Developing a Bioinformatics Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience for Online Students

This project aims to serve the national interest by developing and evaluating opportunities for students in online degree programs to participate in authentic STEM research experiences. Participation in research has been shown to increase student retention and performance STEM. This project intends to expand research experiences to online students.

Specifically, the project team aims to develop a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) for students in online biology degree programs, which typically do not include a research component. The CURE will use bioinformatics as the research methodology. Bioinformatics is the collection and analysis of biological data.

Thus, a bioinformatics CURE will enable students to conduct authentic research with only a computer and an internet connection. The project intends to increase opportunities for inquiry-based computational research that can be easily adopted by other institutions, potentially increasing access to research for thousands of students. Students in online degree programs are more likely to be women, first generation students, low income, rural, working full-time, and/or primary caregivers.

Thus, an online CURE experience has the potential to diversify who participates in science. As a result, this online CURE has the potential to broaden the diversity of individuals who engage in computational life sciences research.

This project intends to: 1) develop an online computational life sciences CURE focused on training in computer programming, genetics, statistics, and reproducibility; and 2) assess the impact of the online computational life sciences CURE on students’ scientific research goals and learning goals. Students will learn basic computational command line skills, read primary literature, develop hypotheses, use software to produce results, and interpret those results.

The research aim of this project is rooted in biological questions relevant to datasets that change annually. Students will be asked to assess how changing bioinformatics parameters affect the biological interpretations of their results. This project is intended to yield scientific research findings regarding the effects of different parameters on biological inference in next generation sequencing data.

Students will be engaging in scientific research and it is hoped that the research that they conduct will be compiled into a publishable manuscript. Further, through the assessment of this online CURE, the project team anticipates defining the impacts of an online CURE on undergraduate students, thus contributing to understanding the impact of CUREs in undergraduate biology education.

The project team will assess students’ bioinformatics skills, as well as how the CURE affects their self-identity as a scientist and their likelihood to pursue a career in science. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.