Leveraging H3Africa Scholarly Publications for Technology-Enhanced Personalized Bioinformatics Education

Abstract

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has catalyzed the expectations for technology-enhanced interactions with personalized educational materials. Adjusting the content of educational materials to the geographical location of a learner is a customization feature of personalized education and is used to develop the interest of a learner in the content. The educational content of interest in this report is bioinformatics, in which the knowledge spans biological science and applied mathematics disciplines. The Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) Initiative is a resource suitable for use when obtaining data and peer-reviewed scholarly articles, which are geographically relevant and focus on authentic problem solving in the human health domain. We developed a computerized platform of interactive visual representations of curated bioinformatics datasets from H3Africa projects, which also supports customization, individualization and adaptation features of personalized education. We obtained evidence for the positive effect size and acceptable usability of a visual analytics resource designed for the retrieval-based learning of facts on functional impacts of genomic sequence variants. We conclude that technology-enhanced personalized bioinformatics educational interventions have implications in (1) the meaningful learning of bioinformatics; (2) stimulating additional student interest in bioinformatics; and (2) improving the accessibility of bioinformatics education to non-bioinformaticians.