Nanocourses Probing Fast-paced Fields

Photo by Graham Ramsay Photo courtesy of Spyros Artavanis-Tsakonas New minicourses in cell biology were introduced this semester as part of an initiative created by Joan Brugge (top) and Spyros Artavanis-Tsakonas to teach people on campus about some of the fastest-changing areas in the field.

As part of the new Integrative Developmental Biology (IDB) initiative created by the HMS Department of Cell Biology, two-day-long courses in developmental biology, called nanocourses, were introduced in February. They are open to the HMS community.

The initiative was developed by members of the Cell Biology Department in response to its organizers’ belief that changes in biological and translational research are outpacing educational change. The nanocourses are the first part of IDB to be introduced.

These courses cover a specific subject in depth and provide participants with a succinct, up-to-date look at a particular field. The goal of the new format is to develop a more dynamic curriculum that is adaptable to students’ changing needs and responsive to current developments in biology. “It is a novel way of teaching biology, recognizing that teaching should be flexible enough to rapidly absorb the changes that discovery brings and also adapt to the fact that biological sciences are becoming increasingly interdisciplinary,” said IDB’s co-creator Spyros Artavanis-Tsakonas, the Kurt J. Isselbacher/Peter D. Schwartz professor of cell biology at Massachusetts General Hospital.

A shorter course format allows for the rapid development of a new curriculum that presents areas not covered in the traditional semester-long courses. The new format can also teach upper-year students, postdocs, fellows, and faculty about an area of interest in a short period of time and provide a framework that attracts faculty who do not traditionally teach at the Medical School to take part in a brief course on their area of expertise. Organizers hope that these courses will establish a new level of intellectual discourse among students, faculty, and postdocs on the Quad and throughout the Harvard Medical community.

The subject matter of the nanocourses will be organized in modules to allow students flexibility in exploring topics. Although participating faculty will be discussing their expertise, these courses will be distinct from the BBS minisymposia, since faculty will not be giving research talks on findings from their own labs, but rather will give participants a glimpse into the current state of a particular field.

The first session of each nanocourse will include a few contiguous lectures on a specific topic from one or more faculty members. The second session will be designed to help integrate course material through discussion and will be used to assess the progress of students who are taking the course for credit. This will allow these students to have productive interaction with the faculty member who organized the course and to learn more about the state of the field through discussing papers, proposing future experiments in the field, and debating controversial findings. Groups of three complementary nanocourses will be classified as intellectual units to provide students with a framework for a course of study. Students will have the option of taking three nanocourses from the same intellectual unit or choosing three courses from different units, allowing students to tailor their education to their own interests.

“We are very excited about this new educational format because it serves so many different members of the HMS community, including faculty and fellows, and provides useful overviews of new and emerging areas of research or technologies,” said Joan Brugge, head of the HMS Department of Cell Biology and one of the initiative’s creators.

Eight nanocourses are being offered in the spring (see course descriptions on the Integrative Developmental Biology website), and faculty leaders and staff will be working during the upcoming semesters to help cultivate the nanocourse format. The IDB organizing committee met with students and faculty in an open town hall meeting format in October to introduce the initiative and receive feedback from the community on how to approach the progress of these courses. The development of the nanocourses will be an ongoing process and will require input from both faculty and students on which areas of the curriculum can be expanded. For more information on the IDB initiative or the nanocourses, visit the website or contact the new IDB teaching fellow, Meg Bentley.

—Rebecca Tinkelman and Jennifer Stanford

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