Team:MIT/Education











Education and Outreach -- The MoClo Learning Module

How can we ensure that people without access to biology labs can still learn about wet lab techniques? With the power of the internet! We created an educational module with both videos and a virtual lab space to teach high school students and college students without access to a biological lab about the power of golden gate cloning. In collaboration with the Johns Hopkins iGEM team, we created a series of educational videos and a virtual labspace.

Our first video was an intro to the power of golden gate cloning from the wonderful Johns Hopkins team, shown here!

We then realized that a lab video might be helpful, and filmed an explanation of golden gate cloning lab techniques with our educational person Zoe.

We also created a virtual lab module to allow people to “practice” golden gate cloning on the web. The .exe is downloadable from here.

That said, due to the security risks posed by java files, we also included a video showing how this virtual module functions, shown below!

We bundled together our videos and other materials into a website at an mit.edu link so that we could more easily share it (rather than as subpages of our igem wiki), and then sent out the resulting module to the wider MIT and Johns Hopkins community for feedback.

So far, we have received 51 responses from people with a wide range of experiences with biology, and polled them both on their perceived efficacy of the module, and how we could improve it for the future!

We sent out an anonymous google form soliciting feedback on our module so far. In accordance with the MIT survey guidelines, we made the survey completely anonymous (using google form's feature for that purpose), and made each individual question optional so that participants could avoid answering any questions they felt uncomfortable with. The only potentially identifying question we asked was about previous experience in biology.

When soliciting feedback, we included a question asking participants to rate their understanding of Golden Gate Cloning both before and after completing the module, on a scale of 1-10. As you can see, the average increase in scores was 4.46 points.

Of course, this does not tell the whole story about the efficacy of our module. No students rated it as decreasing their learning, so it was difficult for us to see negative feedback from this question. Additionally, personal ratings of understanding are highly subjective, and without a knowledge of what there is to know, it's difficult to know what one doesn't know.

To more effectively participate in the design process, we also asked for more open ended feedback about the questions people still had, what was working well, and how we could improve our module. The questions people still had fell under 3 main categories:

  1. What is the difference between golden gate and moclo?
  2. Why is golden gate cloning important?
  3. What is golden gate used for and how is it implemented?

To improve our module, we added these to an FAQ section on the homepage, and provided some more key background information about the processes. We realized in particular we failed to adequately explain that golden gate cloning is the process, and moclo is the standard used to facilitate easier golden gate cloning.

The feedback also fell into a few distinct categories. In general, people felt that the interactivity was helpful, and liked how the same information was repeated over and over to allow for constant reiteration. Some suggestions for improvement included:

  • Adding check-in and concept questions
  • Fixing the video audio quality
  • Adding more text throughout the pages
  • Providing more real world examples
  • Adding fullscreen and mobile compatability
  • Explaining more specifically about the thermocycler
  • Adding captions to improve accessibility
  • Adding more background information

While we were unable to address all of these suggestions at once, we took many of the suggestions to improve our module! We are adding check-in and concept questions below the videos, added some rudimentary captions (both to address accessibility and audio quality issues), added a real-world example of the importance of golden gate in our FAQ page, and provided a text-based introduction to the process before the more specific videos.

Here is an example of one of those questions! Using embedded google forms, we can provide immediate feedback to ensure that students are accurately understanding our materials.

We are continuing to improve our module so that it can be most helpful to our target audience or science students without access to wet-labs, and would like the acknowledge the WONDERFUL help from everyone who took the time to provide their feedback. While it might be cliché, this would not have been possible without y'all.