It is a constant challenge for instructors to develop novel approaches of pedagogy, especially for introductory biology (Bio101) for the first year undergraduate students. Every year about 200 students are admitted into the five-year Integrated B.S/M.S program of IISER, out of which at least 60% of the students have not studied biology at their high school level, while the rest of the students have studied advanced biology. It is therefore a formidable task for the instructors to keep students engaged in class and interested in biology. Reasonably well-structured course content with periodic evaluation serve as useful indicators of the level of comprehension of biology by students from diverse backgrounds.

As a test case, we considered a novel approach for students to build models to represent any biological process or phenomenon as a part of their continuous evaluation instead of the usual quiz and exams for the first time at IISER Pune. There were no pre-conditions in terms of selecting topics. However, an important criterion was to ensure cost effectiveness and eco friendliness in terms of concept and design of the models. The class of 200 students was sub-divided into smaller groups of 10 students each. Each group sent in a title and abstract of the model that they intended to prepare.

Needless to mention, the momentum of building novel models built up closer to the deadline. A palpable sense of excitement prevailed on the morning of the exhibition. All students arrived early to set up their models. Amazingly, models ranged from demonstrating fundamental concepts of evolution from evolutionary bottlenecks to cell division, motor protein function, image formation on the retina, nerve impulse conduction and many more. What was particularly striking was the extent of innovation and simplicity that each model brought forth, using simple hand crafted material from paper and Styrofoam. Students also unleashed their artistic potential. This event underscored that even students not initiated or interested in biology were extremely motivated scientists to apply their skills across disciplines from math, physics and chemistry in devising novel approaches to demonstrate fundamental concepts in biology. A distinct advantage with first year students is their unbridled and unfettered thoughts that translated into action. Students were truly excited to discuss the science and the concept behind each of the models that they had created.

For instance, a group created a model demonstrating protein synthesis from a strand of mRNA as template. Remarkably, the model was fashioned out of a cardboard box, with a strip of paper representing mRNA with the codons indicated. Pushing the paper through one end of the box spewed out a chain of styrofoam balls from the other end depicting protein synthesis! A simple demonstration clarified a fundamental concept and any amount of lectures wouldn’t help drive home this concept as well. Another elegant model demonstrated reflex action. A simple battery operated circuit with a live wire flinched instantly when brought closer to water.

All in all this event was truly a learning experience for the instructors as much it was for the students, since this highlighted the fact that students really do not need constant spoon-feeding and leaving them alone from time to time goes a long way in harnessing their latent talent, creativity, and curiosity.

Strengthening of laboratory and academic infrastructure and provision of multiple copies of routine equipment has provided the ecosystem required for practicals to be conducted by colleges—these could not be done earlier due to unavailability of equipment or costly consumables. Young students are getting much-needed exposure to lectures by eminent scientists, and visits to nearby research institutions are inspiring them to pursue postgraduate courses in science. All stakeholders, including students, faculty and laboratory staff, have witnessed this slow transformation and acknowledge the catalytic role played by DBT. This small investment has paid rich dividends by transforming the undergraduate science education landscape. Most of participating colleges have witnessed a gradual increase in the number of applications vis-à-vis number of seats for admission to undergraduate science courses, increase in cut off percentage at the time of admission to these courses, decrease in drop out rates, better performance in undergraduate examinations and enhanced enrollment in postgraduate courses. Undergraduate students in participating colleges have carried out several innovative experiments and minor research projects, many of an inter-disciplinary nature. I am tempted to quote Prof. Lakhotia, Chairman of the DBT expert committee on Star Colleges “If each college conducts one unique innovative research oriented experiment with an aim to elucidate what is unknown rather than to simply confirm known concepts, we will have a large pool of experiments in each discipline”.

A large number of resources such as laboratory manuals and standard operating procedures have been generated. Committees of subject specialists from colleges are examining these resources for refinement, which will be brought out as final DBT publications to be shared across participating colleges. Outreach activities conducted as part of the Star College program have benefitted teachers and students from neighbouring schools and colleges also. A strong mentoring and monitoring mechanism in the form of a mentoring committee, an in-house advisory committee, a DBT expert committee & a coordinators’ meeting have been put in place to learn from each other’s experience and mistakes. The programme has been received exceedingly well by students and teachers and would need to continuously innovate and evolve to sustain as well as improve.

