Description

Scientific and educational Hubs face the dual challenge of helping community members do their own work as efficiently as possible, and raising awareness of opportunities for learning from / interacting with other hub members. The NSF-funded Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis (QUBES; www.qubeshub.org) project seeks to facilitate the adoption of quantitative reasoning skills into the biology classroom. QUBES is an educational gateway that acts as a virtual center and umbrella organization, giving professional organizations, teaching projects and teachers an online presence for community, collaboration and product dissemination. In supporting our partner projects QUBESHub works to balance ease of use working with a project with sharing of resources across projects. While a suite of educational resources exists on the web, the support and incentives required for faculty to adopt (or adopt, modify and re-share) these resources are lacking. As its content management system, QUBES utilizes HubZero, an open source software platform designed to support scientific and educational activities. We present work on development of two components for the HubZero software designed to address these challenges: (1) a component to record, track and display the multitude of partners and professional organizations involved in the QUBES mission, and (2) a component to bring open-education resource development to HubZero and QUBES. Not only do these components bring additional functionality to QUBES, they also have the potential for use by other Hubs which utilize the HubZero content management system.

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