NEON Resources for Teaching

NEON provides educational materials through their website. Two main types of education materials are provided: those focusing on science content for the undergraduate classroom (Teaching Modules) and self-paced online data skill acquisition (Tutorials). NEON Data Education Fellows can choose either type of lesson to implement in their classroom.  The tutorials are more likely to be appropriate for specialized courses with strong data analysis components – many were designed to teach R or Python skills but can adapted to spreadsheets if this is more appropriate for the Fellow’s classroom.   

Resource Links

NEON on QUBESHub: qubeshub.org/groups/neon  (including past FMN products)

NEON Teaching Modules: neonscience.org/resources/teaching-modules

NEON Tutorials: neonscience.org/resources/data-tutorials

NEON Data: data.neonscience.org

NEON Science Videos: youtube.com/NEONScience

Short script to "stack" downloaded NEON data: NEON FMN Collection  (in R but designed for those new to R as well)

Contributing to NEON Data Skills

We encourage community contributions to the existing NEON Data Skills resources and new resources developed through this FMN or in collaboration with the NEON Data Skills team. Authors and contributors are listed on all tutorials and teaching modules. Below is additional information on how to contribute tutorials and teaching modules. Please note that Teaching Modules may be made up of multiple, discrete Tutorials. 

Teaching Modules

There are several options for cross-listing Teaching Modules (educational resources designed for classroom/lab use) with QUBESHub and NEON.  Given the possibility to "fork" educational resources on QUBES to show different iterations for different regions or themes, we encourage authors to publish their classroom content on QUBESHub.  

The most frequently used method will be to have the Teaching Module overview page on the NEON site and it will link to the QUBESHub content. 

Teaching Module overview pages are not managed in GitHub.  A template for the Teaching Module overview page can be found here. 

Tutorials

Tutorials (self-paced, online training tools focusing on acquiring specific data skills) will also be hosted on the neonscience.org website.  All tutorials are hosted and developed on GitHub:  https://github.com/NEONScience/NEON-Data-Skills/tree/master/tutorials-in-development

For tutorials there are currently two template files. The first tutorialTemplate.md is a simple format that can be copied into another document (.Rmd,  .ipynb, etc). The second NDS-style-guide.md is a style guide that outlines various markdown and html styles used to render the correct styles on the website. 

Collaborative development using these templates is in its infancy. As you use them, I’d be very interested feedback and Pull Requests to improve them.