Enhanced Student Learning in Proteomics - an Interactive Tool Support for Teaching Workflows

Teaching and learning support for bioinformatics has become a popular research area. Proteomics education can be bridged with technology enhancements such that tool support for protein structures experiments. Generally, students in proteomics require different tools with unique processing methods for a given sequence, that makes the learning process challenging and time-consuming. Without an efficient teaching platform to conduct experiments, simulate algorithms and visualize outputs can cause lack of interest over time and can adversely impact on active student participation. This paper presents a novel concept by utilizing a workflow tool to support teaching and learning of bioinformatics. The tool facilitates to conduct experiments, execute various algorithms and visualize outputs to derive conclusions taught during lectures. The research outcome was evaluated using a task-sheet which examined the student's understanding of the proteomics processing such as protein search, alignment and annotation. The results demonstrated a significant gain in understanding, which was reflected through the student answers for the task sheet. The effectiveness and the need for such system were proven to be positive with 85% of educators appreciating the tool support for teaching and the tool enabled more than 80% of student involvement within the first 18 minutes of the session.