Development of a Database Course for Bioinformatics

Biology databases (bioDBs) play an ever-increasing role in the post-genome era for bioinformatics education. In order to handle the increasing demand for bioDBs in bioinformatics education, since Spring 2005, the College of Information Science and Technology (IST) at University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) has offered a course entitled “Database Search and Pattern Discovery” for seniors of our undergraduate Bioinformatics program (which is also available for graduate students majored in Compute Science program) on an annual base. This paper summarizes considerations behind development of this course, describes how the course is structured, reports our findings and observations, and raises issues of urgent tasks. The main objective of this paper is to exchange our thoughts of bioinformatics course development and solicit feedbacks and suggestions from colleagues working in bioinformatics education and related fields.