With the growing availability and accessibility of big data in ecology, we
face an urgent need to train the next generation of scientists in data
science practices and tools. One of the biggest barriers for implementing
a data-driven curriculum in undergraduate classrooms is the lack of
training and support for educators to develop their own skills and time to
incorporate these principles into existing courses or develop new ones.
Alongside the research goals of the National Ecological Observatory
Network (NEON), providing education and training are key components for
building a community of scientists and users equipped to utilize
large-scale ecological and environmental data. To address this need, the
NEON Data Education Fellows program formed as a collaborative Faculty
Mentoring Network (FMN) between scientists from NEON and university
faculty interested in using NEON data and resources in their ecology
classrooms. Like other FMNs, this group has two main goals: 1) to provide
tools, resources, and support for faculty interested in developing
data-driven curriculum, and (2) to make teaching materials that have been
implemented and tested in the classroom available as open educational
resources for other educators. We hosted this program using an open
education and collaboration platform from the Quantitative Undergraduate
Biology Education and Synthesis (QUBES) project. Here, we share lessons
learned from facilitating five FMN cohorts and emphasize the successes,
pitfalls, and opportunities for developing open education resources
through community-driven collaborations.
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Flexible and Inclusive Ecology Projects that Harness Collaboration and NEON‐Enabled Science to Enhance Student Learning
The COVID‐19 pandemic significantly impacted undergraduate education and fundamentally altered the structure of course delivery in higher education. In field‐based biology and ecology courses, where instructors and students typically work collaboratively and in‐person to collect data, this has been particularly challenging. In this context, faculty from the Ecological Research as Education Network (EREN) collaborated with the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) to design five free‐flexible learning projects for use by instructors in varied modalities (e.g., socially distanced in‐person, remote, or HyFlex). The five flexible learning projects incorporated the Ecological Society of America’s 4DEE framework and included field data collection, data analysis components, and an activity that incorporates existing NEON field protocols or datasets. Each project was designed to provide faculty members with a high degree of flexibility so that they could tailor the implementation of the projects to fit course‐specific needs. Collectively, these learning projects were designed to be flexible, inclusive, and facilitate hands‐on research while working in alternative classroom settings.
more » « less- PAR ID:
- 10446426
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America
- Volume:
- 103
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 0012-9623
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract The COVID‐19 pandemic has created new challenges for instructors who seek high‐impact educational practices that can be facilitated online without creating excessive burdens with technology, grading, or enforcement of honor codes. These practices must also account for the possibility that some students may need to join courses asynchronously and have limited or unreliable connectivity. Of the American Association of Colleges and University's list of 11 high‐impact educational practices, writing‐intensive courses may be the easiest for science faculty to adopt during these difficult times. Not only can writing assignments promote conceptual learning, they can also deepen student engagement with the subject matter and with each other. Furthermore, writing assignments can be incredibly flexible in terms of how they are implemented online and can be designed to reduce the possibility of cheating and plagiarism. To accelerate the adoption of writing pedagogies, we summarize evidence‐based characteristics of effective writing assignments and offer a sample writing assignment from an introductory ecology course. We then suggest five strategies to help instructors manage their workload. Although the details of the sample assignment may be particular to our course, this framework is general enough to be adapted to most science courses, including those taught in‐person, those taught online, and those that must be able to switch quickly between the two.
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