Most activities on the Internet (newsgroups, program distribution, databases) have found it useful to give a list of responses or answers to the common questions, concerns and problems that people have about those activities. This FAQ has been started by the course organisers and you are encouraged to ask other questions, which we'll add to this FAQ!
Yes! We've got a lot of precedent for this type of activity. The UK pharmaceutical industry has an enviable record of successful pre-competitive activity in the academic arena. A good example is the Molecular Graphics and Modelling Society, founded in 1982, which supports the development of computational chemistry and graphics. There have been many short courses run by industry-academic groups, such as the modelling course in York each September.
We've had experience of running virtual courses (such as the Principles of Protein Structure course at Birkbeck) and know what the strategy is to manage them.
Q. How will the course be managed?
We agree that good management is critical, and we shall be appointing a full-time course tutor, hopefully with experience of the industry. The tutor will be responsible for regular on-site liaison with the participating companies and will be prepared to react to unforeseen problems. They will also act as 'human glue' in the course, creating a community in the companies which can share its experiences and insights.
The course will have an adventurous spirit and we're confident that you will contribute ideas that can be implemented. Because of the technology and the small number of participating companies we shall often be able to do things at quite short notice.
Many of the successful ventures on the Internet are distributed collaborative projects. We want to build this spirit into the course and so there will be technology for all the particpants to share ideas. Sometimes these lead to individuals or groups volunteering to do something, whilst at other times there are major differences of opinion that will need to be resolved. (We've had a lot of experience of when electronic discussions work and when they don't.) :-)
Many decisions (such as finance, accreditaion, and project management) need to be made formally and we're starting with the following structure:
There is a lot of overlap between these and their roles are expanded below.
Q. Who are the Course Organisers and what do they do?
The course organisers (JO, PMR and course tutor (C-T)) will be responsible for the mechanics of running the course centrally (the intended central academic site is Birkbeck College). Initially they will plan all aspects of the course (management, membership, timetables, finance, technology infrastructure, etc.) As members join we hope that they will contribute ideas, and the Course Organisers will implement them.
The Course Tutor will be a full-time employee, probably at Birkbeck, and will have the key role in making the course a success. Much of the success of PPS was due the energy and professionalism that Alan Mills brought as Course Tutor, and we intend to follow that model. We're already looking for a suitable person, who should be knowledgeable about research in the industry, and be enthusiastic about teaching/training.
The course will have most of the administrative concepts of traditional courses, such as timetables, assignments, face-to-face meetings, student records, etc. and the Course Tutor will be primary responsible for their implementation.
There will be regular meetings with the Company Representatives, and with their colleagues which will be coordinated by the Course Tutor.
Q. What is the Academic Board?
The course will be validated, i.e. the material (both content and style) and the means of learning will be overseen by acknowledged international experts from the UK community. They will review material in detail and strategically. The probable model is a Board which meets electronically and reviews material on an ad hoc basis, and 1-2 (paid) external Assessors who will be more deeply involved in validating the course.
The 'students' will be assessed, i.e. their achievement and contributions will be measured. (See Assessment).
Q. Who are the Company Representatives (C-R)?
Each company will appoint someone as the primary contact person for the Course. This person may or may not be a student or contributor. Their role is to make sure that the Company is fully involved in everything that happens and we want this to be a two-way process.
The C-R will be responsible for making sure that the Course 'works' in that particular company. This will include getting management approval, and agreeing on the amount of commitment from the Participants in the company. It is very important that there is clear agreement as to how much time that any Participant can commit, and what the Course Tutor can expect from the company.
Formal business with the company should be channeled through the C-R, even though they may need higher authority for some decisions. Each site will have different procedures for how it participates and the C-R will need to be able to make these work, or negotiate changes where necessary. For example, some sites may not wish direct connection to the Internet, and it will be the responsibility of the C-R (advised by the C-T) to redistribute material within the company.
It is certain that some of the Participants will have changes in their careers during the period of the course and the C-R will have to adjust the membership appropriately.
The group of people responsible for the creation and use of the course material. Initially this will be the Course Organisers, with the Company Representatives.
In this course everyone has something unique to contribute and we're discouraging the traditional 'lecturer-student' model. In PPS we used the terms 'consultant' and 'student' but many students made very significant contributions. In SBDD we believe that the proposed membership can develop material, ideas, rigorous discussion, etc. without having formal tuition. The Course Organisers and the Faculty are facilitators and moderators rather than teachers.
Q. How will Participants be assessed?
In the first year the assessment will not lead to an academic qualification, but their involvement will be peer-reviewed and we intend that published material will be citable. It's very important that Participants can use the assessment as 'currency' for career development inside and/or outside their organisations.
