This guided tour will give you an overview of the VSNS BioComputing Courses, two Internet courses initiated and delivered to the world from the University of Bielefeld, Germany, in cooperation with volunteers worldwide. Responsibility is currently shifting to Rebecca Parsons from the University of Central Florida who is organizing the 1998 course planned for the fall, with the advice and help from Paul Brennan from the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, London.

For your convenience, all links to the original material that we developed will be displayed in one seperate Netscape resource window. Please keep the resource window open - due to a bug \ feature in Netscape, once iconized the window may never re-open, even if it loads the requested webpages successfully. You can start this window now by loading our homepage, and maybe you can imagine already that it would take months to read it all.

In September 1994, the Virtual School of Natural Sciences BioComputing Division was founded by a group of researchers from Germany, UK, Ireland, Israel, Canada, USA and Australia, with the mission to provide a ``prototype Internet course in Biocomputing, with a strong emphasis on Sequence Analysis.'' Then, a team of 11 instructors and authors delivered the course in 1995 and 1996, to 71 students worldwide:

A few of our students. They represent Ireland, Germany, Israel, Italy, Sweden, Greece, Belgium, the UK, Malaysia, and the USA.

Our faculty members are located in Germany, France, Israel, USA, Canada and Mexico.

After both courses, three quarters of our students filled out our evaluation form and confirmed that they got both a better understanding for the theoretical foundations of the analysis of biosequences, and that they will continue to use the Internet resources presented. For more details, please see the section on difficulties and results from the 1997 report. In 1995, Certificates of Attendence were given out to 25 (out of 34) participants, and in 1996 to 31 (out of 37), based on the recommandations of the instructors. Our efforts won the German Special Award on Distance Training in the 1997 ``Multimedia Transfer'' competition conducted during the ``Learntec'' fair.

The exciting advantages of working via the Internet include the online tutoring of students in small groups of 4-7, using the electronic conferencing system BioMOO. Our study groups met once a week to discuss text and homework with their instructor, an experienced researcher in the area. They used Hypertext material, a novel tool for the interactive exploration of an important sequence analysis algorithm on the conferencing system itself (described in the 1997 report, in the section on Internet Media), a JAVA-based sequence alignment visualizer, and a CGI-Form that allows the exploration of different parameter settings of the basic sequence alignment algorithm. All tools were developed specifically for the course. Other highlights of the course were Guest Lectures, a glossary, self-assessment forms [Broken/Under Review in January 1999], and lots of team spirit. In fact, the courses triggered many follow-up activities by students and instructors alike:

The 1996 participants wrote the Website Biocomputing for Everyone which was a finalist in the first Pirelli INTERNETional Award.

Biocomputing For Schools carried the idea further, and was a finalist of the ``Second European Multimedia Competition For Schools''.

The Internet Biologists platform was started by Chin Hoon Lau, a 1996 participant, and offers online courses and advice in Internet usage for biologists.

The Bioperl project is committed to write free software for handling biosequences.

The Study Project Agency runs joint projects between bioinformatics students and researchers from Germany and the UK.

The course ``Sequence Analysis with Distributed Resources'' is designed for self-study and local practical training.

We believe that distance training via the Internet is an excellent yet inexpensive way of learning, provided that people are put first -- our main aim is not an impersonal automated form of learning, but the personal interactive discussion-based type of learning, mediated and enhanced by the computer.

Any monetary awards that we receive from the Paul Allen Virtual Education Foundation will be used exclusively for the 1998 course for which Rebecca Parsons is the coordinator. We would suggest that any such funds are given directly to her.