratory/JAXBD2K-ShortCourse.
Highlights
One significant obstacle pointed out by the Network for Integrating Bioinformatics into Life Sciences Education is the lack of faculty in the bioinformatics area
This program, Big Genomic Data Skills Training for Professors, was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) project and operated by JAX
We have developed adaptable bioinformatics modules to be implemented appropriately into an undergraduate curriculum
Summary
We present a professional training program that we designed and administered over the last 3 years to deliver an immersive, 1-week skills development course for undergraduate college and regional university faculty from biology, mathematics, and computer science disciplines This program, Big Genomic Data Skills Training for Professors, was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) project and operated by JAX. The goal of JAX BD2K was to (1) immerse professors from small colleges, regional universities, historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), and NIH IdEA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE) institutions in the practice of big genomic data computational biology and (2) enable participants to launch bioinformatics or computational biology courses at their home institutions Toward achieving those aims, the 5-day training program included seminars, extensive hands-on data analyses, evening activities, and collaborative curriculum development forums for course planning.
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