Several years ago, when I first started teaching Intro Biology at the local community college, the class was being taught in a lecture-only format, without active learning or other strategies that encourage student engagement. When I searched the internet for materials to use in the classroom, I was delighted when I discovered the BioInteractive site. As a former scientist as well as a novice educator, I really appreciated that the activities are based on real data from scientific publications, and that many resources show scientists doing their research.

When choosing resources to use, however, I encountered a dilemma that many of you have likely also faced: how to balance a desire to include activities that actively engage students with concerns about having sufficient time to cover the course content. For example, the estimated time for many activities is listed as “one 50-minute class period,” which wasn’t tenable for my courses in many instances.

In addition to using the full-length activities for out-of-class work, I have modified or repurposed many BioInteractive resources to take 10 minutes or less of class time. I have primarily used these short activities to reinforce concepts introduced during lectures. Over the past several years, I have used this approach while teaching Introductory Biology I (cell/molecular biology), Genetics, Cell Biology, and a course introducing students to research and while teaching in different modalities: synchronous and asynchronous online, as well as in-person.

Here are examples of how I adapted and implemented different BioInteractive genetics resources as short activities.

Using cards to teach the central dogma

Before covering transcription and translation, I activate the students’ prior knowledge of this topic by using the cards from the “‘Fixing’ Gene Expression” activity. These cards depict different steps in eukaryotic gene expression; an example of a card is shown here: 

I give students the cards with labels and have them put the cards in the correct order. To save time, I don’t use the accompanying “Student Handout” or the Central Dogma and Genetic Medicine interactive module (Click & Learn), which is a suggested extension of the activity.

During in-person classes, I give students about five minutes to order the cards while working in pairs. I then give a brief lecture with an overview of gene expression (still without the details) and give them a chance to rearrange their cards. Each card has a letter; I have the students “vote” on the order of the cards/letters using a student response system (such as clickers or Mentimeter).

On a practical note, laminating the cards not only makes them last longer but in my experience also leads to fewer students leaving class with these materials.

For my online courses, I put each card image on a separate slide of a PowerPoint/Google Slides presentation, using the individual images of these cards available in the “Card Images (ZIP)” file. I randomize the order of the slides and ask students to rearrange them into the correct order. For synchronous online classes, I have them share their order using a student response system as described above. For asynchronous online classes, I have them answer a one-question multiple-choice quiz about the order of the letters.

Using cards to teach cancer genetics

While I’m teaching the cell cycle in both my Intro Bio and Genetics classes, students learn that mutations in proto-oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes can lead to cancer by disrupting cell regulation. They also learn that cancer is a stochastic, multistep process and that mutations in somatic cells can lead to cancer. To connect these two concepts, and to make them more relevant to the students, I have the students examine the “Patient” cards from Activity 2 in the “Classifying Cancer Genes and Examining Patient Data” resource.

I first show the students an example of a card (like the one shown here) and explain that each card has information about an individual cancer patient, including the type of cancer they have, the cancer genes that are mutated in that patient, and whether those genes are oncogenes (O) or tumor suppressor genes (TS).

For in-person classes, I give each student a card and a few minutes to examine the genes mutated in that patient. Students with cards for the same type of cancer are placed into groups of four, and the groups are asked to compare their findings and see what they can determine about the genes involved in this type of cancer. Initially, students are often perplexed, since each card has different genes listed. However, they usually come to understand that cancer involves mutations in multiple genes, and that different individuals with the same type of cancer may have different mutated genes.

For online classes, each student is assigned one of the cards based on the patient number. I send students a link to a document with all four cards for the same type of cancer (so they can easily see the other cards). Students discuss their thoughts in breakout rooms for synchronous classes and on discussion boards for asynchronous classes.

In both my in-person and online (synchronous and asynchronous) courses, I teach this at the end of the semester. I like to connect the concepts they learn here with other fundamental concepts they learned earlier in the semester. To do this, I give the students a short worksheet to complete before the next class with questions about:

• when during the cell cycle cancer-causing mutations occur
• which enzyme would cause these mutations if it did not function correctly
• which type of mutation (silent, missense, nonsense, insertion, or deletion) results in the gain-of-function mutations in the oncogenes and loss-of-function mutations in the tumor suppressor genes

Using a short video to teach DNA replication

This activity gets students to think critically about the steps in DNA replication while learning about a current topic of interest to them. To introduce this activity, I tell students that the genomes of viruses, unlike genomes of cells, can be either DNA or RNA, and that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, has an RNA genome. Before showing them a short video about how SARS-CoV-2 reproduces in cells, I tell them that, while watching the video, they need to write down at least one way that DNA replication in cells is similar to the replication of the RNA genome of coronaviruses, and one way in which they are different. Next I show the three-minute animation Infection from the resource Biology of SARS-CoV-2.

