Leveraging H3Africa Scholarly Publications for Technology-Enhanced Personalized Bioinformatics Education

Abstract

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has catalyzed the expectations for technology-enhanced interactions with personalized educational materials. Adjusting the content of educational materials to the geographical location of a learner is a customization feature of personalized education and is used to develop the interest of a learner in the content. The educational content of interest in this report is bioinformatics, in which the knowledge spans biological science and applied mathematics disciplines. The Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) Initiative is a resource suitable for use when obtaining data and peer-reviewed scholarly articles, which are geographically relevant and focus on authentic problem solving in the human health domain. We developed a computerized platform of interactive visual representations of curated bioinformatics datasets from H3Africa projects, which also supports customization, individualization and adaptation features of personalized education. We obtained evidence for the positive effect size and acceptable usability of a visual analytics resource designed for the retrieval-based learning of facts on functional impacts of genomic sequence variants. We conclude that technology-enhanced personalized bioinformatics educational interventions have implications in (1) the meaningful learning of bioinformatics; (2) stimulating additional student interest in bioinformatics; and (2) improving the accessibility of bioinformatics education to non-bioinformaticians.

Conceptualizing bioinformatics education in STEM literacy development for pre-service biology teachers

“…1 that the big keywords are learning, bioinformatics, education, genomics, biology, curriculum, design and development, molecular genetics, proteomic, and data-driven, and these terms are part of the bioinformatics education definition. The definition made by Makolo et al (2022) that bioinformatics education broadly is teaching and learning the use of computers and information technology, along with mathematical and statistical analysis to collect, store, analyze, convert, and integrate data to solve biological problems. The development of the bioinformatics curriculum aims to bring bioinformatics to multiple audiences, including undergraduate biology majors, pre-service biology teachers, and teaching faculty.…”

Visual Analytics for Robust Investigations of Placental Aquaporin Gene Expression in Response to Maternal SARS-CoV-2 Infection

“…In this study, a robust data investigation involves the possibility of performing tasks along the dimensions of data challenges: data flow (i.e., collection, storage, access, and movement); data analytics (i.e., modeling and simulation, statistical analysis, and visual analytics); and data curation (i.e., preservation, publication, security, description, and cleaning) [20,21]. In our experience [22][23][24][25], visual analytics tools support the performance of complex cognitive activities, including understanding and knowledge generation [26]. Thus, our first research objective was to develop and implement visual analytics resources able to integrate clinical and biological features as well as datasets on placental gene expression and gene nomenclature associated with maternal SARS-CoV-2 infection during pregnancy.…”