The NSDL Biological Sciences Pathway II (BEN) activities include: Redesigning the portal web site to highlight digital resources that are useful in college introductory biology courses and AP biology courses at the middle/high school level; Developing and implementing a Faculty Tester Program to examine the impact of biological sciences digital education resources on student learning; Increasing the number of BEN Faculty Scholars who promote the use of digital resources in the biological sciences classroom. Information reported by Faculty Testers is included in a blog called The Biological Sciences Digital Classroom. The BEN Pathway serves as a catalyst for professional societies or coalitions that seek to foster a change in biological sciences teaching at higher education institutions and at the middle/high school levels. The project focuses on improving curriculum, pedagogy, and student assessment. The BEN Pathway currently provides services and activities for 26 organizations, including aggregating the resources of collaborators into a portal and providing services to develop, disseminate, and sustain high quality digital education resources. This project addresses the need to provide mentoring and professional development for biological sciences education leaders and fosters the practice of using digital resources by assessing their impact on student learning.
Intellectual Merit The BEN (Bioscience Education Network) Pathway serves as a catalyst for 27 professional societies or coalitions that seek to foster a change in biological sciences teaching at higher education institutions and the middle and high school levels; this includes changes in curriculum, teaching, and student assessment. The BEN Pathway addresses the pressing need for developing and disseminating high quality biological sciences teaching materials and tools that build problem-solving and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) research and workforce skills. In addition, new research directions in nanotechnology and informatics mean that all STEM college majors, and not just biological sciences majors, need an in-depth understanding of the biological sciences. For non-STEM majors, faculty are looking for teaching resources that help prepare these students to understand public issues related to the biological sciences, such as stem cell research, cloning and gene therapy, and environmental and conservation issues. For college students preparing to become K-12 teachers of biology, faculty members also need materials that emphasize the best teaching practices. These and other needs were first identified in the 2003 report by the National Research Council, Bio 2010: Transforming Undergraduate Education for Future Research Biologists (www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10497&page=R2) and later again in 2011 in the Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action report (http://visionandchange.org/files/2011/03/Revised-Vision-and-Change-Final-Report.pdf). Major project activities included: ***Providing mentoring and professional development for staff members in 27 organizations on how to build digital libraries or contribute biological sciences education resources to digital libraries, including the National Science Digital Library (nsdl.org). ***Developing and providing guidelines, software tools, and technical assistance for digital library builders and catalogers. ***Developing and maintaining the BEN Portal. Through the BEN portal, peer-reviewed e-resources from all collaborators are aggregated into a one-stop, searchable central website (www.biosciednet.org). *** Cataloging or describing and validating new online biological sciences education resources and deaccessioning or removing resources that have been deleted from the Internet. Descriptive information about each online resource includes author and copyright information, type of resources (video, image, journal article, etc.), and grade level. More information about BEN catalog management and information are online (http://saas.aaas.org/ben-wiki/doku.php?id=ben_catalog_management and www.biosciednet.org/docs/BEN_Metadata_White_Paper.pdf). ***Providing ongoing technical maintenance for the BEN portal, including upgrading the online search and browse functions and harvesting new resources. Harvesting is the process for aggregating all the educational resources of the organizations at one central website. More information about the harvesting process is online (http://saas.aaas.org/ben-wiki/doku.php?id=harvesting_process). ***Identifying and providing professional development for faculty who promote awareness and use of biological sciences digital libraries. These ambassadors are called BEN Scholars. More information about BEN Scholars is online (www.biosciednet.org/portal/about/benScholars.php?nav=main). BEN lead collaborators include the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Isovera (technical service provider), American Physiological Society (APS), American Society for Microbiology (ASM), American Institute for Biological Sciences (AIBS), BioQuest Curriculum Consortium (BCC), Bio-Link, and Ecological Society of America (ESA). Broader Impacts The leaders of the BEN Pathway: ***Built a learning community that helped staff members in the 27 biological sciences organizations to increase their knowledge about digital library development and management, including creating and maintain digital libraries, as well as describing digital materials to better help users find what they are searching for. Most of these organizations have incorporated digital libraries or electronic teaching resources into their core education operation. These resources support the dissemination and outreach for the Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education initiative (http://visionandchange.org/). ***Built a cadre of biological sciences faculty ambassadors -- the 75 BEN Scholars. More than 90% of the BEN Scholars are developing online biological sciences education resources and projects; providing coaching and professional development for other faculty who want to implement evidence-based changes in undergraduate biology education; or are contributing to the science education literature base (www.biosciednet.org/portal/about/benScholars.php?nav=main). ***Developed cost-effective software, online tools and guidelines for use by anyone who wants to develop a STEM digital library (http://saas.aaas.org/ben-wiki/doku.php). Outcomes The BEN portal includes 18,482 peer-reviewed electronic resources, contributed by the 27 collaborators (www.biosciednet.org/portal/). These resources include images, reviews and journal articles, lab exercises, lesson plans, teaching strategies and guidelines, animations, and more. These resources cover over 70 biological topics including microbiology, plant sciences, physiology, biochemistry and molecular biology, cell biology, anatomy, genetics and heredity, ecology, and more. Since undergraduate biology is a core course in many colleges and universities, and high school biology educators tend to teach 4 to 5 biology classes a day, these educators often have severe constraints on both time and resources. To this end, BEN Collaborators built digital libraries that are helping users easily find the teaching and professional development resources that they need. From June 2010 to November 2014 the BEN portal had 151,551 unique visitors. The average number of monthly visits is 3,625. BEN collaborators have an estimated combined outreach to over 464,000 individual members and 2,032 institutional members.
