A New Way of Teaching and Learning
has been created in the VSNS BioComputing Course - international, interdisciplinary, interactive and with multimedia assistance. The course was developed in 1995 and took place for the second time in 1996. It is offered via the Internet within the Virtual School of Natural Sciences (VSNS) and is addressed to scientists working in the fields of molecular biology, biomedicine and computer science. In this area there is a special need for interdisciplinary education. So far, 71 students and scientists from all over the world have attended this course from their work places.

A New Step in Netbased Telecooperation
has been developed with the VSNS BioComputing Course: so far over 30 partners from over 15 countries have contributed to the course with technology, content, instruction, and analysis. Their common impetus is the need of special training in the young field of BioComputing as well as the fascination of bringing together experts from all over the world for this new way of education.

The course's purpose, consultants and partners are presented in section A.

A Great Impact with Minimal Costs
is achieved by using established technologies - HTML, Java, CGI-scripts and a textbased virtual conference system require merely a WWW-browser and telnet. Therefore, a PC with Internet access is all that is needed to participate in the course.

For a New Edition of the Course
the whole course material, including session transcripts, Hypertext Coursebook, guest lectures, exercises and solutions etc. is available on the WWW, as well as some interactive animation and visualization applications of important algorithms and data structures, and a glossary.


All the internet media we used and our didactic concept are presented in section B.

The Results of the Course
have been compiled in detail: the evaluation of the student questionnaires of the two previous courses, the participants' comments, minutes of the planning decisions, as well as scientific publications are available over the WWW; they may give valuable hints - especially for the organizers of similar courses.

The Transferability of the Course is Guaranteed:
The didactic, organizational and technical course implementation is a pioneering work for a multitude of similar projects; currently a similar course is launched in Singapore. The specific combination of interactive and multimedial concepts is also transferable to less science-oriented education - especially in cases where the use of distributed resources is an essential part of the education.

Difficulties, results and transferability are discussed in section C.