Peer-Reviewed Teaching Resources with Jenny Knight and Sharleen Flowers

CourseSource is an open-access journal now entering its tenth year that has a variety of peer-reviewed teaching resources for biology, primarily detailed lesson plans tagged by course and topic for easy searching.  I found out about CourseSource years ago, and I was amazed at the catalog of high-quality lesson plans and other teaching resources there. I keep running into biology faculty who don’t know about this great resource, which is also kind of amazing. What I haven’t found are resources like CourseSource in other disciplines.

I reached out to the editorial team at CourseSource to find out more about the project and try to figure out why biology has a resource like this but other disciplines don’t. On the podcast today I talk with Jenny Knight, associate professor of molecular, cell, and developmental biology at the University of Colorado Boulder and editor-in-chief of CourseSource, and with Sharleen Flowers, postdoctoral fellow at CU Boulder and managing editor at CourseSource.

We talk about the kinds of teaching resources that educators can find at CourseSource, the origins of the project, what it takes to make a project like this work, and how a peer-reviewed publication like CourseSource can help higher ed value teaching in more concrete ways.

Episode Resources

·       CourseSource, https://qubeshub.org/community/groups/coursesource 

·       Jenny Knight’s faculty page, https://www.colorado.edu/mcdb/jenny-knight

·       2024 Intentional Teaching slow read, https://derekbruff.ck.page/posts/relationship-rich-education-and-the-start-of-the-intentional-tech-slow-read 

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Transcript

Derek Bruff 0:06
Welcome to the Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching. I’m your host, Derek Bruff. I hope this podcast helps you be more intentional in how you teach and in how you develop as a teacher over time.

Imagine you’re coming up on a class session next week on a particular topic in your course. You pull up your lesson plan from the last time you taught this course and this topic, and you realize that lesson didn’t really land well. There was too much lecture and not enough student engagement, and you’re not entirely sure students came away with much understanding. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a place you could go to find detailed, peer-reviewed lesson plans on that topic written by colleagues in your discipline that featured active and inclusive instruction? 

Well, if you teach college biology, you don’t have to imagine this. CourseSource is an open-access journal now entering its tenth year that has a variety of peer-reviewed teaching resources for biology, primarily detailed lesson plans tagged by course and topic for easy searching. Browsing the site right now, I see 267 lessons with titles like “Cell signaling pathways: a case study approach,” “A virtual laboratory on cell division using a publicly available image database,” and “Teaching genetic linkage and recombination through mapping with molecular markers.”

I found out about CourseSource years ago, I think at a conference at Cornell University, and I was amazed at the catalog of high-quality lesson plans and other teaching resources there. I was equally amazed to learn that all those resources had been peer-reviewed! I keep running into biology faculty who don’t know about this great resource, which is also kind of amazing. What I haven’t found are resources like CourseSource in other disciplines.

I reached out to the editorial team at CourseSource to find out more about the project and try to figure out why biology has a resource like this but other disciplines don’t. On the podcast today I talk with Jenny Knight, associate professor of molecular, cell, and developmental biology at the University of Colorado Boulder and editor-in-chief of CourseSource, and with Sharleen Flowers, postdoctoral fellow at CU Boulder and managing editor at CourseSource. We talk about the kinds of teaching resources that educators can find at CourseSource, the origins of the project, what it takes to make a project like this work, and how a peer-reviewed publication like CourseSource can help higher ed value teaching in more concrete ways.

Jenny, Sharleen, thank you so much for coming on International Teaching. I'm glad to have you on the podcast and learn a little bit more about CourseSource. Thanks for being here. 

Sharleen Flowers 3:17
Thanks for having us. 

Derek Bruff 3:19
So I'll start with my usual opening question, which is not about this project that we're going to talk about. Can each of you tell us about a time when you realized you wanted to be an educator? 

