Open Resources for Biology Education (ORBE): a resource collection

In undergraduate life sciences education, open educational resources (OERs) increase accessibility and retention for students, reduce costs, and save instructors time and effort. Despite increasing awareness and utilization of these resources, OERs are not centrally located, and many undergraduate instructors describe challenges in locating relevant materials for use in their classes. To address this challenge, we have designed a resource collection (referred to as Open Resources for Biology Education, ORBE) with 89 unique resources that are primarily relevant to undergraduate life sciences education. To identify the resources in ORBE, we asked undergraduate life sciences instructors to list what OERs they use in their teaching and curated their responses. Here, we summarize the contents of the ORBE and describe how educators can use this resource as a tool to identify suitable materials to use in their classroom context. By highlighting the breadth of unique resources openly available for undergraduate biology education, we intend for the ORBE to increase instructors' awareness and use of OERs.

The Impact of Field Courses on Undergraduate Knowledge, Affect, Behavior, and Skills: A Scoping Review

Field courses provide transformative learning experiences that support success and improve persistence for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics majors. But field courses have not increased proportionally with the number of students in the natural sciences. We conducted a scoping review to investigate the factors influencing undergraduate participation in and the outcomes from field courses in the United States. Our search yielded 61 articles, from which we classified the knowledge, affect, behavior, and skill-based outcomes resulting from field course participation. We found consistent reporting on course design but little reporting on demographics, which limits our understanding of who takes field courses. Cost was the most commonly reported barrier to student participation, and knowledge gains were the most commonly reported outcome. This scoping review underscores the need for more rigorous and evidence-based investigations of student outcomes in field courses. Understanding how field courses support or hinder student engagement is necessary to make them more accessible to all students.

A Guide to Implementing Inclusive and Accessible Virtual Poster Sessions

Poster sessions are an integral part of conferences because they facilitate networking opportunities and provide a platform for researchers at every career stage to present and get feedback on their work. In Spring 2020, prompted by the rapid transition of the SABER (Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research) Summer 2020 meeting to an online format, we designed and implemented a no-cost and accessible, asynchronous, and synchronous virtual poster session. Here, we outlined our goals for hosting an inclusive virtual poster session (VPS), demonstrated how a backward design approach can facilitate effective VPS, and described our rationale for adopting an asynchronous/synchronous model using the Padlet and Zoom platforms. We shared our lessons learned to facilitate a second VPS at the SABER 2021 meeting and to assist future poster session organizers in designing engaging, inclusive, and accessible poster sessions. Virtual poster sessions have great potential to improve collaborations and science communication experiences at scientific conferences and in undergraduate classrooms.