RCN-UBE Incubator: An online networking hub for collaboration, discovery, and synthesis in quantitative biology curricula

College Of William And Mary, Williamsburg VA

Investigators

Abstract

The purpose of this RCN-UBE incubator project is to create a central online hub for biologists and mathematicians to collaborate to improve students' understanding of quantitative reasoning. While online resources such as repositories of classroom materials exist to help instructors modify their curricula, there is no central location where instructors can come together to work on interdisciplinary teaching. QUBES (Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis) will be a streamlined educational repository with a direct link to a Facebook-like social interface, which would allow individuals to discuss different teaching submissions, pedagogies, and philosophies in an efficient manner. Intellectual Merit: The QUBES hub will provide an online nucleus of collaboration, discovery and synthesis in quantitative biology curricula. This goal will be facilitated by extensive collaboration with multiple professional societies (e.g. Society for Mathematical Biology, Mathematical Society of America, National Institute for Mathematical Biology and Synthesis) who share in this common goal. During the funding period, curricular development needs will be identified from the community via multiple meetings with organizations and undergraduate life science educators. Popular existing standards (e.g. CCCS), or the development of new standards, will be used for all material to allow for maximal sharing of resources with other resources/software. The website will be a place where instructors can go to prepare and collaborate on course design, with emphasis on maximal sharing of material and expertise via inclusion of a social networking component. Association with scientific societies and presence at meetings will solidify the long-term survival of the website. Broader Impacts: QUBES will be constructed using all open source components whose software will be completely community designed and maintained. Expected learning outcomes for biology majors will be created and molded into a curricular standard that will be referenced by all learning materials on the website. All forms of curricular materials (e.g. class and lab modules, classroom ready datasets, lecture notes, question sets, and videos) will be housed on-site in a repository or links provided to existing off-site repositories, with comments and ratings via the user community to help in discovery and validation. QUBES will facilitate the creation of a community of quantitative biology educators who will benefit from having access to an easy-to-use and navigable web-based portal for enabling meaningful collaborations in curriculum development. 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/).