First-year science students in large-enrollment lecture courses are rarely given opportunities to contribute to science beyond their classroom as part of their curriculum. Meanwhile, natural history museums are eager to engage students and the general public in curation and research projects, but cannot risk damage to irreplaceable specimens and typically do not have the resources to manage volunteers on the scale of a large university course. One such museum is the Beaty Biodiversity Museum (BBM) at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada. The BBM is home to UBC’s natural history collections and contains over two million specimens, but, like any natural history museum, specimens are not physically accessible to the general public, including university students. This lesson was designed to be online, with only a short project introduction and wrap-up happening in class, in order to both protect specimens and allow large numbers of students to participate in a museum curation project. A set of readings and videos introduce students to biological diversity and how it is documented in natural history museums, in this case, an herbarium. Along the way, students complete three worksheet activities exploring (i) physical variation within a single species, (ii) how specimens are preserved and digitized, and (iii) how new scientific questions can be asked using digitized biodiversity data. During this lesson, students digitize herbarium specimen labels and make a meaningful contribution to science beyond their own classroom. A pre- and post-survey capture student knowledge and perceptions of biodiversity before and after the lesson.

Primary Image: Two herbarium specimens of the bull kelp, Nereocystis luetkeana, demonstrating physical variation within a species. Images from the Consortium of Pacific Northwest Herbaria, used with written permission from Richard Olmstead, CPNWH Administrator.

Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) is an effective approach for group work in STEM courses. POGIL-style lessons foster active learning because they require students to communicate and co-construct knowledge to solve problems. Here, we have designed a POGIL problem set to help students learn about experiments that led to discoveries about protein import into the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). Approximately 30% of all known proteins get imported into a cell’s ER, where they either stay or travel to another location in the secretory pathway. Because this initial localization to the ER is shared amongst all secretory proteins, it is important for cell biology students to understand the mechanism of ER import. Our problem set directs students to answer questions about how an ER import assay works and how the channel for import (known as the translocon) was discovered. This lesson has been used over 100 times at our institution, where students and instructors alike have found it to be successful in solidifying students’ knowledge of ER import and facilitating students’ experimental design skill development.

Primary Image: Protein import into ER: The image shows a protein being inserted into the ER through the translocon.