Publishing activities improves undergraduate biology education

Smith, Michelle K.

doi:10.1093/femsle/fny099

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…One way is by providing instructors credit for sharing their OER with others during tenure and promotion decisions so they have a tangible recognition of their work (Henderson and Dancy, 2007;Corbo et al, 2016). CourseSource, along with journals such as the Journal of Microbiology and Biology Education and American Biology Teacher, provide incentives in the form of a peer-reviewed journal citation that instructors can include on their CVs (Smith, 2018). Counting and highlighting these articles during tenure and promotion decisions sends a powerful message about the importance an institution places on developing and sharing innovative teaching materials.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In addition, there are several labs designed for in-person ecology courses focused on squirrel behavior (Connors et al, 2020;Duggan et al, 2020;Varner et al, 2020), and an essay about how these materials can be modified for remote teaching that was necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic (Dizney et al, 2021). Having instructors publish their revised lessons as peer-reviewed articles encourages individuals to share back to the community and have a tangible outcome they can list on their CV (Smith, 2018). However, given that only 28% of the survey participants had published in CourseSource and the majority of these faculty came from doctoral-granting institutions, this process may be too large a hurdle for some.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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How Do Undergraduate Biology Instructors Engage With the Open Educational Resource Life Cycle?

et al. 2022

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Open Educational Resources (OER) are widely used instructional materials that are freely available and promote equitable access. OER research at the undergraduate level largely focuses on measuring student experiences with using the low cost resources, and instructor awareness of resources and perceived barriers to use. Little is known about how instructors work with materials based on their unique teaching context. To explore how instructors engage with OER, we surveyed users of CourseSource, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal that publishes lessons primarily for undergraduate biology courses. We asked questions aligned with the OER life cycle, which is a framework that includes the phases: Search, Evaluation, Adaptation, Use, and Share. The results show that OER users come from a variety of institution types and positions, generally have positions that focus more on teaching than research, and use scientific teaching practices. To determine how instructors engage throughout the OER life cycle, we examined the frequency of survey responses. Notable trends include that instructors search and evaluate OER based on alignment to course needs, quality of the materials, and ease of implementation. In addition, instructors frequently modify the published materials for their classroom context and use them in a variety of course environments. The results of this work can help developers design current and future OER repositories to better coincide with undergraduate instructor needs and aid content producers in creating materials that encourage implementation by their colleagues.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Do Undergraduate Biology Instructors Engage With the Open Educational Resource Life Cycle?

et al. 2022

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show abstract

“…OER cyberinfrastructure (e.g., OER Commons and QUBES Hub) provides publishing outlets that offer indexing, DOIs, citation guides, and view/download metrics. All of these can help others recognize OER contributions as part of a tenure package, particularly at teaching-focused institutions and/or for teaching-stream faculty ( Smith, 2018 ).…”

Section: Immediate and Emergent Challenges Facing Oer Communitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%