ELIXIR Train the Trainer event on 18-19th of September in Tartu

Lecture on "Interdisciplinary perspectives on bioinformatics training: lessons from cognitive science, biostatistics, and education”.

18th of September, 12:00, Liivi 2-224

Bioinformatics is a highly interdisciplinary domain. Currently there are many threads of discussions and effort globally aimed at ensuring that formal (undergraduate/graduate) training represents the biological and the computational aspects sufficiently to equip new practitioners from both of these domains to engage and participate in the field. Training opportunities are struggling less with this explicit interdisciplinarity because individuals who recognise that they require some targeted, “point of need” training are already prepared in some sense to integrate the biological and the computational aspects of the training. This talk will focus on how formal (degree programs) and informal (training/training programs) can be strengthened by integrating the disciplinary work from the fields of education and cognitive science, with examples of successes and failures of this integration from the domain of biostatistics.

Workshop on “Learning goals, teaching goals, and assessment”.

19th of September, 10:00 - 14:00, Liivi 2-225

Bioinformatics training has important similarities and even more important differences as compared to bioinformatics “education” within a degree program. Typically, the training opportunities are highly focused and short, while the more formal educational opportunities are longer, embedded within other instruction, and may require assessment like tests, papers, or independent research projects. However, there are key features of adult learning and educational psychology that can help teaching in both the training and educational contexts. This workshop will define and explore teaching goals, which often feature what the instructor feels must be “covered” or conveyed; and contrast these with learning goals, which represent what the instructor intends that students will be able to do after the instruction. In the four hours we have together, we will have some lecture based foundational material with exercises around existing training course descriptions, followed by small group work to create or revise learning goals that can engage attendees in one course or sequences of courses. We will also explore how to efficiently plan a course and utilise the limited time to achieve learning goals and promote ongoing engagement with the tools and reasoning that are essential to modern biological sciences and bioinformatics. Participants are encouraged to bring course descriptions and/or learning goals to share, discuss, and work on.

The main target audience for the lecture and workshop are people who develop courses under ELIXIR-EE, but highly recommended also for people who do bioinformatics/biostatistics training in the university.

Lector Rochelle E Tractenberg, PhD, MPH, PhD, PStat®, FASA

Rochelle has strong background in biostatistics and bioinformatics and her areas of interest include statistical methodology and statistical literacy for effective stewardship of the discipline in PhD students/holders; higher education curriculum building and evaluation; neuropsychological assessment; the development and benchmarking of outcomes; experimental design; and longitudinal (latent variable) analytic methods. For more information see her page at https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/crom/rochelle-e-tractenberg/