Sharleen Flowers 3:31
Okay, so I'll go first. I feel like just throughout my life, I've always had this inclination towards teaching and tutoring and talking to my friends about, you know, what's going on in our classrooms and helping them understand the content better. I think in graduate school I found that while I was TA'ing, I was spending a considerable amount of time putting my efforts into improving my TA'ing and improving the classroom and less towards my research. And so I think that was kind of one of my first indications that, oh, teaching is something that I'm really passionate about and I'm really interested in pursuing. 

Jenny Knight 4:08
That's great, Sharleen. Yeah, So I've been an educator for a long time, so it's a little bit hard for me to remember the genesis. But nonetheless, I had, I think, a similar experience to what Sharlene has just described, and that when I had an opportunity to TA when I was a graduate student, I was like, Wow, this is really fun. Like, this brings me joy. And, you know, the research brought me a different kind of joy. But there was something about connecting with a student who was struggling that made me feel, I don't know, useful and kind of just made me excited to try again and maybe think of a different way to explain it. There was something very satisfying about that process, like kind of taking that journey with a younger person and helping them grow. 

Derek Bruff 5:00
Yeah, I can. I can totally relate to that. Yeah, I, I did enjoy my, my, my mathematics research, but there was a kind of daily interaction with students that that that was really satisfying to kind of help see those light bulbs come on and help students who thought maybe they couldn't make it through calculus, figure out that in fact, they could make it through calculus. It's pretty rewarding. Yeah.

Well, let's talk about CourseSource and I'll start concrete, I think. What what kind of resources would an educator find if they started exploring the course source website? 

Jenny Knight 5:42
I'll start and then Sharleen can can fill in a lot of the blanks because Sharleen works with the site every day. 

Okay, So CourseSource began in 2013, I believe the first publication in CourseSource was actually in 2014, and it didn't really start going, I would say, with with energy until 2015. And at that point, that the vision was to provide resources for people who wanted to teach in a more active way. And so it was kind of, you know, fostered by some of the reports that were coming out of that time, like Bio 2010, Engaged to Excel, as well as the summer institutes on scientific teaching. All of these these events and reports that were occurring in the early part of the 2010s were were really, I think, motivating individuals to teach in a more active way. But there really weren't a lot of good resources. So I just wanted to give a little bit of that background.

So what what the what the site has grown into is a pretty large repository of of several different kinds of articles. We have, I would say the most, the most commonly used article type is the lesson, and the lessons provide sort of a tour of, of an individual's creative exploration of a particular topic with all the materials that that that an instructor would need to actually execute that in their own course. And so those are the the kinds of articles that we have the most of.

There are other kinds of articles. We also have, let's see, science behind the lesson which individuals can if they have written a great lesson, they can also then explain more the details about the science. And then we also have teaching tools and strategies articles, and those are a little bit more... they're less of a lesson and more of like a here are some things that we've tried that are really effective, more of a tool, on the tools side. And we also have essays and reviews, but those are less frequently used.

We just recently introduced a new kind of article which is called A Lesson Plus. And these are intended for people who have designed an entire course, usually it's going to be like a course based undergraduate research experience type of course. And the lesson plus allows them to publish sort of a sample of their materials, as well as then having in their supplementary files all of the materials.

So as I mentioned at the beginning, I think are most used resource are the lessons because we we have so many of them and and they are also they're also present in our all of our different individual subdisciplines, you know. So we have both biology and physics articles. Physics is a new edition. But within biology we have many different subcategories. So anatomy and physiology, biochemistry, molecular biology, cell biology, genetics, etc., as well as lessons that are specifically on science process skills. 

Derek Bruff 9:23
Quick follow up. What do you mean by science process skills? I think I know, but but I want to make sure our listeners understand. 

Jenny Knight 9:29
Of course. So science process skills are... they have... it's understandable that one does not immediately know what science process is, but the science process skills are sort of the term that we've given to the body of skills such as reading research papers, interpreting results, communicating results, designing experiments, and formulating hypotheses. Those kinds of skills we call those science process skills. 

