Design and Practice of Experimental Teaching for Research Methods and Technologies in Cell Biology Based on Demand-Oriented Education

Cell biology research methods and techniques is one of the training courses for graduate students before enter the laboratory in many universities. However, due to the limited time of experimental teaching while the teaching contents are increasing, choosing suitable teaching content has always been a challenge faced by experimental teaching. Here, we introduce a demand-oriented experimental teaching design and its application to solve this problem. Firstly, we referred to cell biology-related journals, counted the frequency of cell biology experiments used in these journals, and modularly classified these experiments according to their detection purposes, from which we selected high-frequency experiments as teaching content. Secondly, we adopted a problem-driven approach to cultivate students' experimental design and problem-solving abilities. For other experiments in the module, students are encouraged to engage in self-study through the “Internet + Education” platform to enhance their independent learning ability. Moreover, the teacher conducted on-site assessment of students' operational skills, experimental results, and data analysis abilities. Finally, its effectiveness was evaluated through questionnaire analyses and focus group discussion. Students reported that the experimental skills learned in the course were widely used in their research, which helped them adapt to graduate research more quickly and gain confidence in future research. Student feedback also showed that they had significantly improved their experimental operations, design skills, and data analysis. In summary, this study confirms that demand-oriented experimental teaching design and practice are effective and provide a reliable model for experimental teaching reform in other educational institutions.