Louisiana Biomedical Research Network Summer Bioinformatics Program
In June 2018, Pine Biotech started a pilot with the Louisiana Biomedical Research Network to establish a summer training bioinformatics program for all undergraduate academic institutions in Louisiana. The program’s goal is to provide user-friendly access to bioinformatics tools and provide hands-on training for RNA-seq analysis. At the end of the program, participants will be able to prepare independent projects using curated public domain datasets.
The LBRN Summer Bioinformatics Program is focused on addressing the gap in data analysis skills among biology faculty and students while also addressing the challenge for computer science oriented community in understanding the complexity of biomedical data.
The summer bioinformatics program is structured around a community of faculty and students participating in online education and learning by working on analysis pipelines. Online modules are supplemented by workshop sessions with guest lectures and working groups. This type of an approach follows proven methodologies such as project-based education approach and CURE, course-based undergraduate research experience (https://serc.carleton.edu/curenet/index.html). The goal is to create a community that works on problems of interest, learning to apply tools and discuss analysis results as a summer research activity.
Here is a video of our kick-off session:
The program follows a 3-month schedule with majority of the requirements available on a self-paced timeline. The online materials are all available on edu.t-bio.info website, including 4 courses:
The courses provide a broad overview of dealing with transcriptomic next generation sequencing data. We start from a discussion of how to process raw reads to generating a table of expression and then working with this table to detect patterns and compare samples using machine learning tools.
For the practical part of learning, we are relying on the T-BioInfo platform developed at the Tauber Bioinformatics Research Center at University of Haifa. The platform allows us to run complex analyses on data without spending too much time on developing coding techniques and installing open-source software. Saving this time for work on a biological datasets and discussing interpretation of analysis is the most important part. In fact, from previous sessions we learned that the majority of people learn only while working on a project, ignoring a lot of the information presented during a structured course.
This is a critical discovery for us. Project-based learning is a powerful approach, but in many cases it’s hard to scale from a single participant to many. One challenge is in tracking student progress. That is another area where the T-BioInfo Bioinformatics platform makes a huge difference. Throughout the course, we are able to see student progress tracking course progress and pipelines that are being run:
By tracking progress, we can identify who is more active on both practical and theoretical parts of the program. As we move forward, those that have plenty of experience can share from their challenges and achieved results with the rest of the group, providing an opportunity for peer-to-peer learning and support.
Finally, after everyone reaches a good level with the online courses, we are already preparing for our hands-on workshop:
https://edu.t-bio.info/lbrn-workshop-1/
An important asset in our program are the Ambassadors that joined us in June 2018. You can read more about the Ambassador program on this link: https://edu.t-bio.info/ambassador-program/
Originally published at edu.t-bio.info on June 15, 2018.