Derek Bruff 9:58
Gotcha. Okay. So the skills that might show up in a lot of different courses, actually. 

Jenny Knight 10:01
Absolutely. People can tag their articles or lessons with science process skills, or they can actually write an article that is specifically only about science process skills. 

Derek Bruff 10:14
I feel like I hear about websites from my K-12 teacher colleagues fairly regularly where teachers are helping teachers and sharing lesson plans. But I feel like this is more rare in higher ed. And just to be clear, the journal is aimed at college level teaching, right?

Jenny Knight
Yes.

Derek Bruff
And the kind of courses that you're looking at kind of cover the whole spectrum of undergraduate biology courses. And and it sounds like you're starting to to reach into physics as well. Is that right? 

Sharleen Flowers 10:44
That's right. We are still expanding and trying to figure out how to navigate the physics of space. The biology space has been navigated very well. Another great thing about CourseSource are the learning frameworks that we have. So a few of the courses will have a learning framework associated with it. Typically, they the learning frameworks were made by a society or a group of people that have vetted the learning framework with the... with what the society deems to be important skills or important knowledge.

So, for example, in microbiology, so for example, the microbiology learning framework was devised by the American Society for Microbiology. And the framework has a variety of learning goals associated with different concepts or different topics. And so when someone is submitting a manuscript in in microbiology, they can tag their article with those learning goals. The frameworks also have some sample learning objectives that the authors can also pull from, and so that helps with the both the searchability, so users can find if they are aware of the learning frameworks, they can find specific lessons that are aligned to those learning goals that they're looking for. But if you go to the course page and look at the learning framework, the website auto tags the the learning frameworks, the goals so that anyone who submits an article with that particular learning goal, you can go to that course page and then actually target the specific learning goals you're looking for. 

Derek Bruff 12:29
So if I'm teaching that course and I'm kind of structuring my course around this established framework that the professional societies come up with, I might be looking at my set of lesson plans for the semester and realize, Oh, I could really use something different here. And then and then kind of access some options through that framework. I love that. 

Sharleen Flowers 12:51
Yeah, absolutely. The lessons are are intended to kind of be like cassettes if they're, you know, the lessons can range from you know, maybe an afternoon or a whole class day or a couple of class days or a week. And so depending on what lesson is written, an instructor could just take it and plop it right into their into their classroom and replace something that maybe isn't as active, that they were lecturing or doing something else before. 

Derek Bruff 13:18
Yeah, say more about that. Do you have a kind of standard format for you said the lessons are your most common type of article. What what kind of components would I see in a lesson that I'm trying to make use of? 

Sharleen Flowers 13:29
Yeah. So our lesson articles have a template that they follow. So at the very beginning of the lesson after the abstract are the learning goals and learning objectives. And then they have a brief introduction about what concepts does this lesson target? What are some other lessons that have been done in the past? And we have a section on the scientific teaching themes which are active learning, assessment, and inclusive teaching. So the authors have to talk about how their lesson hits those three areas. The lesson plan itself then, is kind of like an instructions for the instructor on how to implement. There's also a table, a teaching timeline table so they can see the progression of the lesson.

And then lastly, there's a teaching discussion area. They don't need to have formal results. The the theory behind CourseSource is that if if folks are using strategies that are evidence based that they don't need a fully fleshed out results, but often the instructors will talk about some common observations about how students are engaging. If they have any sort of like assessments or survey data, they're welcome to share that. And so they'll talk about in the teaching discussion what were maybe some adaptations or modifications for the future. How could you use this maybe in a different discipline, for example, or online? So the teaching discussion kind of bring brings everything together to kind of show how how it went in some possible avenues for the future. 

