Couch, colleagues gauging implementation, impact of undergrad biology materials
by Scott Schrage | University Communication
As both a biology instructor and an award-winning researcher of biology instruction, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Brian Couch understands the magnitude of asking someone to reconsider what they teach and how they teach.
That was the ground-shifting charge laid down by the National Science Foundation in its 2011 report “Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology: A Call to Action.” Biology had seen massive changes in the decades prior, spurred by technological leaps that were revealing big-picture, big-data connections long obscured by their sheer complexity. New theories of learning, meanwhile, had raised questions about the value of rote memorization, the limits of conventional lecturing and the potential of injecting interaction into classrooms.
“Historically, biology courses have this reputation of being laden with facts and not being particularly interactive,” said Couch, associate professor of biological sciences at Nebraska. “At some point, the degree of factual knowledge that was coming across to students was just so immense that it felt like we needed to distill it down to the most important things.”
So the landmark NSF report called on educators to prioritize conceptual understanding over facts, emphasize the scientific process as much as the result, and explore ways to give students a greater stake in their own learning. Even before the report, but especially in the decade after, instructors developed so-called open educational resources — freely available lesson plans, lab activities, quizzes and other course materials — to help incite the instructional revolution.
With the support of a nearly $2 million grant from the NSF, Couch is now leading a five-year, multi-institutional effort to gauge the creation, evolution and implementation of those open educational resources.
“Changing one day of class takes some effort; changing a whole curriculum represents a considerable undertaking,” Couch said. “‘Vision and Change’ planted the seed that we need a place where the community can share all these resources. If you take the time to build an activity that focuses on a particular concept and uses interactive teaching approaches, how can we help you share that lesson with others in the community, so that they don’t have to reinvent it?”
Read more:
https://news.unl.edu/newsrooms/today/article/nsf-funded-husker-led-project-to-evaluate-open-access-educational-resources/