QUBES Sneak Peek: Be the first to get to know the new QUBES Resources System for finding, adapting, and sharing teaching resources
As part of the QUBESHub site redesign we have launched our system for sharing Open Educational Resources (OER). We believe that this system provides important opportunities for faculty and projects to share materials in ways that will be most useful to the broader QUBES community. Our goal is to provide a system that makes it easy to find, adapt, and share teaching resources and support scholarly approaches to teaching.
The QUBES Resources System has built-in features that support OER best practices, including the following:
- Each resource is issued a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), which makes it easy to identify and find your teaching resource.
- Each resource has descriptive metadata and tags that make it easier to find and browse materials based on things like teaching topics, student audiences, and classroom settings.
- Resources are generally shared in formats that make it easy to adapt them for use in your own classroom, and you are encouraged to share those adaptations back to the community.
- The system automatically tracks the impact of resources including views, downloads, and adaptations to help you keep track of how widely your materials are being used.
Over the next month, the activities and conversations in the QUBES Support Community for Partner Projects will center around the new QUBES Resources System. To kick off our focus on resources please take 3 minutes to complete this short survey and help us shape the conversation to address your project’s goals and needs.
What are our Partner Projects up to?
We are delighted to share with you project updates from the leaders of three of our Partner Projects: Data Incubator Group (DIG), HHMI BioInteractive, and National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON).
Data Incubator Group (DIG) is recruiting for their next Faculty Mentoring Network
The DIG network aims to expand the adoption of data-centric teaching resources and apply the open educational resources (OER) life cycle framework to strengthen the implementation and adaptation phases of these resources. We’ve had a busy year between organizing an oral session at ESA, launching an RCN Incubator Community at the Life Discovery Conference, and publishing a special issue of dataset teaching modules from our Spring 2017 FMN in Teaching Issues and Experiments in Ecology.
We are currently recruiting for our next FMN! This year we are closing the OER cycle by adapting, implementing, and re-sharing the new TIEE Dataset modules. This network includes participant support to attend the BioQUEST/QUBES Summer Workshop June 18-23 at Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA. Learn more and submit your application here.
- Dr. Kaitlin Bonner, St. John Fisher College
- Dr. Arietta Fleming-Davies, University of San Diego
- Dr. Kristine Grayson, University of Richmond
- Dr. X. Ben Wu, Texas A&M University
HHMI BioInteractive announces upcoming Faculty mentoring Network and new blog
HHMI’s BioInteractive and the Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis (QUBES) project invite applications for a Faculty Mentoring Network (FMN). Participants in this network will work in small groups to produce resources related to the theme of regulation that support new or existing HHMI BioInteractive materials. For more details about this opportunity, please visit our FMN group site on QUBESHub. Applications will be accepted until April 9th and candidates will be notified regarding their status by April 16th.
Hear from educators about how they’re using BioInteractive resources through our new
blog. Here are two recent blog posts discussing some of the most difficult science practices for students to master, argumentation from evidence and data interpretation. In a recent blog, North Carolina community college instructor, Parks Collins discusses how he uses a structured argumentation framework and our Virus Explorer Click & Learn to address the question, ‘Are viruses alive?’ In another post, Pennsylvania high school educator Bob Cooper unpacks how to use the BSCS ‘Identify and Interpret (I2)®’ strategy with our Data Points, which feature figures from published research papers.
- Melissa Csikari, M.S., HHMI BioInteractive
- Dr. Satoshi Amagai, HHMI BioInteractive
National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) FMN faculty using NEON data in the classroom
In 2014, a paper authored by Langen and colleagues discussed challenges with using large public datasets in undergraduate classrooms and concluded “our working group was surprised at how difficult it was to find the specific data needed for an exercise online (if they existed at all)”. Discussing this paper in last week’s NEON Data Education Fellows FMN, Dr. Naupaka Zimmerman said, “NEON is solving this! Being able to go back year after year and get the same data in a standardized format, with new data constantly being added, means that I can use this data [in my teaching].”
The National Ecological Observatory Network, or NEON, is an NSF-funded project operated by Battelle that provides ecological data from across the US (including Puerto Rico, Alaska, and Hawaii) online for anyone to use. From genomics data to remote sensing data and hydrology to plant phenology, the broad spectrum of data can be used in many different undergraduate classrooms.
To better support faculty using NEON data in the classroom, Dr. Megan Jones, staff scientist and science educator for the NEON project, is co-facilitating a spring 2018 NEON Data Education Fellows FMN with Dr. Kristine Grayson from the University of Richmond. This inaugural FMN consists of 12 faculty members using NEON data with their students. Some of these faculty are implementing and adapting existing educational resources provided by the NEON project and other members are creating new materials. In the next few weeks, everyone will share their successes and challenges with the materials they’ve implemented. The revised modules will be published on QUBES in June adding to the Open Educational Resources available for you to use.
Check out current educational resources on the NEON QUBES site and watch the QUBES newsletter for future opportunities to participate in a NEON FMN. For questions about using NEON data contact, Dr. Megan Jones.
- Dr. Megan Jones, National Ecological Observatory Network – Battelle
- Dr. Alycia Crall, National Ecological Observatory Network – Battelle
Please help us advertise the BioQUEST/QUBES Summer Workshop!
Please share information about the BioQUEST/QUBES Summer Workshop vigorously with your colleagues. Post it in the hallway, pester your department chair, invite awesome faculty from departments across campus, and hit up your colleagues across the country! A personal invitation from you is more likely to get attention than our blanket announcements. Encourage your colleagues to share with their colleagues, too! The information to share can be found in this PDF flyer and this blog post. We appreciate your help!
Have you heard about the QUBES site redesign?
The QUBES main pages have been redesigned based on your feedback. Learn more and tell us what you think about the changes here.
Also, look for more details about the site redesign in the next QUBES newsletter. Are you subscribed to the QUBES newsletter? Manage your subscriptions here.
Quick Tip
There is an option to display a comment box and list of user comments at the bottom of the overview page (and other pages) of your project site on QUBESHub. However, comments at the bottom of the page will appear chronologically and can get kind of messy. Instead, we recommend having discussions occur in the group forum, where you can organize discussions by topic or theme so that they are easy to read, even for people joining the group at different times. Of course, if you want to engage group members with the content on a particular page, it is a good idea to include a link on that page to send people to a particular discussion thread in the forum.
The simplest way to turn comments off is to go to "Group Manager", then "Settings", scroll down to the "Settings" box at the very bottom, and under "Comments" select "No" from the drop down menu (see image below).
You can also turn comments on/off for individual pages by going to "Group Manager", then "Pages", click the "Manage Page" button to the right of a particular page, and go to the "Settings" box on the lower right to turn comments on/off (see image below).
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