Derek Bruff 15:13
So one thing I've observed is in working with faculty, I remember I was doing a summer institute a couple of years ago and I did a lesson planning activity with a group of faculty, and I think these were biology and math faculty I was working with, and I had some sample lesson plans that I had kind of scavenge from the Internet and a couple of my own. And we we kind of looked at them together and we annotated and we thought about kind of the teaching choices that were represented in these lesson plans. And it really got me thinking about the lesson plan as a as a kind of communication device. Like, how do you describe what you're doing in a class? And I remember one of the faculty members said, yeah, my lesson plan is a Post-it note with a few words scribbled on it that I stick on the computer in the classroom when I walk in.

And so and honestly, I think I had a CourseSource lesson in this mix of of sample lesson plans. And some of the faculty found it a little intimidating because there was so much there. So so what kind of feedback do you get from faculty who might use these lessons in terms of kind of making sense of such a robust resource and making it kind of work in their own teaching? 

Jenny Knight 16:28
What what I've heard is that people often feel like the depth of the information is is very useful because they have a very clear idea of how that person used it in their course. That does not restrict them to using it in exactly that way, nor does it, nor do they have to be as organized basically in their use of it. Because we ask authors to be very specific and fill in a whole set of details, we give, we give other people the opportunity to use it kind of exactly as it was designed, which lowers perhaps the barrier to inserting something into your class, especially if you're maybe not super familiar with the principles of active learning or getting students to talk about something or doing something other than lecturing, basically. 

At the same time, I would say that while... so I know that people have taken CourseSource lessons and just adapted them and made them made them their own, which is great. We love that. And we also know-- which is a slightly different answer, or it's an answer to a different question than what you ask-- But we do know that that creating a CourseSource lesson is quite a heavy lift for people. So we run workshops, we've run many workshops over the years and we continue to run workshops. We're running one at the SABRE West Conference in just a few weeks. But that is our way of helping people get their resources into a lesson format because there is a lot required. It's doable, but it helps to have, you know, to have a little bit of guidance in a workshop.

So long and short of it is, Yes, the template has a lot in it. We think that that really helps other people see what they can do and provides them with any resource they might need to execute it. But but we're all very happy to have people just take it and go like, Oh, this is a good idea. I can adapt this however I see fit, you know, and that's great, we support that. 

Derek Bruff 18:34
And I think a lot about. So, you know, I work at a teaching center and so my field is mathematics, but that often is not relevant to what I'm doing, right? I'm working with faculty from a variety of disciplines and helping them think through active learning instruction and other teaching choices they might make. And I often have an example of something that's worked in someone's classroom, but there's this kind of translation difference, right? So I feel like if I did some kind of small group activity in a math class and I talked to a physics or a biology educator, there's some translation that needs to happen there, right? It's a different discipline. It's a different class context, right? I'm teaching majors or teaching non majors or vice versa. And then if you move kind of outside the STEM disciplines, there's even more translation that has to happen. And I hear that sometimes from faculty in a workshop, you're like, Sure, that would work fine in a history class, but I teach chemistry, right?

And so so one of the things that I love about CourseSource is that you're trying to really close that translation gap, right? We're saying not only is this in your discipline, it's in the course that you're teaching, right? And so it's a very close translation, but it sounds like, you know, there's still room for adaptation. So I can I can see here's how it works in a class very much like mine. But I also need to kind of make it work for my own, my own teaching, my own lesson plans, my own approach. Are there things you do to try to kind of make that adaptation a little easier for for educators who are using the site? 

Jenny Knight 20:04
I think one of the things that can happen is that we encourage people to do as in their lessons, they if they have ideas for how it can be executed online, for example, versus in person, or if they have adaptations that they think would make the lesson work better for an upper division course or a lower division course, just depending on how they had designed it. We encourage them to add those components into the lesson. So that that is a way that perhaps somebody who teaches it at a slightly different level could get some ideas. I don't know if there are any other resources along those lines, Sharleen, that I haven't thought of. 