The Principles of Protein Structure course run from Birkbeck College in early 1995 by Alan Mills and Peter Murray-Rust. It was completely virtual (no participants met face-to-face) and introduced zero-cost molecular multimedia through the RasMol and Mage programs running on PCs, MACs and UNIX (X-Windows). There were over 200 participants from nearly 30 countries and the course lasted 15 weeks. It received many favourable comments including a full-page report in the (UK) Independent and the Times Higher Educational Supplement newspaper. A number of internationally renowned groups particpated, such as Jane and Dave Richardson (Duke U., NC, US) and the Protein Databank at Brookhaven. A great deal of novel and extremely high-quality material was produced in full public view on the WWW.
The course will be run again as an accredited course at Birkbeck.
Original course: http://www.cryst.bbk.ac.uk/PPS/index.html
Present course: http://www.cryst.bbk.ac.uk/PPS2/
The Globewide Network Academy (GNA) is the 'University of the Internet' and is a virtual voluntary organisation committed to distributed electronic education in many flavours.
The Virtual School of Natural Sciences (VSNS) is a group of scientists committed to producing novel, high-quality virtual education in science, primarily at graduate level and beyond. It has run two highly successful courses (PPS and Biocomputing) and SBDD will be the third.
The role of GNA and VSNS is primarily to coordinate activities in virtual education; to support the provision of technology and to support the virtual community of educational enthusiasts.
Q. What's 'Virtual'? Does it work?
We use 'virtual' to mean communication without face-to-face contact. It can cover everything from off-line study of static material, through e-mail correspondence (with a turnaround of a few hours) to direct contact in a 'MOO'. (A correspondence course is virtual, but without the rapid interaction). The GNA is the world's first virtual organisation and transacts its business electronically.
Completely virtual activities only suit a few people and what we propose here is a mixture of virtual and face-to-face contact ('in real-life' -IRL). The administration of the course will have a large RL component and there will be several RL meetings of the participants during the course. However a large amount of the technical discussion will be done by virtual means.
Q. Who can take part in the course?
The course will be run by and for the UK pharmaceutical industry, coordinated from an academic site. Much, maybe all, of the resource material will be in public view on the WWW and anyone can read this.
We are running this as a pilot in the UK because we need the real-life component in the administration and the need for face-to-face contact. In later years we hope that the participation will become international.
Q. What do participants get that can't be got off the WWW anyway?
The participants will be completely involved in developing the course and can contribute strategically so that this fits the needs of their institution. All participating companies will have an equal voice in this. They will be part of a self-help community that will have insight into modern approaches to in-house training and will have expert guidance on Internet technology and the use of biological resources on the WWW. They will also get accreditation where possible.
We want all companies to be completely happy about the way that they interact with the course, and this may need individual decisions for individual sites. The PPS course ran with public e-mail lists, but we may wish to make these password-protected. To avoid the risk of unintentional posting of confidential material, a C-R may wish to set up an internal system for vetting material to be posted.
Some companies may not be 'connected to the Internet' - although this is a complex concept and some sites provide a subset of Internet protocols (e.g. e-mail, but not WWW access). In this case we might wish to 'mirror' the material (i.e. copy the material and provide it for participants). It will remain the responsibility of the participating company to ensure that the material doesn't provide a security threat.
Q. My company is a multinational - can we use the course abroad?
We're sympathetic to this and welcome the widening of the community. We probably couldn't provide accreditation for staff resident abroad without special negotiation.
Q. I'm an academic - can I take part?
We shall almost certainly have public e-mail discussion groups in which anyone can take part and we're open to offers of contribution of material. You're welcome to point to our external URLs and use them casually in teaching, but the course will be copyright and cannot be downloaded in toto without negotiation.
Q. I'm a Participant - should I work at home on on-site?
This depends on local arrangements - both options are strongly argued! We intend that most - if not all - of the material can be run on low-cost machines (e.g. PCs or MACs). Where possible we shall try to avoid things that can ONLY be done on SGI's and with software which you may not all have installed. Where this isn't possible it will be necessary to run things in-house.
Whether someone does the course in company time or in their own time is a local decision and we are prepared to cater for both.
Q. What software will be used - what are the implications?
We used publically available s/w in the PPS course so that anyone who had Internet access could take the course. The software was so good that the course was able to tackle anything we wanted to do. In SBDD we may wish to tackle a number of fields where the software used is commercial. At present we take the following approach:
In computational chemistry and biology there is a wide variety of philosophies about access to software and data and the course will not take a political stand on this.
Q. Are software houses, publishers, etc. allowed to be Participants?
We'd be very interested in following this up. They'd have to have a sizeable UK presence, and we'd have to find a mechanism whereby the course wasn't seen as a vehicle to promote their products inappropriately. The course material is certainly very relevant to many staff in these companies.
