Abstract
Bioinformatics is a highly interdisciplinary subject, with substantial and growing influence in health, environmental science and society, and is utilised by scientists from many diverse academic backgrounds. Education in bioinformatics therefore necessitates effective development of skills in interdisciplinary collaboration, communication, ethics, and critical analysis of research, in addition to practical and technical skills. Insights from bioinformatics training can additionally inform developing education in the tightly aligned and emerging disciplines of data science and artificial intelligence. Here, we describe the design, implementation, and review of a module in a UK MSc-level bioinformatics programme attempting to address these goals for diverse student cohorts. Reflecting the philosophy of the field and programme, the module content was designed either as “diversity-addressing”—working toward a common foundation of knowledge—or “diversity-exploiting”—where different student viewpoints and skills were harnessed to facilitate student research projects “greater than the sum of their parts.” For a universal introduction to technical concepts, we combined a mixed lecture/immediate computational practical approach, facilitated by virtual machines, creating an efficient technical learning environment praised in student feedback for building confidence among cohorts with diverse backgrounds. Interdisciplinary group research projects where diverse students worked on real research questions were supervised in tandem with interactive contact time covering transferable skills in collaboration and communication in diverse teams, research presentation, and ethics. Multi-faceted feedback and assessment provided a constructive alignment with real peer-reviewed bioinformatics research. We believe that the inclusion of these transferable, interdisciplinary, and critical concepts in a bioinformatics course can help produce rounded, experienced graduates, ready for the real world and with many future options in science and society. In addition, we hope to provide some ideas and resources to facilitate such inclusion.
Highlights
Bioinformatics is “one of the fastest-growing interdisciplinary sciences of [...] the early 21st century” (Ai et al, 2012)
We considered the delivery of a genuine bioinformatic research project by an interdisciplinary group of students as the ideal “desired result” that would provide evidence of these targets (Wiggins et al, 2005; Magana et al, 2014)
We propose the above topics – general bioethics; the role of research in society; the risk of biological misclassifications; the global sampling and benefits of bioinformatic research; and the use of personal data, not as a fixed set of recommended discussion points but as an illustrative sub-curriculum to get students thinking, discussing, and critiquing some relevant and important issues in the developing field
Summary
Bioinformatics is “one of the fastest-growing interdisciplinary sciences of [...] the early 21st century” (Ai et al, 2012). Following existing approaches to explore and develop bioinformatics skills with projects (St Clair and Visick, 2010), the idea here was to expose students to open-ended research questions that were not pre-choreographed, with the associated requirements of project development, management, critical analysis, and overcoming unforeseen hurdles Projects run in this module included: learning pathways of disease progression for precision medicine; predicting responses to endurance-exercise training; control and function of beta cells; constructing an “atlas of the phosphatasome;” using ecological and evolutionary dynamics to forecast responses to global change; detour of proteins in cancer; “metabolism across space and time” and its interpretation; horizontal gene transfer in bacteria; and “moving toward predictive evolution.”. We are exploring suggestions from colleagues and our external examiner about making the structure more robust to situations like student dropouts or “defectors” in group work
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