Ever sit through a seminar and wish you had another hour of background to understand? Combine that background information with the current state of cutting edge science, and you have a Nanocourse, a new lecture format instituted at Harvard Medical School (HMS). Meg Bentley, an instructor and teaching fellow in the Department of Cell Biology at HMS, coordinates and runs the nanocourse program. Here, she answers a few of my questions about her career path, her current job, and how other schools can implement and benefit from a nanocourse program. Meg welcomes any and all of your questions in the comments or to meg_bentley [at] hms.harvard.edu. Thanks, Meg!

1. What is your professional background, and how did you come to be involved with Nanocourses at HMS? What is your current role in running the Nanocourses?

I did my PhD in Molecular Biology and Genetics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and then I came to HMS and did a traditional research post-doc in the Department of Cell Biology in Randy King’s lab. At that time, I considered going the traditional route and applying for faculty jobs. But my undergraduate experience at a small liberal arts college made me want to include teaching as a significant part of my career as scientist, so, when this position came up in the department it was a unique opportunity. I get to focus on curriculum development and pedagogical innovation while staying in the fast-paced, high-end research world at HMS.

I was hired in January 2006 as a curriculum fellow. It was my task to administer and implement a new course format, that we call ‘nanocourses’. At that time faculty members in the cell bio department had just created the format, and it was my job to figure out how to execute these courses and make them successful both for graduate students and the wider science community. In this position, I identify potential nanocourse topics, recruit appropriate faculty to teach, help faculty try out new teaching tools, manage student registration and assessment and generally set and enforce high standards for this non-traditional and abbreviated course format. Yes, it is a full-time job!

2. Please briefly describe the Nanocourse format and types of topics covered.

Nanocourses consist of two class meetings. During the first meeting, 2-3 faculty members each give a 1-hour lecture. But, nanocourses are not research talks by expert faculty! These lectures are intended to provide a historical and basic introduction to a topic that will allow nanocourse participants to understand and appreciate the current state of that particular field. We encourage lecturers to include a discussion of the current research areas, specific experimental approaches and new technologies within a field. This lecture-based session is open to anybody, you need not be affiliated with Harvard or even be a scientist! The second meeting is discussion-based and is only for students taking the nanocourse for credit. Typically, around 15 students take the course for credit, however we have held nanocourses with just 1 student and others with 25. This second session is intended to be a forum for the students and the faculty lecturers to engage in continued discussion of the topic. The goal is to have students practice the skill of scientific discussion, integrate the course material with their own knowledge, discuss experiments that address important unanswered questions and generally form an opinion on the direction the field should take. The format of these discussion sessions is flexible, but we encourage our faculty to utilize teaching strategies different from traditional paper discussions. There is almost always an assignment required for students to receive credit. Nanocourses are graded on a pass/fail basis.

Graduate students receive 1/6th of a full course credit per nanocourse completed. Therefore, grad students must take 6 nanocourses to fulfill the equivalent of one semester-long course. Because of this credit structure, grad students can customize their own education. I think that this structure allows graduate students to find connections and themes in disciplines that might seem unrelated. Also, one could argue that they teach students to become comfortable with and see the benefits of multi-disciplinarian approaches in science. Nanocourses have not been offered long enough to give us time to ask how this type of curriculum enhances student learning at HMS, but in the next few years, we plan to ask these questions of our curricular innovation.

Since their launch, we have offered anywhere from 8-18 nanocourses per semester. So far, 67 (I think!) unique nanocourses have been offered. Therefore, a wide range of attendees (students, post-docs, faculty and technicians) have been able to engage in recurring and accessible continuing education, learning about topics related to their own research or entirely new subjects. We believe that this continuing education will inform researchers’ choices in their own work, teach them to find ideas from seemingly unrelated disciplines and inspire collaboration.

3. What was the inspiration/driving force for starting the Nanocourses?

Now that I think back on this process, there are tons of reasons that drove the development of this course structure. These are in no particular order! Their abbreviated nature allows for the very rapid implementation of nanocourses. For instance, we launched 8 nanocourses just a couple months after they were cleared as credit-worthy. Second, nanocourses were created in order to be able to develop curriculum that was by nature, integrative. By inviting multiple faculty members to lecture on a central and focused topic, you will be able to see how their approaches and thought processes differ. Next, at the time they were implemented, there was no format beyond more traditional semester-length and paper reading courses that reached our senior graduate students and the rest of the scientific community. We wanted to create a format that accommodated the busy schedules of this population. Finally, they were a mechanism by which any faculty member (no matter how busy keeping up with research and writing challenge grants) could realistically teach students in our graduate programs! Three months after they were cleared by the GSAS as credit-bearing, we launched eight nanocourses.

