Subject: bioinformatics on the Internet

From: Arne Elofsson <[email-masked]>
Date: 27 Nov 1996 15:50:11 +0100

Dear .....

Recently I taught a course in "bioinformatics on the Internet", and I
thought that my experiences could be important to others too.

All information about the course including assignments etc can be
found at http://www.biokemi.su.se/~arne/kurser/kurs_96/ 

The course was given to about 20 students with very different
backgrounds. This was of course a problem. The computer scientists and
the physicists was much easier to teach than the biochemists
and molecular biologists. The main problems for the bio-students were
to get programs such as rasmol to work on their Mac's without crashing
too often etc. (Is this possible ?)

Further I was the only teacher, except for about 9 guest lecturers,
this made it impossible to organize computer labs etc. Therefore all
assignments was supposed to be done by the students them self, without
any supervision. This proved to work fine for the computer/physics
students while it took a lot of time for the bio-student to get
everything running.

Please feel free to read the http pages and if anyone has any input I
would really appreciate that.

OK, so what did I learn.

General
-------
1) Computer demonstrations/labs should be given in first week
   I think this is necessary and actually will save time, as the
students then at least know how to use netscape and rasmol.
   
2) Use more interactive lectures (do the assignments)
   It is more fun, but take more time to prepare, and I would have to
use a MAC. Well I could probably run Linux on a PC so that is OK.

5) Local servers for something to speed up things.
  Some servers are very slow, therefore it could be a good idea to set
up some servers (like blast) locally.

Problems 
--------
1) UCLA threader server
   The organizer refused to give my students access to their threading
page. 

2) Slow responds from some servers sometimes
  For instance PHD sometime took several days to answer.

3) My local alignment page needs to be improved

4) Very low interaction on the net between students
  This is to bad, I do not know hoe to improve that. Mailing lists is
the only alternative as no bio-students read news or surf
regularly. Maybe I should set up some assignments where it is
necessary to collaborate with each other. but HOW ?

thanxs

arne

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
      From: Arne Elofsson         Email: [email-masked]
      Tel:+46(0)8-161553   WWW:  http://www.biokemi.su.se/~arne/