Peer-Reviewed Teaching Resources with Jenny Knight and Sharleen Flowers
Jan 30, 2024
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Jenny Knight and Sharleen Flowers discuss the origins and purpose of CourseSource, an open-access journal that offers peer-reviewed teaching resources for biology. They talk about the format of lesson articles, the use of learning frameworks, and the importance of sharing teaching resources. They also mention efforts to expand physics resources and the role of CourseSource in scholarly communication.
CourseSource is an open-access journal that provides peer-reviewed teaching resources for biology educators, offering detailed lesson plans tagged by course and topic.
CourseSource aims to bridge the translation gap by providing teaching resources tailored to specific disciplines, enabling educators to access and integrate effective teaching strategies into their own classrooms.
Deep dives
Course Source: A Valuable Resource for Biology Educators
Course Source is an open-access journal that provides peer-reviewed teaching resources for biology educators. It offers detailed lesson plans tagged by course and topic, ultimately facilitating easy searching and browsing. With over 267 lessons available, educators can find a wide range of teaching materials, such as case studies and virtual laboratories. Course Source has been successful in biology, thanks to a supportive community that emerged from the summer institutes on scientific teaching. The journal follows a rigorous peer review process, ensuring high-quality resources. While biology has seen success with Course Source, efforts are being made to expand into other disciplines, such as physics.
Structure and Components of Course Source Lessons
Course Source lessons follow a standardized template, providing educators with clear instructions and materials for implementation. They include learning goals and objectives, an introduction to the topic, scientific teaching themes such as active learning and inclusive teaching, a detailed lesson plan, a teaching timeline table, and a teaching discussion section. This comprehensive format allows educators to easily understand and adapt the lessons to their own contexts and teaching styles. Additionally, Course Source is working on introducing learning frameworks for various disciplines, enhancing the searchability and applicability of the teaching resources.
The Role of Course Source in Closing the Translation Gap
Course Source aims to bridge the translation gap by providing teaching resources that closely align with specific disciplines and courses. By offering detailed lesson plans and resources tailored to biology and now physics, Course Source enables educators to find materials that match their teaching goals and target concepts precisely. The availability of learning frameworks further assists in contextualizing and adapting the teaching resources. This approach allows educators from various disciplines to access and integrate effective teaching strategies into their own classrooms, breaking away from traditional lecture-based instruction.
Course Source's Expansion and Future Plans
While Course Source has been successful in biology, the journal is looking to expand its reach in physics and other disciplines. Collaborations with platforms like Fizzport aim to increase submissions in physics and enable seamless integration with Course Source. Efforts are being made to incorporate more learning frameworks to facilitate the sharing of teaching materials across disciplines. Course Source continues to prioritize supporting authors through their submission and peer review process, with the goal of ensuring that valuable teaching resources are widely accessible and recognized.
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.