Biology today is changing to become more technology-dependent and collaborative, and the integration of research experiences with standard undergraduate biology education is considered essential to nurture future innovators in science. Several programs by the NSF and AAAS (Vision and Change Program), HHMI (Science Education and Research Training), PCAST (Engage to Excel report) and others have introduced research-based learning and discovery into undergraduate STEM programs in the United States. Utpal Banerjee, a molecular biologist and HHMI professor at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), has focused on integrating education and research for over 20 years. He talks to Nandini Rajamani about the structure of these programs at UCLA, if they can be adapted to India, and his personal motivations.

Can you describe the approach and philosophy behind the move to integrate research into undergraduate biology curricula?

The whole program is about early engagement and scientific inquiry, with the view that this will improve science education. Most people at an undergraduate level think that they need to finish up all of their curriculum, which has to do with genetics, cell and molecular biology, and everything else, before they could go to a lab and do a little bit of research. The problem with this approach is that by the time they have finished all the courses that they need to take, it’s too late for them to then spend enough time in a lab.

Our approach has been that students should be exposed to research early on. All they need to do is learn some basics, almost starting mechanically at first. We find that they very quickly learn to think and design experiments, and we hope this will help with their education. This is the premise behind Vision and Change, which has students applying the process of science using quantitative reasoning, models and simulations, communicating and collaborating with other disciplines, and understanding the relationship between science and society.

How do you implement the recommendations of the Vision and Change Program and PCAST at UCLA?

We’ve got two programs—one is a hands-on-research program, and the other is called deconstruction, which is a pedagogy that we have developed at UCLA. First or second year undergraduate students, fresh out of high school, will do one of these. Then based on their interest in research, which will be evident after the course, they will then be absorbed into a minor in biomedical research, and can do research for all four years of their undergraduate degree.

Could you elaborate on the kind of research they are required to do?

The hands-on research course is a HHMI funded program. This is very easy to implement in India if one had the courage and heart and need and want to do it. The idea is that you start with students as early as first year, and each student is assigned a piece of original research, and they contribute little parts to one large group of projects. This is just for ten weeks, in which they get didactic lectures, laboratory experience, computer experience and some writing experience. A publication as outcome promotes ownership, and the top students can advance to research-based careers.

For example—there are different projects in my lab—mosaic analysis of essential genes in Drosophila development, gene based expression and analysis, RNAi screens etc. One outcome was a PLOS Biology paper with 134 undergraduate authors. We beat that with a Genetics 2007 paper with 264 undergraduates, and still hold the world’s record for the most number of undergraduate authors on a paper. We are now aiming for another paper with over 300 undergraduate authors.

Can you talk about the second program—research deconstruction?

This is a new concept. This is mentioned in Vision and Change, and we have also described it in a PLOS Biology paper. Basically what we do is to have a bunch of students come in, they get a full-scale research seminar, which is video-taped. And then there are many interaction sessions, which help to deconstruct the initial seminar, cutting pieces of it, and this goes on for five weeks. The deconstruction starts as a dialogue in a question-answer format to explain basic concepts, and then at the end you bring back the lecturer for an interaction session. We find that this model works really well. In one course, we deconstructed one of David Morgan’s iBiology seminars. At the end of five weeks, David Morgan then asked the students questions on Skype, and it was a great session. The students, who are just in their first or second year, they tend to become very sophisticated after five weeks.

How many contact hours do the students get in the five weeks?

It's very extensive—typically three hours of lecture plus discussion sections. This one course covers many topics. After this we place them in a lab, but we already know these students by then, so we can place them appropriately. Then they get some research training courses, integration with social sciences, and philosophy and history of science etc.

Do you also work with high school students?

We do some high school outreach, where students or teachers can come in and get trained, and then they sometimes go back and revamp their curriculum based on this. One high school teacher came and worked with us—he then took it back to his class and his high school students now actually do this kind of work as well.

What is the scale of this program at UCLA?

We started this in 2007. The number of students that have participated in any of our programs is upwards of 3000, across 142 laboratories and 28 different departments at UCLA, majority in the school of medicine. They have published over 77 papers in journals like Cell, Development, Nature Methods, etc. One third of all students have at least one publication.

How is the success of these programs assessed?

STEM retention is a major issue in the US, like in India. STEM retention nationally is 30 something percent. UCLA is a little better than that—60 something percent. For us, it’s close to 100%—97% STEM majors (94% of women, 100% of underrepresented minorities) are retained. 84% of our students then go on to some higher degree, but a significant number, 36%, either go to MD or MD PhDs in very good places.

