Necessity is the Mother of Invention: A Remote MolecularBioinformatics Practical Course in the COVID-19 Era

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought manychallenges to human beings, related to not only health and wayof life but also teaching because of the interruption of the standardtraining at universities imposed by lockdowns. Concerning thelatter, the academic community had to reinvent itself, in manyways, to carry on with prepandemic education. This article focuseson the use of modern technology and software to create a virtual,highly interactive classroom where a remote but still hands-oncourse on molecular bioinformatics can be taught, motivating theuniversity students and helping them learn the course contentswithout significant compromises imposed by successive lockdowns.We implemented such a virtual hands-on molecular bioinformaticscourse in the second semester of the 2020/2021 academic year. Furthermore, we compared the learning outcomes with those for theearlier editions of the same course in the pre-COVID-19 era, in which the more traditional teaching method was used where allteaching was delivered with physically present lecturers. The virtual classroom proposed here allowed the students to develop skillsclose to, although slightly below, those obtained with physically present learning.

Automated summary

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed challenges to teaching, and this article proposes the use of modern technology to create a virtual classroom for hands-on molecular bioinformatics courses, allowing students to learn effectively despite the lockdowns. The outcomes of this virtual classroom are comparable to the traditional teaching method.