Big data is big fun

Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2011) stresses the importance of fostering an understanding of the relationship between science and society. We describe a library-based activity that enables students in an undergraduate microbiology class to explore this relationship over the course of centuries, with the library functioning as a laboratory. Students are guided by a worksheet as they explore historical materials such as books, newspapers, letters, government publications, articles, scientific treatises, and artifacts. Working in pairs, students answer questions about the content and reflect on how the ideas in the documents relate to the scientific understanding at the time. Exploring authentic materials in a library setting provides a powerful learning experience. This activity was also successful using digitized documents during the COVID-19 pandemic, when remote teaching was required. Student responses to a post-activity questionnaire indicated that the activity sparked a keen interest in the history of science as well as introspection about the relationship between science and society. This approach can be generalized for different biology courses and education levels.

Primary image:  Students examining historical books and microscopes. Students working in pairs to complete worksheet questions during one of two visits to the University of Colorado Boulder’s Special Collections.

National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science resource on the 2014 Ebola epidemic. This resource is also included in the NIBLSE Learning Resource Collection

Case study developed for an introductory genetics class published in the National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science

Bioinformatics case study focusing on phylogenetic tree interpretation, published in the National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science

An online module introducing students and biologists to R, published in American Phytopathological Society

Introduction to the Ames Test, published as GSA Learning Resource

This Critical Guide briefly presents the need for biological databases and for a standard format for storing and organising biological data.

This Critical Guide in the Introduction to Bioinformatics series provides a brief outline of the Protein Data Bank – the PDB – the world’s primary repository of biological macromolecular structures.

This Critical Guide in the Introduction to Bioinformatics series provides an overview of the BLAST similarity search tool, briefly examining the underlying algorithm and its rise to popularity.

This Critical Guide in the Introduction to Bioinformatics series briefly introduces the Unix Operating System, and provides a subset of some of the most helpful and commonly used commands....

This Practical Guide in the Bringing Bioinformatics into the Classroom series introduces the idea of computers as tools to help understand aspects of biology.

This Practical Guide outlines a number of basic bioinformatics approaches that can be used to understand the molecular basis of genetic diseases.

This Practical Guide in the Bringing Bioinformatics into the Classroom series introduces simple bioinformatics approaches for database searching and sequence analysis.

Presentation given at GLBIO 2019 on NIBLSE Incubators

This problem space brings together diverse resources with the goal of helping biology teachers and learners engage in research investigations.

In this lesson, we describe an easily adaptable lab module that can be used in existing undergraduate molecular biology lab courses to conduct authentic scientific research, published in CourseSource

This lesson is a five-week series of laboratory activities designed to help students transition from applying lower order thinking skills to the central dogma to applying higher-order thinking skills.

This lesson plan was created to teach RNAseq analysis as a part of GCAT-SEEK network. It is provided here, both in finished form and with the modifiable source code, to allow flexible adaptation to various classroom settings, published in...

Module using analogies to introduce students to genomics

Lesson on what it means for biological processes to be Poissonian, published in CourseSource

In this four- part guided activity, students will learn about the structure and function of human autosomal and sex chromosomes, view and interpret gene maps, and gain familiarity with basic bioinformatics resources and data through use of the...

A lesson in which students will understand the basic structure of an HMM, the types of data used in ab initio gene prediction, and its consequent limitations.

Lab introducing students to evolutionary genetics using bioinformatics and biocuration, published as GSA Learning Resource

To increase students' interest in their own genomes, this computer-based laboratory lesson is designed to be coupled with the opportunity for the students to be genotyped by the consumer sequencing company, 23andMe. Published in CourseSource

This module is a computer-based introduction to bioinformatics resources.  This easy-to-adopt module weaves together several important bioinformatic tools so students can grasp how each is used in answering research questions. Published in CBE-LSE

Modules showing how the NCBI database classifies and organizes information on DNA sequences, evolutionary relationships, and scientific publications. And a module working to identify a nucleotide sequence from an insect endosymbiont by using BLAST

Introductory genetics laboratory published as GSA Learning Resource

Talk on the NIBLSE Resource Collection and Incubators given at several professional development confernces

Poster on Incubators, a NIBLSE and QUBES collaboration presented at Great Lakes Bioinformatics Conference - Chicago, IL