RCN-UBE Incubator: The Biological and Environmental Data Education Network

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The Biological and Environmental Data Education (BEDE) project seeks to create a community of biologists and data scientists dedicated to empowering undergraduate instructors to bring data science into biology and environmental science curricula. All scientists must now, to some extent, be data scientists--they must manage, analyze, and communicate about data in the context of collaborative, reproducible research. Furthermore, future professionals will need to have data science skills to deal with urgent problems in agriculture, environmental management, and public health. However, most students in biology and environmental science graduate with little data science experience. The BEDE Network will help address this need by focusing on developing the technical skills, curricular resources, and pedagogical confidence of undergraduate instructors so that they can more intentionally include core data science skills in their classes and labs. By engaging an inclusive community of scientists and biology and environmental science educators, BEDE will develop training workshops, curricular materials, and best practices that can be adopted by educators at almost any institution and in almost any course.Biology and environmental science have been fundamentally reshaped by recent technological advances, including increased computational power, sensor technologies, publicly available software and data, and the Internet. Together with these advances, complex, multidisciplinary questions and urgent environmental and public health problems have led to changes in scientific culture and practice, with shifts toward greater collaboration, accountability, and transparency. These technological advances and cultural changes represent an educational challenge: already-full courses and curricula do not prepare students to address data-intensive problems. To assess the main opportunities and obstacles for integrating data science into biology and environmental science curricula, BEDE investigators will use a survey to gather data on faculty attitudes and expertise about it. Data from the survey will be examined at a BEDE workshop, where participants will: 1) develop Train-the-Teachers workshops based on curricular needs of survey respondents, 2) prepare a position/review paper describing barriers and opportunities to incorporating data science in biology and environmental science education; and 3) develop plans for further expansion of the Network. This project is being jointly funded by the Directorate for Biological Sciences, Division of Biological Infrastructure, and the Directorate for Education and Human Resources, Division of Undergraduate Education as part of their efforts to address the challenges posed in Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action (http://visionandchange/finalreport/).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.