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While molecular visualization has been recognized as a threshold concept in biology education, the explicit assessment of students' visual literacy skills is rare. To facilitate the evaluation of this fundamental ability, a series of NSF‐IUSE‐sponsored workshops brought together a community of faculty engaged in creating instruments to assess students' biomolecular visualization skills. These efforts expanded our earlier work in which we created a rubric describing overarching themes, learning goals, and learning objectives that address student progress toward biomolecular visual literacy. Here, the BioMolViz Steering Committee (BioMolViz.org) documents the results of those workshops and uses social network analysis to examine the growth of a community of practice. We also share many of the lessons we learned as our workshops evolved, as they may be instructive to other members of the scientific community as they organize workshops of their own.

 

For many programs, the COVID-19 pandemic prompted a shift from in-person workshops to a virtual format. Using a mixed methods approach with data gleaned from feedback forms and a novel pre/post social network analysis (SNA) survey, this paper examines the merits of using online vs. in-person professional development workshops to build collaborative networks of STEM instructors. A series of biomolecular visualization workshops served as our case study, and participant perceptions in online and in-person workshops were compared and contrasted across a variety of metrics. The findings suggest that online workshops present new opportunities for the future of collaboration. Rather than a temporary stop-gap measure, virtual collaborations can increase content knowledge and foster a sense of community. 

Biochemistry relies heavily on the use of images and diagrams to make the abstract tangible. Yet, as biochemistry instructors, how do we know whether our students see the same things we instructors see? BioMolViz (biomolviz.org) is a community of practice dedicated to the instruction and assessment of biomolecular visual literacy. To this end, BioMolViz created the Biomolecular Visualization Framework, an assessment tool that identifies more than 200 learning objectives clustered under twelve overarching themes, such as StructureFunction and Alternate Renderings. The team is currently assembling a searchable repository to host assessment instruments for each of these learning objectives. To aid in its construction, BioMolViz is recruiting participants to help write, revise, and pilot these instruments in the classroom. Here, we introduce the Framework, share various BioMolViz projects, and invite likeminded individuals to work with us to build students’ biomolecular visual literacy.