Faculty professional development (PD) often addresses how faculty may increase their scholarly pursuits as they relate to teaching. One aspect of scholarly teaching is the sharing of curricular materials, with colleagues, through publications and in public online spaces. Here we report early outcomes from research on the faculty development portion of the Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis (QUBES) project. QUBES offers a unique PD experience called Faculty Mentoring Networks (FMN) where participants interact over multiple weeks in an online community to customize and implement a particular high quality teaching strategy focused on quantitative biology. We report on the community of faculty that participate in our FMNs and the effect of our unique PD experience as it relates to sharing curricular materials as evidence of scholarly teaching. To assess the effectiveness of FMNs in faculty development, we conducted interviews and collected data from faculty participation in the FMN activities and surveys conducted at the end of the PD experience.
Results/Conclusions
The QUBES framework for building community is based on the BioQUEST model. Participation in the BioQUEST community has been shown to be a transformative experience for faculty. We believe that the sharing of curricular materials is a measureable outcome of scholarly activity as a result of participation in QUBES FMNs. Data from 63 faculty participants in the 2016 BioQUEST Summer Institute suggest that faculty place a high value on the sharing of curriculum items and do share with their colleagues. However, we see a decrease in reported incidences of sharing in other public spaces (i.e. peer-reviewed publications, maintaining a public record of educational work, commenting on curricular materials, etc.). At least seven additional FMNs are running in spring/summer 2017. We will refine our assessment for these networks to further identify the mechanisms that promote a positive and productive professional development experience for faculty and encourage sharing of curriculum materials as a measure of scholarly activity. Additionally, we intend to compare the QUBES FMN model to other PD experiences to assess the impact of our unique PD model on the sharing of curricular materials as an aspect of scholarly teaching.