RCN-UBE: A Network for Facilitating Online Content for Experiential Learning of Tropical Systems

Life science students must be prepared for solving ‘wicked’ problems, i.e., complex ones without clear solutions. These problems require higher-level thinking about the connections across scales and disciplines, and within a global context. Tropical ecology provides opportunities for studying this kind of complexity, from the interactions of organisms in highly diverse communities to the web of social and economic considerations that guide the processes and conservation of tropical species and ecosystems.

Despite this, most core undergraduate biology curricula retain a primarily temperate-zone lens and limited exposure to the global diversity of ecosystems and cultures. At the same time, there is a critical need for online open educational resources (OERs) that incorporate real-world examples and are easy for both students and instructors to access and use.

This network brings together a diverse community of experts with backgrounds in tropical biology research, active-learning pedagogy, software development, and multimedia content creation. The network activities will support faculty participants in the creation and adaptation of field- and research-based OERs. These online modules will be hosted on a responsively designed, open-source and open-access platform, Gala.

The goals of the Online Content for Experiential Learning of Tropical Systems network are to: internationalize the undergraduate biology curriculum through the creation of OERs in tropical ecology; enhance and innovate within platforms such as Gala to facilitate the integration of quantitative elements within OERs; and broaden participation within the biology community by engaging participants from under-represented groups, HBCUs and community colleges. Activities will include: initial workshops to create author guidelines and toolkits; 'Incubator' workshops to develop new OERs; Faculty Mentoring Networks for adapting existing OERs; and engagement with professional societies and other networks to expand and sustain this new network.

For each module, design and development of interactive and quantitative elements will be undertaken in collaboration with the developers of the Gala platform, the Midwest Big Data Hub, and Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis. As this new network’s agile process for creating OERs is refined, it will provide a novel framework for OER development that can help propel STEM education in fields beyond tropical ecology.

This project is being funded by the Directorate for Biological Sciences, Division of Biological Infrastructure as part of efforts to address the challenges posed in Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action (http://visionandchange/finalreport/).

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.