WIP: Identifying Tutorial Affordances for Interdisciplinary Learning Environments

TL;DR

This study investigates how bioinformatics tutorials support interdisciplinary learning by analyzing their design patterns and assessing their effectiveness for diverse learner backgrounds.

Contribution

It provides a novel analysis of bioinformatics tutorials' design patterns and evaluates their capacity to support interdisciplinary education.

Findings

Identified ten common themes in tutorial design

Assessed tutorials' effectiveness in supporting interdisciplinarity

Highlighted strengths and limitations of current tutorial designs

Abstract

This work-in-progress research paper explores the effectiveness of tutorials in interdisciplinary learning environments, specifically focusing on bioinformatics. Tutorials are typically designed for a single audience, but our study aims to uncover how they function in contexts where learners have diverse backgrounds. With the rise of interdisciplinary learning, the importance of learning materials that accommodate diverse learner needs has become evident. We chose bioinformatics as our context because it involves at least two distinct user groups: those with computational backgrounds and those with biological backgrounds. The goal of our research is to better understand current bioinformatics software tutorial designs and assess them in the conceptual framework of interdisciplinarity. We conducted a content analysis of 22 representative bioinformatics software tutorials to identify design patterns and understand their strengths and limitations. We found common codes in the representative tutorials and synthesized them into ten themes. Our assessment shows degrees to which current bioinformatics software tutorials fulfill interdisciplinarity.