Altai State University scientist developed a unique online course on the use of computer technologies in biology

21 October 2020 Department of Information and Media Communications
Senior Researcher of the South Siberian Botanical Garden of Altai State University, Associate Professor of the Botany Department of the Institute of Biology and Biotechnology of Altai State University Aleksey Vaganov developed a unique online course on the use of computer technologies in biology.

In the catalog of the national educational platform "Stepik", a new massive online course "Computer technologies in biology" has appeared in the open access, which may be interesting and useful to biologists, as well as other researchers who are directly or indirectly involved in living objects (ecologists, geographers, paleontologists, applied mathematicians, naturalists).

“The 21st century is marked by the large-scale development of digitalization and the rapid evolution of IT solutions. Our generation sees the heyday of "Life Sciences". Right now, it is important to provide ourselves with the tools of modern computer technologies and effectively install the potential of the Internet into the scientific work. The new online course will help to acquire practical skills in the use of modern computer technologies and information achievements in relation to the processing, transmission and storage of biological data”, emphasizes Aleksey Vaganov.

The author of the course claims that the skills acquired during the full development of the course can be used to prepare a scientific project, a thesis, master's thesis and even a scientific article. Individual modules will even help enrich the project activities in high school.

The information in the course is clearly structured and presented in an accessible form, full of video tutorials. At the end of the course, the user creates real cases, gains practical knowledge of working with free software packages (DIVA-GIS, Mesquit, MEGA, MaxEnt), open global resources and specifications (GBIF, Darwin Core, iNaturalist, GenBank (NCBI, EMBL-EBI), GeoJSON).

The creation of the course was made possible thanks to the targeted support of the Vladimir Potanin Foundation and a key partnership with the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBIF). It is worth noting,that GBIF Executive Secretary Donald Hoben called the online course developed by the AltSU scientist “the first educational product offering a university-level preparation of biodiversity data on a regular basis in Russia”.

The official partner for the development of the new online course was the Tigirek State Natural Reserve, and the leading foreign educational partner of the course was the Al-Farabi Kazakh National University.

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