My Teaching Philosophy
Education is the one major activity which has thus far not applied ingenuity to the solution of its problems.
Sydney Pressey, pioneer of Intelligent Tutoring Systems
I haven’t given a classroom lecture in 10 years now.
And I haven’t been fired yet… See how my student Niema Moshiri (now professor at UCSD) explains why I hate traditional classroom lectures in his TED talk: View Video
Instead of traditional classroom lectures, I have been advocating a transition from this 1000-year old education technology to Massive Adaptive Interactive Texts (MAITs), an Intelligent Tutoring Systems based on online active learning software platforms (Compeau and Pevzner, Communications of ACM, 2015). Here is how the MAIT flowchart looks like for the first 20 minutes of our first lecture in the Introduction to Genomic Data Science online course on edX.
This transition from the traditional classroom lecture to flipped classes is based on our recently published textbook “Bioinformatics Algorithms: an Active Learning Approach” that Phillip Compeau and I wrote specifically for our Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). This MOOCBook (now in its 3rd edition) has been adopted at over 200 universities from over 45 countries:
Alexander Kulikov and I recently published a MOOCBook “Learning Algorithms Through Programming and Puzzle Solving.”
Here are some of my papers about challenges of bioinformatics education:
Educating biologists in the 21st century (Pevzner, Bioinformatics 2004)
Computing has changed biology - biology education must catch up (Pevzner and Shamir, Science, 2009)
Life after MOOCs (Compeau and Pevzner, Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 2015)
