Every year, hundreds of thousands of undergraduate students participate in an Introduction to Behavioral Neuroscience course. This gateway course, offered by Neuroscience, Psychology and Biology departments across the country, provides students with foundational principles of nervous system structure and function, as well as basic information about how the nervous system governs movements, feelings, and thought. Given the high enrollments in introductory behavioral neuroscience courses across the US, the development of a high-quality, open access textbook could substantially reduce barriers to neuroscience education, as well as implement a broad core curriculum that may broadly improve educational quality. The recent shift of numerous courses to online format in the wake of COVID19 further highlights the need for digital learning resources that can be accessed from anywhere in the world. This project will create an open access, online educational resource to serve as a replacement for commercial textbooks. It will integrate multimedia presentation of material, including videos and high quality graphics, as well as instructor-friendly supplemental material (including sample test questions and pre-prepared lecture slides), providing access to a faculty-created, peer-reviewed neuroscience educational resource that is not sequestered behind a pay-wall. Wider access to professional neuroscience learning resources is likely to translate into improved recruitment of talented students into neuroscience. Although targeted toward US students, the common adoption of US textbooks in international classrooms means that this resource would also be poised to influence international neuroscience education and recruitment.
Textbooks support and guide learning in numerous college-level science courses. Though faculty typically create the content of science textbooks, the books are primarily produced and sold by for-profit publishers. Instructors then assign texts which students pay to access, by purchasing a physical book or gaining online access. The emergence of open educational resources offers a way to reduce financial barriers to academic success by providing educational materials free of charge, to anyone who wishes to learn from them. However, there are currently no high-quality open access textbook-replacement resources for university undergraduate neuroscience students. To address this gap, the proposed work will develop an open-access, online textbook replacement to accompany the typical Introduction to Behavioral Neuroscience course for first and second year college students. The proposed content will be created, curated and peer-reviewed by a team of expert neuroscientists who all show excellence in undergraduate instruction. Resource production, formatting and access will be supported by a team experienced in the dissemination of open access textbooks (OpenStax). The proposed resource will be rooted in digital presentation, allowing written text to be interleaved with high quality graphics and embedded videos. Slides with images and videos will also be provided for instructors to encourage faculty adoption of the resource, as will a test bank. Most importantly, all of these components will be free and openly accessible to the public.
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.
