I have been fortunate enough to be involved in several widely successful scaled online education projects in computational biology, biological modeling, and programming. Together, these platforms have reached over a million learners.

Rosalind

In 2012, I co-founded Rosalind (with Nikolay Vyahhi), a free platform named in honor of Rosalind Franklin for learning bioinformatics through problem solving. Rosalind has reached over a million users and helped educate a generation of computational biologists around the world.

Bioinformatics Algorithms

In 2013, I co-instructed (with Pavel Pevzner) the first MOOC (massive open online course) in bioinformatics, which has since grown into the Bioinformatics Specialization on Coursera. Hundreds of thousands of learners from around the world have signed up for these courses, and thousands have completed them.

The official course companion to the Bioinformatics Specialization is Bioinformatics Algorithms: An Active Learning Approach, which has quickly become a bestseller in bioinformatics, having been adopted by 220 universities in 47 countries.

We also developed a shorter introductory course titled Biology Meets Programming: Bioinformatics for Beginners. This course is aimed at learners who are interested in learning how to program in Python while also seeing how programming can be used to solve problems in DNA analysis. It is a great way to start exploring bioinformatics and programming.

Biological Modeling

I worked with a collection of undergraduate and master’s students to develop Biological Modeling, a free online course on modeling molecular biological systems in organisms like SARS-CoV-2 and E. coli. The course’s print companion, Biological Modeling: A Short Tour, was funded with over $20,000 worth of donations at Kickstarter and Indiegogo.

Programming for Lovers

I recently launched Programming for Lovers, a free programming course at the intersection of fun, science, and rigor. I am still actively developing this course and look forward to watching it grow in the future.

SARS-CoV-2 Software Assignments

As part of my Great Ideas in Computational Biology course, I’ve worked with a few students to develop a series of assignments using open software to analyze publicly available SARS-CoV-2 datasets. I have made these assignments available to the community for all interested in using them.