JUL 28, 2021

Making Lemonade, Giving Students a Choice, and NOT Reinventing the Wheel in Introduction to Bioinformatics Course

Student choice, POGIL, and flipped classroom approaches are successfully used to engage students in Introduction to Bioinformatics (BIMM 143) during the Winter and Spring quarters of 2021 at UC San Diego. The majority of the students enrolled in the course are fourth year biology students with a range of majors, from Human Biology to Molecular Biology. The majority of students have no coding experience prior to this course. Students are paired at the beginning of the quarter into groups & given access to DataCamp, an online education platform for learning how to code in python and R (students choose which coding track they would prefer at the beginning of the quarter as well). These groups were affectionately renamed PODs (for People of DataCamp) and each PODmate was given a role similar to the structure of POGIL activities (process oriented guided inquiry based learning). Students choose whether they want to participate in weekly trivia based on that week’s DataCamp activities or do a challenge problem that is loosely based on DataCamp activities. Students also participate in Code-Together Meetings and share notes from DataCamp for participation credit in the course. DataCamp and PODs formed the foundation for supporting students in their learning so that they could accomplish two major projects throughout the quarter. For one of the projects in the course, students can choose to either formulate their own unique scientific question and hypothesis that can be answered through a bioinformatics method OR they can opt to participate in Schrodinger’s Molecular Modeling course. Students that choose the molecular modeling course then present on the course findings and learnings to the rest of the students as an extra credit opportunity for BIMM 143 students not enrolled in the Molecular Modeling course. Student’s response to this course format is very positive. The biggest take-home has been that students really appreciate having choice, whereas having PODmates and using a flipped classroom has gotten mixed reviews.