Summary of Week 1

Summary of this week’s learning

This week you were introduced to some basic principles of how adults learn – this is important for you to consider in your own design of training. You shared your experiences with other learners and heard from experts involved in bioinformatics training programmes.

We hope that you have already thought of an idea for the course or module you will be designing throughout this week. In the next week, there will be a lot of ideas to read and hear about, that you can use and apply in your own course design.

When you joined this course, you were aware of the Learning Outcomes:

• Discuss adult learning theory and illustrate how an active, learner centred approach guides course design
• Apply good practice learning and teaching skills of communication, group work and facilitation
• Identify opportunities for creating learning experiences from subject content
• Plan and design learning for a selected audience encompassing aspects of generation and analysis of genomic data, suitable for own context and environment
• Evaluate and reflect on learning design and identify areas for improvement using peer review feedback

Reflect on the progress you have made towards being able to demonstrate these LOs. You may have discussed adult learning theory earlier in the week in the Active Learning activity, and you have seen some examples of how an active, learner centred approach guides course design; would you be able to illustrate this for yourself now?

You have learned about skills of communication, group work and facilitation in the Teaching Practice and Course Facilitation activity and in other parts of the week. What do you need to be able to apply these into your practice?

You have hopefully started to think about aspects the remaining three Learning Outcomes as you work towards your design project in Week 3, and you will learn more about these next week, in Week 2.

As always, please use the comment area to ask questions and discuss your learning.