S Star's Trial Bioinformatics Online Course: On IVLE

The S Star Trial Bioinformatics Online course was recently organized by the S* Life Science Informatics Alliance last October to November 2001. 150 participants from Asia, Australasia, Europe, North America and South Africa were registered on the IVLE for the course.

The course is free to all online registrants. During the course, participants accessed streaming video course lectures from the S-Star website and the lecture notes, discussion forums and MCQ assessments hosted on the IVLE. The discussion forums and assessments were made accessible to the S Star course participants following a lecture schedule. For each lecture, the participants participated in the associated discussion forum and assessments during the two weeks duration specifically assigned to each lecture.

During the period of discussion forum for a specific lecture, the lecturer occasionally gave guidance and answers to exceptional issues raised by students. By and large the discussion allowed the participants to learn from each other and to clarify with each other and participate in group and self-learning. The participants' active participation was of utmost importance to the effectiveness of the discussion and to their own comprehension and learning.

At the completion of the course, feedback from the participants indicated that the course was informative, interactive (because of discussion forums) and above all excellent for distance learning. Overall, the participants felt that the course contents were useful and well presented with good technical support. They also indicated the strength of the course lie in the online flexible accessibility (AudioVideo streaming) to the course contents, covering a broad range of topics by world renowned experts from different institutions, made available to a broad audience, and provided good interactivity via the discussion forums.

For more information, visit http://www.bic.nus.edu.sg and http://s-star.org.