Information for Potential Consultants

About PPS

The Principles of Protein Structure (PPS) course is now in it's third year. The course in it's first year was experimental (and free) which lead to a certificate of participation for the students.

The following year (and currently) the course leads to an Advanced Certificate from Birkbeck College (University of London)( if the students so desire - taking the exam at the end of the course is not compulsory). The students pay a fee for the course and exam.  The course is non-profit making and course fee's go towards the admin overheads.

The Role of Consultants

All our consultants are volunteers who help during their freetime. The role of a consultant can be as much or as little as they want dependant on their available time.  Consultants can help in a number of ways :-

Authors

writing hypertext material for inclusion into the course.  Any material produced will of course be acknowledged and the copyright retained by the author.  We can with any technical problems authors have (converting text into HTML etc).

Biomoo Sessions-'Lecturers'

We use the BioMoo (a text based virtual reality) to hold realtime interactive lectures.  Usually this involves one or two consultants/PPS staff leading a discussion/seminar on a particular subject relating to the course work.

Group Consultants

The students are split up into groups and each group has a tutor assigned to it from the Staff here at Birkbeck.  We also like to assign consultants to the groups to help answer questions, lead discussions etc.

Technical Consultants

Technical consultants help on specific technical problems that may arise i.e. help with rasmol/kinemage etc.