4. What has the response been like within the Harvard community?

The response has been really amazing. We average around 50 people per 3-hour nanocourse and this semester we are offering 17 different nanocourses. We have had senior students and post-docs lecture in nanocourses and we plan to have junior students organize nanocourses in the future. I believe that this is a valuable and sustainable addition to the graduate curriculum at HMS and I think it is a permanent addition to the educational community. In the coming years we plan to begin assessing student outcomes, generating a digital library of nanocourses, and all sorts of other innovations that will keep the format fresh and high impact!

The first couple of years that nanocourses were offered, we kept careful track of the format. Based on these records, colleagues and I published a paper on the format in the Summer 2008 issue of CBE-Life Sciences Education. It is a great read if you are planning on implementing anything like this at your institution.

5. How do you choose which topics to cover in new Nanocourses?

The topics come from all over. Now that nanocourses are a known and popular curriculum format at Harvard University (HU), I get unsolicited suggestions from students, faculty and folks just walking by me in the hallways. I also get ideas for nanocourse topics by reading the primary literature. Really, anything with biomedical relevance can be a nanocourse topic. We have technical nanocourses that teach researchers how to improve their use of particular techniques, and courses on topics that are included in our graduate curriculum, like mRNA processing and the ubiquitin-proteasome system. If there is someone willing to teach it, then we can organize a nanocourse on it. You can see our list of current and past nanocourses here.

One last point to make on the choice of nanocourse topics… in science, there is a constant buzz of emerging fields. As an academic institution, it is our responsibility to inform our students of these emerging fields, however it can be difficult to build an entirely new course around these emerging fields or to incorporate into an already-bursting semester-length course. Therefore, the nanocourse format allows us to rapidly and easily develop courses on emerging fields without the teaching and administrative burden of a full-semester length course.

6. What guidelines or advice do you give to faculty members designing a Nanocourse lecture?

Begin at the beginning! In our research, we have found that about half of each nanocourse audience is a beginner in the topic. This means that the first lecturer is tasked with explicit description and introduction of the fundamental concepts and seminal papers in the field. This can be difficult for some faculty members who more often give very specific research talks on their own lab’s work, but most of them do a great job!

Also, I try to give faculty members the liberty and the opportunity to get creative with their teaching in a nanocourse. While there are guidelines for nanocourses, there are no rules! Most of the time the faculty follow the guidelines though…

7. Do you have any advice or resource suggestions for other institutions interested in starting a Nanocourse program?

Yes! Most of our 135 nanocourse faculty lecturers have come from our own institution. And we certainly recognize that we are in a luxurious position, because you can’t throw a rock in Boston without hitting a Harvard faculty member (i.e., there are a lot of HU faculty). So, if you are at an institution with fewer faculty to draw from, I have the following suggestions. First, I recommend using invited speakers. In this case, you can have one faculty member give a seminar essentially prepping students to hear and critique the invited lecturer’s talk. The discussion session then includes the visiting scholar. We have done this at HMS and it is exciting for the students and the visiting speaker. Second, I recommend using online resources for lecturers, like the iBioSeminar offered through the American Society for Cell Biology. Companies might also be a resource for lecturers. This can serve as a recruiting tool for the company (if anyone is recruiting anymore!?) and a way for them to engage potentially more sustainable academic customers. Thirdly, I think that advanced students and post-docs can give nanocourses if given sufficient guidance on lecture prep and pedagogical strategy. Using these alternatives means that other institutions may have fewer and more carefully chosen topics, but if implemented with enthusiasm and attention, they can be integrated into the more traditional curriculum as a fun and exciting element.

If you are at a big institution, then my strongest recommendation would be to higher an individual (like myself) who is the face and go-to person for launching these nanocourses. This will make faculty more likely to volunteer to teach (because they have a teaching assistant who handles everything but the lecturing), and make students more willing to take a chance on a crazy course format (because they have a figurehead who handles registration, maintains high standards and seeks their feedback). This person is responsible for choosing nanocourse topics and faculty and for assessing each individual nanocourse. Just because the nanocourses are abbreviated courses does not mean that they run themselves!