Free Web-based Platform Research Articles

Bioinformatic Teaching Resources – For Educators, by Educators – Using KBase, a Free, User-Friendly, Open Source Platform

Over the past year, biology educators and staff at the U.S. Department of Energy Systems Biology Knowledgebase (KBase) initiated a collaborative effort to develop a curriculum for bioinformatics education. KBase is a free web-based platform where anyone can conduct sophisticated and reproducible bioinformatic analyses via a graphical user interface. Here, we demonstrate the utility of KBase as a platform for bioinformatics education, and present a set of modular, adaptable, and customizable instructional units for teaching concepts in Genomics, Metagenomics, Pangenomics, and Phylogenetics. Each module contains teaching resources, publicly available data, analysis tools, and Markdown capability, enabling instructors to modify the lesson as appropriate for their specific course. We present initial student survey data on the effectiveness of using KBase for teaching bioinformatic concepts, provide an example case study, and detail the utility of the platform from an instructor’s perspective. Even as in-person teaching returns, KBase will continue to work with instructors, supporting the development of new active learning curriculum modules. For anyone utilizing the platform, the growing KBase Educators Organization provides an educators network, accompanied by community-sourced guidelines, instructional templates, and peer support, for instructors wishing to use KBase within a classroom at any educational level–whether virtual or in-person.

LIONESS Lab: a free web-based platform for conducting interactive experiments online

LIONESS Lab is a free web-based platform for interactive online experiments. An intuitive, user-friendly graphical interface enables researchers to develop, test, and share experiments online, with minimal need for programming experience. LIONESS Lab provides solutions for the methodological challenges of interactive online experimentation, including ways to reduce waiting time, form groups on-the-fly, and deal with participant dropout. We highlight key features of the software, and show how it meets the challenges of conducting interactive experiments online.

Google Docs: Step by Step Sentence Construction for Primary School Marginal Passing Rate Pupils

Writing is a form of communication to enable students to express their feelings and ideas in a constructed text. However, pupils are showing least interest to express their ideas in writing due to the non-contextualized materials and the traditional approach used in classroom. In order to arouse pupils’ interest in writing, technology will be a tool for the teachers to achieve their goals. Google Docs, a free web-based platform, allows collaborative writing and cooperative learning to take place. This collaborative platform would gain pupils’ understanding about the writing task and increase their interest in accomplishing the writing tasks. It also allows teachers to evaluate pupils’ feedbacks and correspondingly for pupils to review on their peers’ work. This study aims to explore the effectiveness of using Google Docs as a tool to carry out the 4-step sentence construction activities, which leads pupils progressively to expand their note from a word to a complete sentence based on the given title. It is specifically designed for the primary school pupils with marginal passing rate, which are categorised as the pupils with marginal passing grades. An action research based on Kemmis and Mc Tagart model was carried out with 30 GALUS pupils by gathering documents, survey questionnaires, interviews and assessments. The findings showed increase of 16 percent in the sentence construction skills among the pupils via the 4-step sentence construction activities conducted in Google Docs. The results also show that this approach clearly promotes the participation of pupils in writing activities. In conclusion, the 4-step sentence construction activities are effective in teaching sentence construction.

LIONESS Lab – A Free Web-Based Platform for Conducting Interactive Experiments Online

LIONESS Lab is a free web-based platform for interactive online experiments. It provides solutions for the methodological challenges of interactive online experimentation, including ways to reduce waiting time, form groups on-the-fly and deal with participant dropout. The intuitive, user-friendly graphical interface enables researchers to develop, test and share experiments online, with minimal need for programming experience. We highlight key features of the software and show how it meets the challenges of conducting interactive experiments online.