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Mastery of quantitative skills is increasingly critical for student success in life sciences, but few curricula adequately incorporate quantitative skills. Quantitative Biology at Community Colleges (QB@CC) is designed to address this need by building a grassroots consortium of community college faculty to 1) engage in interdisciplinary partnerships that increase participant confidence in life science, mathematics, and statistics domains; 2) generate and publish a collection of quantitative skills–focused open education resources (OER); and 3) disseminate these OER and pedagogical practices widely, in turn expanding the network. Currently in its third year, QB@CC has recruited 70 faculty into the network and created 20 modules. Modules can be accessed by interested biology and mathematics educators in high school, 2-year, and 4-year institutions. Here, we use survey responses, focus group interviews, and document analyses (principles-focused evaluation) to evaluate the progress in accomplishing these goals midway through the QB@CC program. The QB@CC network provides a model for developing and sustaining an interdisciplinary community that benefits participants and generates valuable resources for the broader community. Similar network-building programs may wish to adopt some of the effective aspects of the QB@CC network model to meet their objectives. 

ABSTRACT As a validated assessment, the Microbiology for Health Sciences Concept Inventory (MHSCI) is a valuable tool to evaluate student progress in health sciences microbiology courses. In this brief analysis, we survey MHSCI faculty users and report student MHSCI scores to determine the impact on student learning gains of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent quarantine in spring 2020. Although a majority of students reported moving to a fully online lecture and lab microbiology course in the spring 2020 semester, there was no statistically significant impact on student outcomes reported by the MHSCI, and by some measures, student learning gains increased in the semester students moved to online learning. Further research is necessary to determine the continuing impact of online lecture/lab courses on student outcomes on the MHSCI. Our analysis of data from spring 2020 shows that the MHSCI is still a statistically reliable measure of student misconceptions and overall difficulty scores for each item on the MHSCI was unchanged due to the pandemic.