Colleges and universities nationwide are changing the ways they teach undergraduate biology courses. These changes reflect a growing understanding and application of evidence-based education practices, including active learning, aligned assessments, and inclusive teaching strategies. Implementation of these evidence-based practices will support recruitment and training the next generation of scientists, and also enable greater gains in scientific literacy among the non-scientists in our biology classes.
This educational transformation is slowed by the time and energy that an educator must devote to learn about evidence-based strategies and to develop teaching materials that implement those strategies. In response to this need, a national convocation (Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action) recommended creating a peer-reviewed, open access journal of student-centered, evidence-based biology education resources. CourseSource, now in its second year, is a response to that recommendation.
Built on collaborations with scientific societies, including the Genetics Society of America, CourseSource is an open-access journal of peer-reviewed college biological teaching materials that:
- Incorporate student-centered, evidence-based pedagogy.
- Focus on learning goals and objectives determined by scientific societies.
- Can be easily replicated or adapted for other classrooms.
CourseSource enables authors to publish teaching materials in a high-quality format that documents their scholarly teaching efforts, accomplishments, and innovations. A key feature of CourseSource is organization into “courses” with learning goals and objectives developed by the related scientific society. To see the genetics learning framework, go to http://coursesource.org/courses/genetics.
Just 12 months after the journal went live, each article had been downloaded an average of 25 times, suggesting that many readers are finding the articles to be useful. We will describe CourseSource publication standards, provide examples, and consult with colleagues about their ideas for CourseSource articles.