Nanocourses: a short course format as an educational tool in a biological sciences graduate curriculum

Traditional courses for graduate students in the biological sciences typically span a semester, are organized around the fundamental concepts of a single discipline, and are aimed at the needs of incoming students. Such courses demand significant time commitment from both faculty and course participants; thus, they are avoided by a subset of the academic science community. Course length and the high barrier to course development are inhibitory to the creation of new courses, especially in emerging areas of biology that may not merit a full-semester approach. Here, we describe the implementation of a new, graduate-level course format, created to allow for rapid development of courses, provide meaningful educational experiences for both junior and senior graduate students and other members of our community, and increase the breadth of faculty involvement in teaching. These courses are greatly abbreviated, and thus termed "nanocourses." Based on experience from the first three semesters, nanocourses seem to accomplish the initial goals that we set. Importantly, nanocourses engaged students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty, and others, thus providing a new mechanism to educate our community in response to rapid advances in biology. In our view, nanocourses are a useful tool that can supplement graduate-level curricula in varied ways.