Sharleen Flowers 20:46
Yeah, I think as you said, like in the lesson plan or the teaching discussion, they can bring up those ideas. I've seen lessons where someone has implemented it with freshmen and upper division students, and so they'll provide two lesson plans, two teaching timeline tables and show the differences between how the upper division students, maybe how to do a little bit extra work or something.

I've also seen kind of getting what you're asking about like other people's using it. There have the we have a comment feature on all of our articles and so folks can provide a comment and upload documents. So I remember reading, someone had, like I think it was some sort of ecology lesson that they had implemented. And so they wrote like this really nice like two page paper about how they implement today and what they did and what worked. And it was, it was really nice to see how see that implementation and see see the things that they suggested to help others if they want to implement that lesson as well. 

Jenny Knight 21:55
Yeah. And what Sharleen just described is like exactly what we'd like to really encourage for the future. We need to figure out how to actually do it on our platform in a in a seamless way. And that's kind of what's holding us up at the moment because the comment area is not ideal. But but what Sharleen has just described would, would be such a nice addition so that people who are like, Whoa, I don't know if I want to do it that way. They can see how other people have adapted it. 

Derek Bruff 22:22
Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and, and one of the reasons I reached out to Sharleen a few weeks ago is that I'm I'm kind of fascinated by this kind of unsolved problem in higher ed, which is we have really great ways to know if people are reading and citing our research publications. We don't have mechanisms for kind of tracking the spread of teaching ideas and teaching materials, right? So in theory, you know, if I'm a biology faculty member and I've come up with a really fantastic lesson for a particular topic in a particular course and I put it, you know, I get it, I get it on CourseSource and lots of people use it and adapt it, right? That should reflect well on me, right? This is how our research evaluation and assessment works, right? When people build on my work as a researcher, then you know, that's that CV building, right? That helps me get tenure. 

And we don't have the kind of tracking mechanisms to even know if people are using my my lesson plan, my, you know, my teaching strategies, you know, unless you, you know, write a book about it or something and people cite that, it's it's hard to to have that kind of feedback. And so I can imagine for the authors who get that kind of comment right, to say, I use this, here's what I loved about it, here's how I adapted it. That's I mean, I would find that pretty gratifying as a as a contributor to to get that kind of feedback. 

Jenny Knight 23:52
Yes, absolutely. And I would like to say that we do actually have a really nice feature where you can see as an author, well, anybody can see this. We have how many times an article or lesson (excuse me) has been downloaded on the website. And so there is that. Although it's not like this official type of tracking mechanism that we have for research articles, if somebody was, for example, wanting to cite their CourseSource articles as a major contribution on their CV or something like that, if they're going up for promotion, they can say, I wrote this course or this article. It has been downloaded or accessed a thousand times. That doesn't mean that it's been implemented a thousand times, there's no way to actually track that, but it's essentially like a citation. It means someone was interested enough to go there and and look at it.

Derek Bruff 24:45
Well, and that's a metric you see on research articles, too, which is kind of downloads and views, which is again, not the same thing as being cited, but it, you know, it it does have some meaning, I think, in terms of of how many people find your work interesting and worth looking at. 

Let's let me ask the question that you started to answer earlier that I hadn't asked yet, but how do you work with authors and what is that process like? How do you recruit authors and what's the... because there's a peer review component too. So so what is it like to be a contributor to CourseSource? 

Sharleen Flowers 25:16
So the way we've gotten kind of the word out there is we have our social media, we have blogs, we partner with societies and conferences to kind of get the word out there that, hey, CourseSource exists, you should submit an article. And on our submission page, once they have submitted all their materials, we get we have a team of editors that that get assigned and reviewers. So it goes through a regular peer review process. And then once they've received the decision, they can then revise and then resubmit.

