Inquiry activities have become increasingly common in
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- NSF-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 Ecology and Evolution courses, but the rapid shift to remote instruction for many faculty members in response to the COVID‐19 pandemic has created new challenges for maintaining these student‐centered activities in a distance learning format. Moving forward, many instructors will be asked to create flexible course structures that allow for a mix of different teaching modalities and will be looking for resources to support student inquiry in both online and in‐person settings. Here, we propose the use of data‐driven inquiry activities as a flexible option for offering students experiences to build career‐relevant skills and learn fundamental ecological concepts. We share lessons learned from our experiences teaching a two‐semester course‐based research experience in global change ecology that leverages publicly available datasets to engage students in broadly relevant scientific inquiry. -
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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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