How would you adapt the program to a country like India?

One way is to develop these deconstruction ideas from resources that are available online. But this might not be feasible in the long term. What is more feasible is encouraging a large number of small observations. For example, there are rice varieties in India that have not yet been sequenced. One can use undergraduates to do annotations after sequencing. Or students can be involved in bird migration monitoring programs, like Migrant Watch.

What would you suggest for Indian undergraduate colleges, which typically don't have research as part of the curriculum, or where faculty don't do research?

I think one has to choose. If the faculty don't care about research then there's not much you can do. But it’s important to note that it doesn't matter what students do, as long as they are working on something hands on, for which the answer is not known. This is critical.

Do you think an undergraduate could do this for 3-4 months, or does it have to be sustained and spread out?

Most of the students would not do 3 months—they would do just a little bit, then they would find something on their own to do, like joining a lab of their interest. Even that little bit is better than nothing. If you have a research lab in which you are doing titrations, instead of routine experiments, one could instead create an apple extract, and figure out the acidity or molarity, or calculate how many hydrogen ions there are in an apple. This doesn't require a gigantic lab but would still be a novel research experience.

Do you think even simple experiments should lead to some kind of ownership or authorship?

Ownership is a must. Students have to say, "I did this, and this is my result".

This implies that the student has to see it through up to a productive end point.

Yes, that’s why you want a large number of small observations. You don’t students to start a long project where they get stuck in the third step and then don’t know what to do. Little sections of larger projects or questions are best. For example, one of our labs sequenced the sea urchin genome, and they do in-situ hybridizations. Each student gets a different gene and does in-situs to see where it is expressed. The cDNA library is made from all these stages of sea urchins, so everyone is guaranteed to get some results within the larger project. The student also writes a little report about it. If you have a website, you could put up reports online—then you don’t need to publish a paper. Even having something on a website can help students claim ownership.

Change is not going to happen overnight, but I think also waiting around and expecting something to happen is not going to make a difference. One has to begin at some scale, even if it is 50 or 100 kids, or only those who have access to NCBS or AIIMS labs. Let’s not try and solve all problems simultaneously. That’s not going to happen.

One last question—what is your personal motivation behind what you do?

Education is important, there is no other cause in the civilized world that overrides education. Everything else is either a necessity or a matter of just basic pride, but education you can’t do without. People who make political and financial decisions about the future, those who become the next scientists, engineers—they all need to get this level of education. Without that nothing is going to progress or change. Social freedom, and every kind of freedom in this world is based on education. I think that’s motivation enough.

The Biotechnology sector in India has seen immense growth over the past few decades, and infrastructure, human resources and policy structure have been the key drivers for achieving global competitiveness. With a huge base of talented, skilled and cost-competitive manpower, India has great potential to become a leading global player in biotechnology. The Human Resource Development programmes of the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India have played an important role in nurturing the next generation of researchers. One such DBT-HRD initiative—the Post-Graduate Teaching Programme, started with 6 universities in 1985 and scaled ten-fold in the past two decades.

As the Post-Graduate Teaching programme has been in existence for more than two decades, an in-depth assessment of current practices was thought crucial for incorporation of practices towards strengthening their effectiveness. I was part of the BCIL (Biotech Consortium India Limited) team conducting an independent evaluation study commissioned by DBT to assess the overall success and potential gaps of the program, as well as provide suitable recommendations and future directions.

The evaluation study included extensive preliminary research, eliciting feedback from Heads of Departments (HODs), students and external experts, and conducting site visits to all universities/institutions with DBT-supported teaching programmes. The assessment critera took into account various performance indicators including faculty teaching quality and mentoring, research environment, infrastructure, and academic activities.

Considering that students are the key beneficiaries of these programmes, their frank inputs regarding satisfaction with the program were gained through detailed discussions in absence of faculty. Some of the global ranking systems—Times Higher Education (THE), Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), etc rely on self-reporting rather than validation through site-visits, and reputational surveys rather real-time student experience, which could lead to generation of subjective data. To circumvent this, in addition to student surveys, the evaluation team comprising of experienced academicians conducted individual assessments to generate an unbiased metric of the quality of teaching.

