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Apply today for the HHMI BioInteractive Ambassador Academy! The Academy is a multi-year professional development experience designed to support evidence-based teaching practices. We’re looking for educators with diverse backgrounds and teaching contexts who are committed to centering equity in their classrooms.QUBES Educator Publications and HHMI BioInteractive Resources
When I began as a new faculty member five years ago, I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel when developing lessons for my classes and hoped to benefit from the wealth of innovative teaching materials and approaches being developed by the wider community, while giving back myself. Like many educators, I often lack the time to format and submit a resource to an established teaching journal. Informal sharing with colleagues can lack recognition for resource-development work, as well as limit the reach and visibility for more widely exchanging ideas.
I have been working with the Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis (QUBES) project for the last three years to promote open-access educational resources for biology education, particularly for data-centric teaching materials. QUBES has developed an open-access publishing system that permits individuals or projects to freely host their resources while generating a discoverable citation and tracking access metrics. Another unique feature of the QUBES publishing system is the ability to post updated versions of resources, as well as publish adaptations to existing resources. Instructors often make valuable additions to published teaching materials such as scaffolding resources for different levels of instruction or implementation based on classroom technology. These modifications could include making changes to support online instruction or large classrooms, adjusting the software platform, or building new forms of assessment.
Sharing teaching materials on QUBES offers a way to recognize resource-development work and distribute teaching materials to a wider audience. I have worked with faculty and the HHMI BioInteractive team to pilot a QUBES site for classroom adaptations of BioInteractive resources. Please reach out to me at kgrayson@richmond.edu if you are interested in exploring QUBES for publishing open-access educational resources or have feedback on the current site.
Kristine Grayson is an assistant professor in the Biology Department at the University of Richmond, where she teaches courses in ecology and evolution. She also chases invasive insects, salamanders, and aquatic macroinvertebrates in her research lab. She serves as a facilitator for several Faculty Mentoring Networks in partnership with QUBES and is a co-organizer of a Research Coordination Network Incubator on sharing data-centric teaching resources.