Sustaining and Growing a Dispersed Community of Practice that Engages Undergraduates in Course-Based Genomics Research

University Of Alabama Tuscaloosa, Tuscaloosa AL

Investigators

Abstract

With support from the NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Program: Education and Human Resources (IUSE: EHR), this project aims to serve the national interest by improving undergraduate education in genomics. As the economy becomes more dependent on science and technology, the need for highly capable STEM workers is increasingly important. As a result, high-quality STEM education is critical for the U.S. economy, particularly STEM education that includes training in data science. It is also important to identify successful strategies to retain and inspire undergraduate STEM students, especially those from underrepresented groups, so that they may thrive in STEM careers. To help address STEM education needs, the Genomics Education Partnership seeks to integrate active learning into the undergraduate curriculum through Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) centered in genomics. In these CUREs, students engage in authentic scientific research and develop valuable skills in data science while also practicing problem solving and perseverance to produce a scientific publication. The only tool required for a student to carry out the research is access to the internet, making the program financially accessible to all institutions, including ones that are under-resourced. This project has four objectives: 1) to restructure the Genomics Education Partnership to more widely distribute management and oversight responsibilities throughout the Genomics Education Partnership; 2) to identify effective strategies for recruiting and retaining faculty from community colleges as Genomics Education Partnership members; 3) to develop and optimize a system of online training for new faculty members in the Genomics Education Partnership; and 4) to diversify the scientific projects included in the CUREs. Achieving these objectives will contribute to a cost-effective program that provides high-quality CUREs to a greater diversity of undergraduate students. The Genomics Education Partnership is a dispersed Community of Practice founded in 2005 that integrates active learning into the curriculum through genomics-centered CUREs. Its research projects investigate the evolution of genes and genomes, as well as CURE effectiveness. Since its inception, the Genomics Education Partnership has used a centralized leadership structure to create a nationwide research and teaching consortium. To meet challenges associated with growth and diversifying its scientific and pedagogical impact, while maintaining its core mission and achieve sustainability, the Genomics Education Partnership is transitioning to a distributed leadership structure and broadening the scope of Genomics Education Partnership's scientific research projects. The Genomics Education Partnership will optimize a suite of virtual tools to facilitate collaboration and build community across its geographically dispersed members and trainees. Further, it will provide mentorship and teaching assistant support for faculty implementing the curriculum in under-resourced institutional environments. CUREs have been demonstrated to have substantial benefits for minority and disadvantaged students in STEM. The Genomics Education Partnership CURE is an extremely low-cost research opportunity for students, making it financially accessible to a broad range of institutional types. This project will increase the diversity of engaged faculty, students, and institutions. Further, this transition in the Genomics Education Partnership provides the opportunity to identify factors that improve the organization's resilience and scalability providing a model for sustaining and expanding a STEM Community of Practice. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.