This NSDL Selection Services project is supporting two professional societies and a well-known university laboratory to collaboratively facilitate the discovery of high quality educational resources in the ecological, evolution and plant sciences. The intellectual merit of the project lies in its responsiveness to four demands within the ecological sciences and the broader biology community that guide the partnership and the direction of activities: 1) Demand for Quantitative Skills in Biology; 2) Demand for Digital Resource Discovery Services; 3) Demand for Community Support Services; 4) Demand for a Sustainable and Innovative Digital Library And Learning Community. Further strengthening this merit is the project's fostering of dynamic learning communities among two sets of users: 1) researchers who have resources to contribute and 2) educators from grades 7-16 who seek up to date and scientifically accurate resources for their classrooms. The project is exerting its broader impact by engaging a wide variety of faculty members, including those who are teaching lower division general biology classes in universities, community colleges and minority-serving institutions, along with biology educators in the 7-12 grade band. Furthermore, the project's "Visionary Learning Councils" provide an important prototype of future virtual learning communities that bring scientists and educators together in their search for high quality resources so that scientists understand what educators need and educators can access leading edge scientific material for their classrooms as well as give support to one another.
The Digital Resource Discovery project is a milestone for four scientific societies that have come together to collaborate: Ecological Society of America, Botanical Society of America, Society for the Study of Evolution and Society for Economic Botany. We have emerged with strong bonds and mutual commitment to biology education for middle school grades through college. The project has resulted in a coordinated effort to promote Vision and Change for Undergraduate Biology Education and the Next Generation Science Standards through the LifeDiscoveryEd Digital Library, building efficiency and leveraging NSF investment in the partnership for education. A significant collaborative effort is the launching of the Life Discovery - Doing Science education conference. This is the first time for all the partner societies to organize an education conference outside of the annual meetings of our societies. This is a major effort to contribute to the building of the community of scientists and educators by scientific societies, as well as facilitating exchange between secondary and college educators. The conference also served to encourage sharing of teaching resources through the Digital Library. Collectively, over time as we build our collections of teaching resources, we will be able to hold up models of the best teaching resources for the community and provide vital support to help faculty adopt evidence-based teaching approaches by providing such examples. Our Science Pipes Data in the Classroom project is a highly promising initiative that will enhance biological and data literacy by focusing on core concepts and building the groundwork for interpretation and appreciation of Big Data. The Life Discovery partnership is an open one and we anticipate that the collection of resources will become more valuable and will draw in larger numbers of users over time as new partners are added. The partnership will ensure that best practices, surveys and templates for promotional material are passed on to current and new partners.