And so the goal, of CourseSource is that we are cheerleaders and we want to be mentors and help everyone who submits an article to be able to publish, and so we use our the peer review system and the editors to help improve the article and give them some feedback on what to change to help get it to the next stage of a publication. So once it's accepted, then we have a final stage of editing and then to publish online on on our website and is also the PDF component that folks can download as well.

I have heard from people who have engaged with submitting an article that the peer review time is is pretty good. We have a pretty good turnaround time, but I would say that we have we have pretty good turnaround that folks who submit and end up also getting to the acceptance stage we have, we're pretty relaxed on the revision time. So as long as an author addresses the comments and resubmits, they have pretty good chance of getting their article on CourseSource. 

Derek Bruff 27:13
So we're some journals would have perhaps be kind of proud of their rejection rate right. "Only 8% of articles get it accepted." You're actually kind of aiming for 100%, right? 

Sharleen Flowers 27:26
That's right. 

Jenny Knight 27:27
Yes. 

Derek Bruff 27:28
Yeah. So the idea is that, you know, you've got kind of a bar that you want to clear in terms of the quality of these teaching materials. And ideally, everyone would get there. It may take them longer, write some people longer than others or more rounds of revision. But that seems consistent with what I know about good teaching as well.  

Jenny Knight 27:47
Yeah. We you know, we really want anybody who has gone to the effort of thinking about how to share their materials. We really want everybody to be able to share their materials. And, and just as you said, sometimes people submit something that's really not quite ready and that's okay. Like, we just, you know, Sharleen sometimes has to send things back and say, well, things are missing from your from your manuscript and you need to add these things before we can even send it out for review. Then, you know, once it passes of her check, she has a lot of different things she has to check, then, you know, we we go to the review stage and then as she's indicated, you know, it can go quickly or it can take a while just depending on and how people feel about about the materials that have been presented. But yeah, we work we work with people even over kind of lengthy periods of time. We've had, you know, people put their article in, revisions have been requested and they'll say, you know, gosh, I'm so busy this semester, I don't know if I'm gonna be able to get to these revisions until next semester. We're like, No problem. That's part of the process. We will work with you for as long as it takes. 

Derek Bruff 28:52
Do you have a record? I have a record for the longest... 

Jenny Knight 28:56
Well, we do have a few people who basically kind of dropped off of the the mark altogether. Like after two years, we kind of consider them. Okay, you submitted something, but we never really got to the end with you. There are very few people like that. I don't know about the success, how long we have, like a person who's maybe been successful. I don't know. Sharleen maybe knows that. 

Sharleen Flowers 29:24
There was one that came in recently that I think we recently accepted, and it was first we first received in like 2020. So it can be many years through your article and resubmit and we're like, Oh, this is great. 

Jenny Knight 29:41
And that's not the standard. I mean, obviously most people kind of want to get their things in and and taken care of. But there are some people who just get, you know, stuck with something, just not enough time to complete.

Derek Bruff 29:53
No, I get that. 

Jenny Knight 29:54
Yeah. Yeah. And you know, I agree with Sharleen, like, we've really managed to increase our, I should say, decrease our time of, of responding to authors and getting, getting their articles online. And we're, we're very proud of that because for a while it was extremely slow. We just didn't have enough people in the in the whole works. But we're always looking for new people. We're always looking for new reviewers. We definitely need to increase our numbers in the physics area since we just expanded into physics, we still, you know, we don't have a lot of submissions yet, but we also, you know, we need more people just kind of to hear about it so that they're excited about using it as a resource. But yeah, we are always looking for new editors, reviewers, all that kind of stuff. 

Derek Bruff 30:43
Yeah, yeah. And I would guess it helps, you know, you're going to try to match a reviewer, you know, who has experience teaching the course in question. 