I then have students share their observations with the class, first for the similarities and then for the differences. For in-person and synchronous online classes, they do this using a word cloud or in chat. For asynchronous classes, students share their thoughts on a discussion board.

Using small portions of handouts to analyze pedigrees

I have observed that many of my students analyze pedigrees by memorizing the characteristics of certain patterns of inheritance rather than thinking about how genes are inherited. To get students to think more critically while analyzing pedigrees, I give them a short worksheet with Questions 2–5 from the “Student Handout” of the activity “Inheritance and Mutations in a Single-Gene Disorder.” To save time, I don’t show the wonderful short film Genes as Medicine that the activity is meant to supplement; I just tell the students that they are interpreting pedigrees about a type of blindness called Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA).

The first two questions ask students to determine the possible patterns of LCA inheritance based on family pedigrees (shown below). Since these pedigrees are consistent with multiple inheritance patterns, students cannot determine how LCA is inherited based on these pedigrees alone.

The next question shows pedigrees from additional families with LCA; taken together, only one pattern of inheritance is possible. Students are asked to state how LCA is inherited, and to cite specific evidence from the pedigrees to both support their choice and to rule out the other possibilities. The final question asks which genotypes are possible for unaffected family members in the pedigree shown on the right of Figure 2 above. I have found that when I use this short activity, students are better at analyzing complex pedigrees in later homework assignments and assessments.

Using a video clip and small portions of handouts to connect point mutations with classical (Mendelian) genetics concepts

After learning about point mutations and the different types of amino acid substitutions they cause, students watch a one-minute clip from the short film Genes as Medicine (from 7:32–8:30) that explains how blindness in individuals with LCA can be caused by mutations in a gene that codes for a protein called RPE65. I then give students a worksheet with data from Part 2 of the “Inheritance and Mutations in a Single-Gene Disorder” activity described above. The worksheet includes portions of the protein sequences for two individuals with LCA (Tables 1 and 2 from the “Student Handout” for the activity); one table is shown below.

The worksheet states that both alleles have a point mutation and asks students to identify:

• which amino acid (if any) is encoded by the mutation
• whether that change is caused by a missense or a nonsense mutation
• whether the individual has the same mutation or different mutations in their two alleles

Although rather simple, this brief activity reinforces the relationship between mutations and the inability of a protein to function correctly and connects those concepts to what the students learned earlier in the course about single-gene disorders.

Key Takeaways

In asynchronous classes, I assign these short activities derived from BioInteractive resources in between the taped minilectures, just after the minilecture that covers that topic. During in-person and synchronous online classes, I use these activities along with other short active learning activities (such as think-pair-share, answering questions with student response technologies, and working in groups on problems) to break up the lecture portion into segments of no more than 15 minutes.

This year, as an extra-credit question on my finals, I asked students to give me one idea they had for improving the course. A number of students suggested that I add more of these short activities. Specifically, several students mentioned that, during group work/breakout sessions, the other students were much more engaged and on task when working on the modified BioInteractive activities, which were short and focused on a single topic, than when they were working on longer problem sets covering several different topics. I have also noticed that students in both in-person and online classes are more likely to ask questions after these activities than during normal lecture time.

Although the examples shown here focus on genetics, this same approach can be used to modify BioInteractive activities on a variety of other topics such as ecology, evolution, etc. Making these short activities takes relatively little effort, since they use portions of carefully developed and vetted resources that are typically already designed to be broken into parts, and often requires only modifying or writing a few questions. BioInteractive strongly encourages and supports customization of their materials, so many BioInteractive resources have a “Resource Google Folder” that contains a Google Doc version of the student handout or worksheet, from which questions can be easily accessed and modified when necessary.

I strongly encourage you to try using a modified BioInteractive resource in your courses if, like me, you want to include active learning activities in your classes and still have time to cover the course content. I believe that your students, like mine, will enjoy these activities and will, in the process of doing them, get a better grasp on fundamental concepts in biology.