I declare that this thesis is my own account of my research and contains as its main content work which has not previously been submitted for a degree at any tertiary education institution.

Abstract: Online learning initia-tives over the past decade have become increasingly comprehen-sive in their selection of courses and sophisticated in their presen-tation, culminating in the recent announcement of a number of consortium and startup activities that promise to make a university education on the internet, free of charge, a real possibility. At this pivotal moment it is appropriate to explore the potential for obtaining comprehensive bioinformatics training with currently existing free video resources. This article pre-sents such a bioinformatics curric-ulum in the form of a virtual course catalog, together with editorial commentary, and an assessment of strengths, weaknesses, and likely future directions for open online learning in this field. Online Learning Comes of Age Online academic ‘‘courseware’ ’ at the university level has now been available to the public for a decade, the earliest concerted effort having originated in 2002 with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and their OpenCour-seWare initiative