Building Adaptability for Teaching Online through Peer-Reviewed, Active-Learning Resources and Professional Development

This project aims to serve the national interest by helping life science college instructors teach online lessons using active-learning instructional practices housed in the CourseSource repository. This Institutional and Community Transformation Level 1 project will increase the number of published open educational resources (OERs) for a variety of undergraduate online classrooms (e.g., synchronous and asynchronous online classes, hybrid classrooms that combine in-person and online teaching).

OERs are educational materials that are available in the public domain. CourseSource publishes peer-reviewed OERs that implement research-based, effective pedagogical techniques. Increasing the number of freely-available online OERs addresses an immediate need by providing lessons and professional development to instructors.

It also addresses a long-term need by assembling an extensive set of resources that meet the growing demand for online education. Because CourseSource has built a diverse and large community who uses its materials, this project will directly improve instruction for hundreds of instructors and thousands of undergraduate biology students.

The unifying goal of this project will be to share effective online lessons and help biology instructors implement them to benefit their students. Furthermore, advancing the progress and development of peer-reviewed, pedagogically sound OER materials can benefit the larger academic landscape as it moves towards providing low- or no-cost access to high-quality resources for instructors and students.

This project will: 1) Use information from the OERs published in CourseSource to determine how instructors implement active-learning instructional strategies online, 2) Evaluate short- and long-term online professional development programs designed to help instructors find, adapt, implement, and share online lessons, and 3) Explore how OERs can support instructors in using online lessons that include active-learning pedagogies. Since CourseSource publications include a section in which authors delineate their instructional approaches, they can be mined to determine the type and frequency of active-learning practices as well as alignment with instructional design practices, the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework, and evidence-based strategies for online instruction.

The results will identify strategies that will easily transfer across contexts, situations where instructors need greater support to initiate and maintain these practices in online environments, and ways active-learning can be enhanced by the online format. This project will also create multiple professional development programs for instructors in which they learn to write about and publish their online lessons and implement previously published OERs.

These programs will be assessed through surveys and a Social Network Analysis. The results will allow the exploration of whether and how instructor beliefs about online teaching change, and if professional development programs can create and sustain instructor support networks. Finally, interviews with instructors who are implementing OERs in their classroom will be used to determine how the availability of instructional materials influences instructor pedagogical decisions.

The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Institutional and Community Transformation track, the program supports efforts to transform and improve STEM education across institutions of higher education and disciplinary communities.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.