How Our Live Online Classes Work

Our online lessons strive to provide top quality training in topics related to life sciences. We recognize that high quality cannot be achieved without the help of skilled instructors. Therefore, our online classrooms always include human instructors.

Our teaching methodology is built around allowing students to learn by solving problems, while the knowledgeable instructor guides them through common pitfalls, errors and misconceptions. We make effective use of online tools to -

minimize long lectures,

increase time spent in actively solving problems,

allowing everyone to work at his/her own pace.

Our instructions are chat and zoom-based. In addition to the shared classroom, students can directly communicate with our instructors through direct messages or Zoom breakout rooms (i.e. one-on-one session). That way everyone feels like he/she is working with a private tutor.

Typical session

A typical session is described below.

1. A few days before the class, the instructor sends you study materials as rmarkdown files. You are expected to "render" the rmarkdown file and glance through it.

2. In the class, the instructor explains topics from the learning material by solving related problems.

3. The students are given related problems to solve on their own and at their own pace. As they continue to work through their problems, the difficulty level increases. During this time, the students contact the instructor primarily through direct messages and occasionally through Zoom.

4. From time to time, the instructor shares common issues encountered by many students with the class in the main classroom chatboard. For example, if the instructor senses that everyone is confused about some aspect of the problem, he explains it to everyone in the classroom. Also, we continue to improve our learning materials to highlight those common sources of errors.