Online Courses for Navigating Research Mentoring Relationships

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PROJECT SUMMARY / ABSTRACT Research mentoring relationships are one of the most important means by which students acquire core research competencies, develop a strong sense of self-identity as a scientist, and prepare for careers. However, practical training for students in how to initiate and navigate these critical relationships is absent from most biomedical research training programs. Training that empowers graduate students with the skills and knowledge to be successful mentees is needed. In order to address this, the Science Communication Lab has partnered with the authors of Entering Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to build, test, and evaluate a program of online instruction. This project focuses on students at the critical undergraduate to graduate transition, i.e., advanced research undergraduates, post-baccalaureate students, and first year graduate students, and will provide instruction (online courses) that can be integrated into the curriculum of an existing research training program or engaged with independently by individual students. These courses will address challenges that students from diverse backgrounds face as they transition from undergraduate to graduate school by (1) teaching them to cultivate mentoring relationships with intentionality and to leverage those relationships to benefit their education, research, and careers, (2) building a national community of students from diverse institutions and backgrounds to support their collective learning/training, (3) providing access to free evidence-based, in depth, just-in-time instruction in their research training, and (4) highlighting important cultural aspects of responsible conduct of research, reproducibility, and equity and inclusion. The program is being evaluated using feedback from educational experts, as well as student testing of the courses. As part of this project we developed and deployed the iBiology Courses Platform (ICP), a learning management system (LMS), to deliver the online courses. Our goal in this grant supplement is to ready the ICP software code for a robust open source release and to develop the documentation and resources needed for adoption and further community development. We will refactor and genericize the ICP so it can be used for implementations other than iBiology Courses. We will also document and release the ICP as open source software for the broader community. The expected outcomes of this project are: (1) improved security, speed, and accessibility of the ICP, resulting in a better user experience for all users; (2) a small, nimble, and customizable open-source learning management system that can be easily adapted to meet the needs of a variety of educational programs; (3) a vibrant community of developers and users who engage with this uncomplicated e-Learning system – simple and comprehensible, straightforward to extend, easy to deploy and manage – and are therefore motivated to contribute to the development and enhancement of the platform; and (4) increased adoption and use of the ICP and related resources by educators, leading to improved learning outcomes for students.