Creating a Community of Practice

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In this NSDL Usage Development Workshops project the American Physiological Society is transforming its existing resource repository to a dynamic platform (the "Archive") supporting a community of biology educators. Participating faculty are using new Archive tools to promote discussion, sharing, and recommendations of teaching resources and strategies focusing on both how to use resources and their effectiveness in the classroom, with an eye towards forming a reflective community of practice. To organize participants, the project is creating and supporting "like-minded" User Groups of faculty who teach similar courses at similar institutions. Furthermore, the project is providing online faculty development workshops - Archive Scholar Online Workshops - to teach expanded skills for finding and using high quality online materials and for annotating and sharing these resources with colleagues. The strong intellectual merit of this approach is enhanced by the project's evaluation of these tools and professional development activities for their impacts on faculty skills and behaviors using a quasi-experimental design. The project's broader impacts are felt through its designation of faculty who complete these professional development activities as Archive Scholars, thus identifying a cadre of faculty leaders. In addition, the project is devoting special attention to recruiting and supporting minority faculty and faculty from historically minority institutions for both the User Groups and Archive Scholars activities.