The detailed findings, gaps and specific recommendations for each of the 71 programmes have been submitted to DBT. Several fledgling programmes are striving to achieve excellence and flagpship programmes striving to maintain excellence while there are some that are performing poorly. The quality of teaching of programmes at Jawaharlal Nehru University, IIT-Mumbai, IIT-Roorkee, IIT-Kanpur, IIT-Kharagpur, Banaras Hindu University, GB Pant University, Jammu University, University of Hyderabad, Aligarh Muslim University, Indira Gandhi Agricultural University and Sher-e-Kashmir University, to name a few, were well appreciated by students as well as respective head of institutions and received enthusiastic support internally.

The students of some other programmes conveyed a deep sense of frustration, and it was noted that student assessment of the programmes was also negatively affected by logistic issues—including delayed receipt of fellowships and dissatisfaction with facilities such as hostel, restrooms and food.

It is imperative that the university administration provide the much-needed support in terms of direction, mentorship and resources to facilitate strengthening of the programmes. While the mandate of the funding agencies is simply to disburse funds towards a research project/teaching programme, the onus for optimal resource utilization and execution lies with the department or university. Based on my experience during the study, I present below an indicative list of best practices of the top-performing teaching programmes with sound academic, research and placement records. While there have been many critiques on the quality of biotechnology education in India, I wish to specifically focus on the positive aspects of the teaching programmes that have benefitted post-graduate biotechnology students:

-Head of Department/Course Coordinator—Departments/programmes driven by dynamic leadership with prolific experience in both academia and administration were most successful.

-Course Curriculum—Defined course curriculum roadmap, with a fair balance of foundational and applied biotechnology teaching to cater to the needs of the students and not to be designed to suit the expertise of the recruited faculty. Students should be given the flexibility for choosing electives from other departments as well.

-Classes 101—Bridging/preparatory classes in basic biology, chemistry, biostatistics and good lab practices ensure that students belonging to diverse backgrounds are on the same page.

-Faculty Orientation—Blend of enthusiastic experienced and young faculty devoting appropriate time to teaching and research. The faculty should allocate reasonable amount of time to motivate, mentor and mould the scientific temper of the students.

-Teaching Pedagogy—Classroom culture could be interactive (on a regular basis) rather than conventional 'chalk and talk' method of teaching. Interactive classes do not mean simply using contemporary audio visual tools but to engage students in meaningful discussions, encourage out-of-the-box thinking and inculcate curiosity driven research aptitudes.

-Lab Techniques—Provide hands-on training for most of the practicals especially molecular biology and bioinformatics; simple methods may be designed for practicals such that each student can perform most of the experiments individually. Faculty should play constructive roles rather than delegating the lab duties to research fellows. Analysis, interpretation and representation of results should be given priority to enable conceptual understanding against rote learning.

-Dissertation— Students should be given the opportunity to define problems and select research topics rather than simply being assigned topics. Students should be sensitized about potential areas of research - local/regional problems i.e. drought, salinity and disease prevalence so that specific biotechnological applications can be sought to address them.

-Fellowships—Ensure timely disbursement of fellowships to students irrespective of timely receipt/non-receipt of funds from funding agency in students's best interests.

-Basic Amenities—Access to library and computing facilities beyond classroom hours, rest-room (separate ladies' and yes, clean ones too), canteen, hostel, grievance redressal cell, etc. Teaching cutting-edge technologies may not be well-appreciated if basic amenities for sustenance are missing!

-Career-related Activities—Organize educational tours, industry/incubator liaisons, seminars by eminent scientists/industry representatives with successful science careers, alumni talks, productive career counseling sessions and bio-entrepreneurship club meets; guidance for competitive exams, scientific writing and soft-skills workshops (i.e. communication, problem-solving, computing, inter-personal skills) to invigorate the students. Universities in remote areas can organize events through video-conferencing facilities or pre-recorded lectures.

-Experiential Learning—Research, academic and industrial collaborations of the faculty help the students tremendously. Efforts should be made towards maximal student participation such that they benefit from experiential learning.

-Student Feedback—Elicit periodic feedback from students to review, reflect and re-organize the efforts of the department.

Quality issues in education are linked to the crucial role played by the educators and education functionaries. Rather than massive fund mobilization, the implementation of the above-mentioned quality enhancement strategies require concerted and committed efforts by the educators.

Above all, keeping in view the current trend of declining interest in the pursuit of science, the need of the hour is that biotech educators must devise innovative strategies to instill passion and spark students' interest in science. Hopefully, student-centric efforts along with adoption of quality enhancement measures will create a vibrant learning environment for biotechnology students across the country.