Jenny Knight 30:52
Absolutely. Yeah, that's the idea. We ask people to... we don't ask people to review things that they're not at all familiar with. And then, you know, ultimately everything at the end goes through me. I'm like the last stop. And so I you know, I do. I do look at everything that comes through. But I also rely heavily on the review process. So I don't... I hope that I'm not actually having to review the article. I'm simply checking, reading, you know, deciding that I agree or disagree with, you know, what needs to be done next. Yeah, because I certainly wouldn't have the bandwidth to do it all. That's why we have so many people along the way as that We have to distribute the work because, you know, we're a volunteer organization. 

Derek Bruff 31:41
Yeah, yeah. So I mentioned that there are other disciplines that don't have peer reviewed journals like CourseSource, but I know there are a variety of kind of open educational resources that you can find that may not have the same kind of kind of system in place to, to try to kind of vet for quality. But I guess I'm curious and I think you might have perspective to answer this. Is there something about biology education and kind of your discipline in your field that makes a resource like CourseSource possible? 

Do you think there's like a kind of a matching here between what you've built and kind of how people work in your field That may be a little unique to biology, maybe not completely unique, but a little bit unique to biology. 

Jenny Knight 32:31
Maybe It's it's a really good question. I mean, I've been with the biology education research community pretty much since its inception. And I will say that it you know, it was a uniquely motivated group of people who really started coming together around a shared vision. And part of that was the summer institute. A lot of us came from the summer institute that Jo Handelsman and Bill Woods started in 2004, I think was the first year. Many of us who then went on to really to form SABRE, our disciplinary society, many of us were at those original summer institutes and were highly motivated by our interactions with our physics colleagues who were already doing this kind of research. And so it may have been a happy, happy coincidence or a happy coalescence of people, but there were some, you know, some big name scientists who got behind the idea, and that gave it some traction.

I think with university, R1 university faculty who maybe hadn't thought about how important teaching was, and so I think that that kind of that that galvanized the community in a way that perhaps didn't happen in other disciplines like chemistry, math, geosciences, etc.. So so perhaps there was this special grouping of individuals. I don't know how else to talk about it, but you know that that group of individuals who were trained at the Summer Institute, we stuck together and we really we, we really helped each other. Many of us were non tenure track at the time and many of us are now tenured. And so it kind of changed the trajectory of our careers. And I think it was a powerful time for all of us. And so so maybe that's how CourseSource, the institutes, the workshops, the research they all kind of they came together at the same time. 

Derek Bruff 34:48
Well, and what I'm hearing is that, you know, there was this kind of blossoming the field of biology education research. 

Jenny Knight 34:56
Yes. 

Derek Bruff 34:56
And to take that field seriously, you need certain types of structures and institutions.

Jenny Knight 35:03
And resources, tools. 

Derek Bruff 35:05
Yeah. And tools. Yeah. Yeah. And because as you notice, as you note, like, you know, there are folks who were outside the tenure stream 15 years ago that are now in tenured positions in biology education research. 

Jenny Knight 35:20
Yes. 

Derek Bruff 35:20
And I work at the University of Mississippi, and we have... our biology department has now hired two tenure track assistant professors in biology education research. And so that's a that's a new development for the university. Chemistry is trying to get theirs. They've they're running a search right now. And so that'll be a new kind of, you know, way of of being a biology department. It's a kind of different type of faculty member that you that they've recruited. But I'm hoping for great success there. But structures and resources like CourseSource are kind of part of what makes that possible.

So, what's next for CourseSource? You said a little bit about some things you'd wish, but what, what's what's next for CourseSource>

Sharleen Flowers 36:03
Honestly, it's expanding that physics side. We've been trying for a while to get traction and Jenny has some exciting developments on how we might get more people involved with physics. One thing that's interesting is with, you know, in biology we have all these different disciplines that have societies that have learning frameworks. And so we've been able to like pull in those learning frameworks. And because we think having those is best for our articles, right? So we want to develop more frameworks. And within physics, it doesn't seem like they have these sub disciplines societies. And so that will be an interesting path forward is figuring out like if there is some sort of learning framework for physics, what does that look like? Who decides what goes in there? I think it'd be great to have some more learning frameworks on the physics side, but that that's a huge unknown for me. That's very interesting territory. 

