Answered plainly, including the awkward ones.

Yes, entirely. No fee, no deposit, nothing to buy. The curriculum, the software and the datasets are all free as well. Basira is not a commercial venture.

No. The programme is built for people who have none. Chapters one and two contain no science at all, and chapter three builds cancer biology from the cell upward. Every cohort so far has started there.

No. Chapter five teaches what you need, and it is written as a reference you return to rather than a course you must finish first. If you have never opened a terminal, you are the intended reader.

Any. We have taken students from first year through to graduates. What matters far more than year is whether you can protect the hours.

Yes. Every session is online, on Google Meet. You need a reliable connection and to be able to make 5–7pm Saudi time on Thursdays and Saturdays.

Taught and written in English, since that is how science is published and how KAU teaches. Every technical term also appears in Arabic in our bilingual glossary, so the concepts are yours in both languages.

Four hours of live sessions a week, plus roughly two hours between them. The capstone in November is heavier, because designing and running a study takes longer than reading about one.

Tell us and catch up on the reading. Missing one is fine. Missing several means you will struggle, because each chapter assumes the one before it.

Tell us and step away. You keep everything you learned, and the curriculum stays free to read. Some people come back for the next cohort.

Basira is an independent research training institution. Our certificate records that you completed nine weeks of structured training in research methods, and at the higher tiers that you designed, pre-registered and ran a study of your own — with the work named on it. Every certificate carries an identifier that anyone can verify on this site, so it stands up to being checked. What supervisors and admissions committees respond to most is the work itself, and you finish with something concrete to show them.

It is a realistic outcome, and we build towards it deliberately. Chapter six takes you through finding a question, pre-registering the design and running the analysis, and a preprint is well within reach for students who put the work in. The outcome depends on your results as well as your effort, so we make no guarantees — but the programme is designed so that you finish with work worth submitting.

A team of four, based in Jeddah and studying at King Abdulaziz University. We built the curriculum ourselves, we teach it ourselves, and we publish all of it openly so it can be judged on its merits. The about page introduces everyone.

Yes, and we would be glad if you did. All six chapters are free to download with no sign-up. Teach from them if you like.

It is archived on Zenodo with a permanent DOI, so the reference keeps working whatever happens to this site:

Gomosani, A., & Marghalani, H. (2026). Basira Curriculum. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21791751

The material is licensed CC BY 4.0 — use it, adapt it, translate it, teach from it, as long as you credit us. Chapters may be cited individually by number and title.