Massive open online course “From Disease to Genes and Back” is open

In PolyOmica, we some times need to train people in the basics of genetics and genomics. While training people in basics is fun, it is quite time consuming, and is not exactly our company’s core activity. For a long time, we thought that it would be great to have a massive open online course (MOOC) that would explain basics of human genetics and genomics. Last year, together with our colleagues having similar needs, we have started working on such a course.

Today, we are happy and proud to announce the opening of the MOOC “From Disease to Genes and Back” [1]. The course is dedicated to the question of how genetics and genomics can be used to study biology of human disease. It is available from November 24th, 2017, on the Coursera learning platform.

The course is aimed at bachelor students in health/biomedicine/biology programs and professionals who want to learn more about human genomics. The course explains the principles of organisation of human genome, the basics of population and quantitative genetics, and the principles of genetic analysis of Mendelian and complex disorders. Finally, we discuss the applications of genomic findings in clinics. The course consists of 38 video lectures interspersed with with reading sessions and quizzes. Assuming 3–5 hours a week, the total study load is 6 weeks.

The course is designed and taught by PolyOmica together with our colleagues from the Novosibirsk State University, Russia, the University of Liège (GIGA Institute), Belgium (Dr. Marianna Bevova and Prof. Michel Georges) and the University of Leuven, Belgium (Prof. Gert Matthijs).

You can watch the trailer of the course here:

[1] M. R. Bevova, Y. Aulchenko, M. Georges, G. Matthijs, L.C. Karssen, Y. Tsepilov, N. Aulchenko, S. Sharapov (2017) “From Disease to Genes and Back”, MOOC on https://www.coursera.org