BIOME: Fall Working Groups

This lightning talk outlines out work to develop a set of podcasts and in0class activities. The podcast episodes on metagenomics in general are available. Additional resources and additional podcast episodes are in development!

Our BIOME Fall Working Group, Scientists Offering Solutions through Sprints, explains the process of putting together a Science sprint in your community. A science sprint is a one-day event in which participants gather and analyze data to address real-life problems. They are a wonderful way to bring a community together. For more information on Science Sprints, check out this website: https://cns.utexas.edu/tides/undergraduate/events-workshops/science-sprints-and-inventors-sprints

Members of the Ciliate Genomics Consortium (CGG) formed a fall working group to brainstorm how to convert existing Course-based Undergraduate Research (CURE) curriculum modules, which have been shared privately, into open education resources (OER) and populate these as resources on a CGC QUBEShub. After our initial meeting, the group decided that we should consider that motivation for teaching with CUREs before making the OERs so that the final resources would be ready for adoption by other. Methods: the group meetings consisted of a chapter by chapter journal club of the Dolan and Weaver (2021) text "A Guide to Course-based Undergraduate Research" (Macmillan). Through this study, we developed a draft of questions that instructors can use to consider whether they and their students would benefit from teaching using a CURE. We plan to develop a decision tree to use with these questions. We also started to develop additional resources that will help faculty align the research goal of a CURE with student learning goals and how assignments can assess whether research and/or learning goals are achieved. This work will provide complementary material to the CURE curriculum we curate.

Biome Institute 2021, Fall Working Group Summary Video

BIOME 2021 Ungrading Working Group Lightning Talk

This two-minute overview video describes the work of the 2021 fall working group for Scientist Spotlight/Data Nugget course resources. Group members began developing new projects for a variety of courses and topics, and discussed key themes and important considerations for development of future projects.   

The Revising Social & Environmental Justice Open Educational Resources through UDL and Accessibility Lenses Working Group met during the Fall 2021 semester as part of the BIOME Institute. This resource includes a lightning talk describing our activities and plans going forward.

Our team, Quantitative Skills and Science Identity (QSSI), met in the fall of 2021 to discuss and develop a methodology to assess the effectiveness of Data Nugget/Scientist Spotlight activities. We have worked on finding established and reliable instruments to measure 1) quantitative skills, 2) interest in developing quantitative skills, and 3) a sense of belonging in STEM. This presentation shares our findings, and goals moving forward.

The Got Milk? working group plans to use lactase persistence evolution as a case study to teach genetics in large introductory biology courses. While developing these resources, we will be mindful of how we will approach teaching and learning to avoid racial bias. Our mission is to improve our approach to teaching genetics in large introductory biology courses in order to avoid unintentionally reinforcing racial bias.

The uRAMS (undergraduate Research and Microbiology Science community) was created by faculty and researchers at Colorado State University as part of our engagement with the 2021 BIOME Institute. Our group focused on the development of resourcers that undergraduate researchers may find helpful when conducting research in STEM fields. The video contains a short description of the resources we will developed as a 5 module semester long course. These include: 1. Introduction to research to showcase what a research laboratory, how it works and who participates in research; 2. Oral communication skills, including science communication and the development of a Scientist Spotlight; 3. Tips and tricks to read and write scientific literature, including poster designing and abstract writing, 4. Quantitative skills where we will develop a microbiology datanugget and scientist spotlight and will focus on graphing and basic data analysis, and 5. Wellness and DEI in the context of undergraduate research.

Our team met in the fall of 2021 to discuss and develop resources around podcasts. We created lists of podcast episodes for several courses, learned about listening guides, shared assignment guidelines and education research on multimedia use, and planned future lessons that include podcasts. This presentation shares our findings, assignment ideas, and goals moving forward.

Project summary for our Working Group, which sought to develop a toolbox of interventions for students struggling in introductory Biology courses

The resource is a brief description of an analysis pipeline for microbiome analysis of Oxford Nanopore 16S amplicon sequence data. We tested the Kraken 2 and Krona pipeline from nanogalaxy with data obtained from nanopore sequencing of 16S DNA extracted from dog feces, conducted by an undergraduate student.