RCN-UBE Incubator: Designing an Infrastructure and Sustainable Learning Community for Integrating Data-Centric Teaching Resources in Undergraduate Biology Education

St. John Fisher College

Investigators

Abstract

This RCN-UBE incubator network seeks to address challenges facing the valuable use of authentic research data to teach biological concepts. Exploring real scientific data helps students develop quantitative skills and understand the real-world context for core biological concepts. These methods provide high-impact learning experiences in undergraduate STEM education, which can increase retention and academic achievement for all students, including those from underrepresented and underserved groups. A great deal of progress has been made in the collection, sharing, and discoverability of biological research data as a public resource. However, limitations in sharing and adapting these resources to formats for teaching remains a barrier to wide dissemination and adoption in the classroom. The development and publication of these resources represent the first step in the open educational resources (OER) life cycle, where instructors then find, implement, and enrich these resources based on the context of their classrooms. This network will identify causes and mechanisms to overcome the gap in the curriculum cycle after the development stage by designing a community framework for the large-scale sharing and adaptation of data-centric collections. There is an emerging need to address this gap given the rapid increase and availability of diverse research and monitoring datasets. Increasing the availability of data-centric resources will also promote critical thinking, communication, and quantitative skills, which are key skills for classroom success, for the STEM workforce, and for science literacy in an informed citizenry. The network will be composed of experts in information science and the OER model, experienced educational resource developers, leaders in faculty development, diversity, and inclusion efforts, and undergraduate instructors with interests in applying teaching approaches with data in the classroom. These diverse stakeholders will collaborate to build a working model for sustaining a technological and social community focused on emerging approaches and resources for biology data-centric teaching. Through a workshop and a series of online meetings this network will (1) define the needs and challenges of different stakeholders associated with data-centric pedagogy, (2) explore social-technological solutions in order to create a vision of a virtual space that would promote the OER model, and to identify necessary incentives for sustained investment by faculty and module providers in the virtual space, and (3) conceptually synthesize discussions into a report which will serve as the framework for an expanding and evolving network. The goal of this network is to further elucidate barriers and generate mechanisms to overcome these barriers to wide-dissemination of high-impact data-centric teaching pedagogies in biology. This project is being jointly funded by the Directorate for Biological Sciences (BIO), Division of Biological Infrastructure, and the Directorate for Education and Human Resources (EHR), Division of Undergraduate Education as part of their efforts to address the challenges posed in Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action (http://visionandchange/finalreport/).