Lucy Poveda, Functional Genomics Center Zurich:

There is an astonishing number of PhD students that have not developed research/analytical skills in der undergraduate programs. Such skills are essential for them to acquire the capacity to ‘learn by doing’ and problem-solving to become good professionals to deal with the increasingly complex society. The embedding of research-based teaching and learning into such short practical courses can be challenging due to the limited time. However, I believe, that practical courses are key to foster student-learning experience and to understand the research process. As a matter of fact, I could profit from using a complex technology and workflow to enable first year PhD students to experience the process of research based teaching and learning to be directly applied to their thesis. Students were monitored during the entire course at several checkpoints, mainly through the tasks, such as exercises, discussions and presentations. The response of the PhD student was overwhelmingly positive and managed to spark their interest. The remained actively engaged and motivated throughout, which I believe is most likely due to the fact that they were the producers of knowledge. Some have even started with the project and experiments using the experimental design from the course.