Bioinformatics is recognized as part of the essential knowledge base of numerous career paths in biomedical research and healthcare. However, there is little agreement in the field over what that knowledge entails or how best to provide it. These disagreements are compounded by the wide range of populations in need of bioinformatics training, with divergent prior backgrounds and intended application areas. The Curriculum Task Force of the International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB) Education Committee has sought to provide a framework for training needs and curricula in terms of a set of bioinformatics core competencies that cut across many user personas and training programs. The initial competencies developed based on surveys of employers and training programs have since been refined through a multiyear process of community engagement. This report describes the current status of the competencies and presents a series of use cases illustrating how they are being applied in diverse training contexts. These use cases are intended to demonstrate how others can make use of the competencies and engage in the process of their continuing refinement and application. The report concludes with a consideration of remaining challenges and future plans.
The need for bioinformatics education and training is immense, but it is also diverse. There is a wide range of audiences who are potential recipients of training, each of which has different needs in terms of what skills or knowledge they require and at what depth. For example, someone training to be a bioinformatics engineer (which we define as someone who will actively be involved in the development and application of bioinformatics algorithms) requires in-depth knowledge of existing algorithms, how they work, how to critically evaluate them, and how to interpret the results. By contrast, a bioinformatics user (which we define as someone making use of bioinformatics resources in an applied context, such as in medical practice) would need a basic level of understanding of the methods and a stronger focus on the interpretation of the outputs. In a recent publication [1], the ISCB Education Committee’s Curriculum Task Force described the potential for refinement and application of bioinformatics core competencies for different user groups. Here, we describe the further refinement of these competencies and provide a series of use cases illustrating their applications to different bioinformatics education and training programs globally.
To better illustrate the use of the competencies, we present here a series of brief use cases—scenarios in which the competencies have proven valuable already in defining, refining, or assessing a bioinformatics training mechanism. These use cases were selected to highlight a diverse set of training needs, user personas, types of training programs, and educational settings. In this spirit, we present examples grouped into three categories: (1) complete degree programs for which the competencies have proven valuable to overall curriculum design or refinement; (2) supplements to existing degree programs (i. e. , specializations, tracks, certificates); and (3) training resources outside the context of specific degree programs.
The work of the Task Force identified a pressing need for bioinformatics education but also tremendous variability in the details of this need and widespread confusion about how to meet it for diverse target user populations and training contexts. The effort to develop and successively refine a set of core competencies for bioinformatics training has sought to assist educators in this domain by providing a conceptual framework in which the field can more productively share experiences and pool our efforts in identifying best practices for bioinformatics education in the face of divergent needs and expectations. Several years of community engagement efforts and subsequent refinements have brought us ever closer to that goal, leading to a broader appreciation of the range of user personas in need of bioinformatics education and a more productive language through which to identify and discuss shared needs and training mechanisms. As the use cases presented here illustrate, the core competencies that arose from this process provide a basis for the community of bioinformatics educators, despite widely divergent goals and student populations, to draw upon their common experiences in designing, refining, and evaluating their own training programs. We caution that these core competencies are not, and are not intended to be, a prescription for a specific set of curricula or curricular standards. While the competencies highlight common points of focus across training scenarios, few points escape dissent. The field is still figuring out what it means to be trained in bioinformatics or how best to provide that training. We do not expect that state of affairs to end in the near future. Nonetheless, we hope that having a framework in which we can evaluate how different programs define and service their training needs will prove valuable in the maturation of bioinformatics as a discipline. In the future, the Task Force plans to detail its guidelines in a manner similar to the CourseSource framework. Specifically, the plan is to provide an explicit mapping between the competencies and the CourseSource framework, which is tailored for life scientists. The taskforce’s ultimate goal is to have explicit mappings of courses to competencies for each of the personas in the ISCB competency framework. This is already underway for life scientists (with the CourseSource framework) and clinical practitioners (with the NHS clinical bioinformatics framework). Where there are synergies with other frameworks, we see potential to map these to curricula for other personas; for example, the Edison framework for data science has many elements relevant to bioinformatics engineers; the ABET framework was indeed used as a basis to develop the ISCB competency framework; and the curricula described in this manuscript also provide specific examples that can be generalised into a framework for bioinformatics engineers.
As data size and complexity increase in life science research, so the need for bioinformatics training has increased. This training is required across a wide variety of audiences, but varies in the level of detail and content that needs to be delivered. A scientist wishing to use some bioinformatics tools to analyse their specific dataset will require different competencies than one that provides support in a bioinformatics services environment. The Curriculum Task Force of the International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB) Education Committee has attempted to address this by developing a set of bioinformatics core competencies and mapping these to ten different user profiles across the spectrum of potential trainees. Here we present the final iteration of the competencies and some examples to demonstrate how they have been used to drive bioinformatics curriculum development and training in different settings.
applied mathematics
simulation and modeling
algorithms
scientists
mathematics
genome analysis
science and technology workforce
research and analysis methods
computer and information sciences
message from iscb
bioinformatics
engineers
people and places
professions
science policy
careers in research
database and informatics methods
computer software
genetics
biology and life sciences
population groupings
physical sciences
genomics
computational biology
genomic medicine
The development and application of bioinformatics core competencies to improve bioinformatics training and education