Fernandes Pedro A, Passos Óscar, Ramos Maria J
LAQV/Departamento de Química e Bioquímica, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade do Porto, Rua Campo Alegre s/n, 4169-007 Porto, Portugal.
J Chem Educ. 2022 May 10;99(5):2147-2153. doi: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.1c01195. Epub 2022 Apr 21.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought many challenges to human beings, related to not only health and way of life but also teaching because of the interruption of the standard training at universities imposed by lockdowns. Concerning the latter, the academic community had to reinvent itself, in many ways, to carry on with prepandemic education. This article focuses on the use of modern technology and software to create a virtual, highly interactive classroom where a remote but still hands-on course on molecular bioinformatics can be taught, motivating the university students and helping them learn the course contents without significant compromises imposed by successive lockdowns. We implemented such a virtual hands-on molecular bioinformatics course in the second semester of the 2020/2021 academic year. Furthermore, we compared the learning outcomes with those for the earlier editions of the same course in the pre-COVID-19 era, in which the more traditional teaching method was used where all teaching was delivered with physically present lecturers. The virtual classroom proposed here allowed the students to develop skills close to, although slightly below, those obtained with physically present learning.
新冠疫情给人类带来了诸多挑战，不仅涉及健康和生活方式，还因封锁导致大学标准培训中断而影响了教学。关于后者，学术界不得不在许多方面进行自我重塑，以继续开展疫情前的教育。本文重点探讨利用现代技术和软件创建一个虚拟的、高度互动的课堂，在此可以教授远程但仍具实践操作的分子生物信息学课程，激励大学生并帮助他们学习课程内容，而不会因连续封锁带来重大影响。我们在2020/2021学年第二学期实施了这样一门虚拟实践分子生物信息学课程。此外，我们将学习成果与新冠疫情前同一课程早期版本的成果进行了比较，早期版本采用的是更为传统的教学方法，所有教学均由现场授课教师进行。这里提出的虚拟课堂使学生能够培养出与现场学习相近但略逊一筹的技能。
