During the course of four meetings, the module content was reviewed and the problems adapted slightly so that they better suited the online learning environment.
Before the last meeting of the module, each group of students submitted a written one-page proposal of the follow-up experiment.
Each group was assigned one or two of the identified techniques and background items, which they presented to the class in the second meeting of the module.
During the last class meeting of each module, the groups presented their experimental proposals and evaluated proposals presented by other groups, acting as "grant panels," an activity described in the CREATE approach (Hoskins et al. 2007; Hoskins and Stevens, 2009).
To provide students with practice in overcoming these difficulties, during the first meeting of each module, we had student work in small groups to identify the important methods, terminology, and background they would need to know to understand the paper.
During the third meeting of the module, most students were asked to present at least one experiment from the paper, focusing on clearly describing how the experiment was performed and on their own interpretation of the data.
Regular weekly meetings with the CVS module committee were sufficient to convince and motivate them.
A number of recent publications [ 2- 6] and conferences (e.g. the 2009 Seefeld Meeting of the Protein Modules Consortium; http://www.proteinmodules.org/) provide some insight into how we can advance our research field in the future.
Student teams are required to schedule additional intensive meetings with the instructor during Module III.
This foundation is consistent with the suggestion, outlined earlier, to have transparency and to avoid compensation [ 3, 6, 7, 14]. 3. The use of regular progress meetings throughout each year for module convenors to discuss student progress.