Q. What does the course cover?
The primary aim is to show how a knowledge of protein structure can lead to the rational design of bio-active compounds (i.e. drugs, pesticides, etc.) The emphasis will be on designing 'small-molecules' though we may touch on therapeutic proteins, etc. An essential component will be the use of modern electronic technology such as WWW both for the course and to explore the biological Internet. (A by-product is the creation of Internet-literate Participants).
The borders of the course are fuzzy and subjects will be probably be discussed which are outside the formal content. There will not be a formal commitment to things like:
Q. Are there any pre-requisites for the course?
Yes, but they won't be formally required. It's assumed that Participants have a working acquaintance with protein structure, and that if they don't the PPS course should be available, possibly on CDROM. They'll need to be familiar with simple organic chemistry (but don't need to know synthetic methods) and they should have some knowledge of basic biochemistry (e.g. cellular organisation, common metabolic processes, what an enzyme does, etc.)
They will need to be able to run simple programs on a PC or other system and to learn how to create HTML (WWW) documents.
We intend that there will be extensive glossaries (created by the course) which will help with unfamiliar terms.
Q. What happens if I leave the course?
We anticipate that a number of people will have to drop out for reasons beyond their - or our - control. This must be discussed with the C-R who will need to think whether we need a 'replacement'.
Q. What if I find the course too hard?
We believe that the level of the course won't be too hard (we got it right for PPS) but if a significant number of people are concerned, then we'll alter the amount, or the depth, of what we do. Also, if we find too many people are putting in too much time, we'll reconfigure.
In the mature course (i.e. in the second or third year of it being run) we expect that people will spend a maximum of 5 hours/week on it. It will be self-paced, so that you will be able to miss weeks and make them up later. It will be up to the C-R and the Course Tutor to make sure the effort is reasonable. Obviously everyone will start with a different spectrum of knowledge so that someone might know all about the Internet and very little about biochemistry.
In the first year there will be a substantial amount of effort producing material. It's difficult to quantify this, and there may be an element of voluntary creation of resources that people feel are strongly worthwhile.
Q. How will people be assessed?
Contributions to the course material (e-mail, data, reviews, etc.) will be obvious and will give a clear measure of the time and commitment from individuals. In our experience contributed material has always been of high quality, and we'd expect this to be the case here. We do not believe in 'exams' and would expect Participants to write reviews, create small data resources, develop tutorials, etc. which could be formally accredited. There should not be any problem of authentication of identity.
Q. Surely virtual working is very inefficient?
The human race is only just finding out how to live with the new information and technology and many things are difficult. We have found, however, that people pick them up fairly quickly, so that if you're already experienced in an electronic environment we can guide you through our resources quite efficiently.
The WWW material that we shall use (sequences, protein structures, small molecules, etc.) is very well organised and represents a more efficient method of working than conventional approaches. The use of e-mail is also very effective, once we have got servers and mailing lists set up.
Q. Won't I be giving my competitors valuable information?
We have to work out a system where this isn't a worry for you. All companies have material which can be placed in the public arena and we shall accept you judgment on what you can provide. In less structured discussion (e.g. e-mails) you need to exercise at least the same amount of care as when talking at conferences. So no one will mind if when asked: "What's your view on ..." you take time to think about it, and maybe feel you can't say anything definite. However it will also be necessary to create a critical mass of correspondents.
It will be essential that security is addressed for each site. This is a local matter, and it's best if the Course Organisers aren't directly asked to advise on the technology, though we can offer insights into the social aspects - e.g. training, guides, when not to post, etc.
Q. How much of the course will be in public view?
This is up for discussion, but one of the key points is that this course will show the rest of the world what the industry is doing in general terms. We'd expect that material will be created in the companies, peer-reviewed by the Board, and then released to the world. E-mail could be more sensitive, and some Participants might wish their contributions to be local to the project. We might, therefore, have some public and some private lists. The public ones could accept postings from anywhere, rather like BIONET at presence.
Q. Isn't it very expensive in money and time?
Commercial courses usually cost ca. #250 per day, so that you will soon get to a large figure if you priced it that way. Most companies have large training bills and we believe that this is a very cost-effective approach to something that cannot be obtained by other means. Moreover the material is reusable in later years so that the resources will continue to grow. If you include the PPS course (CDROM) and the Internet training you'll see it's extremely good value.
It is a sizeable management commitment at the start and each Company will have to deliberately allocate resources, though these may be seen as marginal in some cases. Much of the investment (networking, databases, home-working) is a useful generic investment.
Q. I like it! How can I sell it to my management?
Here are some one-line bullet points:
Creation Date: 24th October 1995
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