Description

Community colleges around the United States serve a large proportion of minority, low-income, first generation and underrepresented students. As a result of numerous national reports, resources for teaching quantitative biology, one of the important 21^st century workforce skills, have been developed for K-12 and 4-year institutions, but very little has been done to meet the needs of community colleges. Our RCN-UBE grant “Quantitative Biology at Community Colleges (QB@CC)” will address this gap because community colleges serve over half of the undergraduates in the U.S. including a diverse student body who are key to the success of our future STEM workforce. Community college faculty need both quantitative biology modules appropriate for their courses, and professional development to leverage effective methods for increasing student success. The QB@CC network will generate a large collection of Open Educational Resources (OERs) accessible to any interested faculty user, and professional development opportunities will be designed to address many of the challenges in teaching quantitative skills. Both the OER collection and the professional development opportunities designed to support the use of these materials, are relevant for all biology faculty that teach the first two years of undergraduate courses. The resources developed by the network will be openly licensed and be available at multiple hubs – QUBES and Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER), to name a few – thus, sustaining the resources beyond the 5-year span of the grant. Additionally, because the materials will be shared as OERs in a variety of locations, the products of this network will be widely available to faculty in any institution, in any discipline to adapt for their own classrooms. The impact of the network may also include the advancement of adjunct faculty and recruitment of future faculty, who might not otherwise have the opportunity to build relationships with full time community college faculty around the country.

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