Leveraging guest lectures in course design

In our “Population Genetics Simulation and Visualization” course, Andrew and I adopted the following structure:

• Concept overview/term review (often a guest lecture)
• Live-coding demo/syntax overview (instructor-guided)
• Independent coding-based problem sets (instructors circulating to support and address questions)

As expected, students really enjoyed the live-coding and appreciated the chance to test their knowledge and explore other implementations within the classroom, with Andrew and I looking at their screens to give quick feedback and help push them along as necessary.

But I was surprised by how much the students enjoyed and absorbed the guest lectures! Multiple students shared in the course evaluations that the guest lectures introduced them to research careers and science outside the classroom. They also said they enjoyed connecting their work from our course and others with bigger scientific questions. These guests offered additional insights and contacts to our students and helped them see the bigger picture behind many of our in-class lessons.

Our guests were:

• Stephanie Yan, a PhD student who shared her work investigating selection vs. drift in a case of archaic introgression
• Arjun Biddanda, a postdoc who introduced the students to human population structure
• Michael Tassia, a postdoc who discussed how computational biology allowed him to investigate the genomes of non-model organisms. He also wowed the students with his photos and videos from his expedition to Antarctica