Peer teaching as bioinformatics training strategy: incentives, challenges, and benefits.

As biomedical research becomes more data-intensive, bioinformatics is becoming essential to understanding biological processes, systems, and diseases. In this paper we describe the use of a series of peer teaching workshops as a strategy to respond to the bioinformatics training needs at a research-intensive institution. In addition to the data collected from the workshops, we also used personal experiences of researchers who participated as peer teachers to understand the incentives, challenges, and benefits of peer teaching. Developing communication skills such as confidence in teaching, explaining complex concepts, and better understanding of the topic emerged as primary benefits that the teachers obtained from this experience. Lack of time for teaching and the struggles of classroom management were identified as two major challenges. We suggest that peer teaching can be beneficial not only to train researchers in bioinformatics, but also as a professional development opportunity for graduate students and postdoctoral trainees.