The QUBES Resource System: Integrating open educational practices into diverse education reform communities
Author(s): Sam S Donovan1, Drew LaMar2, Hayley Orndorf1, Sarah Prescott3
1. University of Pittsburgh 2. College of William and Mary 3. University of New Hampshire
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The QUBES Resource System 10-28.pptxDescription
The Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis (QUBES, qubeshub.org) project supports the infusion of quantitative and computational skills throughout the undergraduate biology curriculum. To this end, we work with a diverse set of stakeholders interested in biology education reform from individual faculty members to large professional societies. The QUBES project provides a flexible cyberinfrastructure that can be used by education projects, organizations, and faculty learning communities to create online groups, share resources, and collaborate using a variety of communications and productivity tools. We view our open publishing platform as a key feature of the collaborative cyberinfrastructure services we provide. We are committed to raising awareness of, and participation in, open education scholarship as a mechanism for spreading and sustaining education reform.
In this presentation we will report on our analysis of the QUBES publication system and our OER collection from three interrelated perspectives. First, we consider the perspective of various “contributor” communities by characterizing the ways that open publishing was used by different stakeholders to pursue their project goals. Next, we describe the “discoverability” of publications as they sit within our data structure by describing our heavy use of community collections to create networks of related materials and facilitate navigation of the broader QUBES collection. Finally, we analyze the role of “impact metrics” for publications and projects as a means to support use, add value, and increase visibility of open education scholarship beyond the QUBES site. This evaluation of the QUBES open publishing services was done to document and share our progress promoting the use of open education scholarship across diverse user communities. While our 7,500 registered users are primarily undergraduate faculty in biology and related disciplines they generally have very little prior experiences with OEP. We currently host over 70 partner projects and 250 online groups which have widely ranging levels of commitment to openness. Identifying some of the emerging patterns across our stakeholder open publishing use scenarios has helped us to focus our descriptions and deployments of the QUBES publishing services.
Cite this work
Researchers should cite this work as follows:
- Donovan, S. S., LaMar, D., Orndorf, H., Prescott, S. (2019). The QUBES Resource System: Integrating open educational practices into diverse education reform communities. QUBES Leadership Team, QUBES Educational Resources. doi:10.25334/X9F5-7C81