Editor degrees:

• Ph.D., Yale University
• B.S., Cornell University

About Teaching and CourseSource

The life sciences – and life science education – has changed tremendously in the nearly 30 years that I’ve been a college professor. I recognized early on that traditional lectures weren’t the best way to foster student learning and have experimented over the years with a variety of teaching approaches including problem-based learning, case studies, and flipped classrooms. While numerous studies have now demonstrated that active-learning significantly improves student education compared to traditional lectures, a major challenge for instructors continues to be ready access to a sufficiently deep collection of high-quality teaching resources.

This is why I have been excited by the potential of a journal for peer-evaluated teaching resources ever since I first heard about CourseSource. The peer-review system both ensures the quality of the material collected and properly recognizes authors, who are often overburdened with teaching, research, and service responsibilities, for their valuable contributions. As chair of the Resource Review Committee, I worked with NIBLSE colleagues to establish an “incubator” system where authors can work in small, collaborative groups to refine their bioinformatics teaching materials. As we anticipated, several authors have gone on to submit their final products to CourseSource for publication. Now as a Bioinformatics Course Editor I’m eager to further advance these efforts to share high-quality educational resources with interested colleagues.