Jenny Knight 37:02
Yeah. Yeah. I'll echo what Sharleen said, that we, we, we do have a small grant from the American Institute of Physics to run some workshops for people who would like to publish on CourseSource. We're starting with integrating CourseSource with PhysPort, which is a pre-existing portal that Sam McKagan runs that that really draws a lot of physics teachers in, and there's a very low barrier to entry. And so our idea is to try to get people who are already submitting things to PhysPort to kind of go through the process of both sharing their stuff in PhysPort, but then making it into a peer reviewable publication. So we think that that will really increase our numbers for physics. So we're excited about that.

But yeah, what what Sharleen is saying about the frameworks, you know, we've just we've discovered that that's super important on the biology side because it really does give people an understanding of what, what people in the discipline think students should be learning in that subdiscipline. And that really helps guide authors in choosing their, their, you know, their objectives. So I'm sure we can make that happen in physics. It's just it's, it's a little bit of a narrower discipline. There aren't as many subdisciplines as Sharleen said. So yeah, that's, that's I think it's a big push for us. 

We had a very generous donation from Carl Wieman to get the physics side kind of rolling. Despite that generous donation. We, it's been, it's been slow work that the physics community is just like, what is this thing? We already have our own thing. So that's why we partnered with PhysPort. And we think that that will help us.

And of course, we intend to keep the biology side going and expanding and we're getting learning frameworks up on to all the other... We have a couple biology subdisciplines that didn't have learning frameworks and we're getting all of those taken care of now. So we feel like we're on a good path to continuing to serve the community, both communities biology and physics. 

Derek Bruff 39:06
Yeah, well, that's great. Well, thank you again for coming on the podcast and sharing and it sounds like, like happy anniversary, right? Ten years, of CourseSource. 

Jenny Knight 39:15
Yeah, exactly. 

Derek Bruff 39:18
Yeah. Well, thanks so much for sharing here on the podcast. I really appreciate it. 

Jenny Knight 39:22
Thank you. 

Sharleen Flowers 39:23
Thank you. 

Derek Bruff 39:24
That was Jenny Knight, associate professor of molecular, cell, and developmental biology at the University of Colorado Boulder, and Sharleen Flowers, postdoctoral fellow at CU Boulder. Jenny is the editor-in-chief at CourseSource, and Sharleen in the managing editor. In the show notes to this episode, you’ll find a link to CourseSource.

One thing I like about CourseSource is that they don’t require contributors to provide rigorous evidence of effectiveness of the teaching resources they contribute. We know certain forms of instruction are more effective than others when it comes to student learning, so why make instructors reinvent those research findings? That kind of education research is important, but it’s a big lift for a lot of faculty who have limited time or resources for such things. CourseSource provides a way to an instructor to share their great teaching approaches with the wider community in a scholarly way, without requiring, say, an institutional review board review of their project. We need more mechanisms like this for sharing teaching! I can’t tell you how many times I cited some faculty member’s blog post about their teaching strategy in my last book because that was where the good teaching information was. It’s great to have that kind of venue, and it’s great to have discipline-based education research, but it’s also useful to have something in between.

If you know of other publications like CourseSource in other fields, please let me know! Or if you have ideas on how one’s contributions to the wider teaching community might be better recognized in the tenure, promotion, and reappointment process for faculty, let me know that, too!

Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association. In the show notes, you’ll find a link to the UPCEA website, where you can find out about their research, networking opportunities, and professional development offerings.

This episode of Intentional Teaching was produced and edited by me, Derek Bruff. See the show notes for links to my website, the Intentional Teaching newsletter, and my Patreon, where you can help support the show for just a few bucks a month. If you’ve found this or any episode of Intentional Teaching useful, would you consider sharing it with a colleague? That would mean a lot.

As always, thanks for listening.