RCN-UBE Incubator: Growing a Physiology Education Community of Practice

American Physiological Society, Rockville MD

Investigators

Abstract

This incubator project is establishing the Physiology Educators Community of Practice (PECOP) which centers primarily on undergraduate education, but encompasses multiple teaching levels (K-12, grad/professional), including international and novice educators. PECOP also promotes strong participation by faculty at institutions serving underrepresented students. The American Physiological Society (APS) has developed key components to support the PECOP, including a National Science Digital Library with tools to build and support teaching and learning communities (APS Archive of Teaching Resources, www.apsarchive.org), online faculty development to promote online community involvement, and new support for a biannual conference on teaching and learning which will offer workshops and sessions for faculty from all types of institutions. The conference serves as a forum to build the PECOP structure and recruit participants, encouraging educators to interact, share resources, and collaborate on an ongoing basis. It also provides an opportunity for physiology educators to learn how to use scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL) methodologies to improve their teaching and offers teaching professional skills training for new physiologists. This RCN-UBE project is using Archive community tools and the teaching conference to organize and launch PECOP, a support community that provides resources, training, mentoring, and community benefits for the teaching of physiology. In the organizational stages, the project is recruiting Thought Leaders who will guide discussions at the conference and online on key topics such as curriculum development, student-centered learning, assessment, effective undergraduate research experiences, and SOTL methods. Finally, the project is providing support to promote participation in PECOP via regional and national meetings of physiology educators. The Intellectual Merit of this initiative is the creation of an active community of practice (COP) that will increase the overall impact and effectiveness of physiology, which is among the most common undergraduate course topics worldwide. PECOP will encourage and support best teaching practices, evidence-based teaching and preparation of new educators to work with diverse students through training, resource sharing, and mentoring in live and online settings. Broader Impacts of PECOP lie in its engagement of physiologists from diverse institutions, the support for collaborations among new and experienced educators to share educational research and best practices, and the important communication forum it provides across educational levels (undergrad-grad-professional). This project is funded jointly by the Directorate for Biological Sciences and the Directorate of Education and Human Resources, Division of Undergraduate Education in support of efforts to address the challenges posed in Vision and Change in Undergraduate Education: A Call to Action http://visionandchange.org/finalreport/.