Ecological research, alongside many other fields, is in the midst of a data revolution. Publicizing best practices in data management and archiving have resulted in a dramatic increase in open access data. The increased availability of research data coincides with calls for undergraduate education reform, including providing opportunities for students to increase quantitative competencies in biology. Authentic inquiry rooted in real research datasets allows students to engage in the scientific process and has the potential to play a major role in the quest for quantitative literacy in undergraduate students. While the accessibility of research data has substantially improved, other barriers remain for its integration in the classroom. Published datasets that have already been curated for use in classrooms can make teaching with research data more accessible to larger numbers of classrooms. However, the development and publication of these resources is only the first step in the open educational resources (OER) life cycle, where instructors then find, implement, and enrich these resources based on the context of their classrooms and ultimately re-share the resource. Our work addresses the gap in the curriculum cycle by conceptualizing a community framework for the large-scale sharing and adaptation of data-centric collections.
Results/Conclusions
We report on the outcomes from an RCN Incubator network on promoting the OER life cycle for data-centric teaching resources. To support the development and open access publishing of teaching resources with ecological data, we organized a Faculty Mentoring Network (FMN) to prepare dataset teaching modules for publication in Teaching Issues and Experiments in Ecology (TIEE) in collaboration with the Education Division of ESA and the Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis (QUBES) project. Participants brought a diversity of teaching experience and backgrounds, coming from 19 different institutions from across the United States and Canada, including Ph.D granting institutions, liberal arts colleges, primarily undergraduate public institutions, community colleges, and museums. The FMN structure allowed us to build a faculty community of practice that generated innovative educational scholarship. We continue the work of our network by applying the OER framework to these resources with a second FMN to adapt, implement, and republish these modules. Through our partnership with QUBES, we aim to further engage faculty in teaching scholarship by promoting community benefits and academic credit for this work.