Thanks Leslie. Yes, the collaboration has definitely promoted interdisciplinary thinking. Even more than that, it's allowed for faculty development in many different areas. For example, I came in as a protein biochemist and became interested in the discipline-based pedagogy part of the project. I was able to carry out a sabbatical at Purdue with Trevor Anderson on this topic.

Hi Monica!

It looks like Arthur touched on this a bit in his comment below, but I just wanted to add some additional insight. I spent a significant amount of time thinking about what should be assessed. Many CURE curriculums, and lab curriculums, in general, tend to focus on either goals that are too broad to assess effectively or on procedural skills. Both are important, but we wanted to devise a way to identify Course-based Undergraduate Research Abilities (CURAs) that would be unique to the BASIL curriculum, in that they were vital abilities for this field of research and they were abilities that students would not encounter in other courses or experiences. 

 

I have published a series of papers on: (1) how to identify these abilities for a course, (2) how CURAs can be used as Anticipated Learning Outcomes (ALOs) for designing student assessments, and (3) students' perceptions of their knowledge, experience, and confidence for the identified ALOs (CURAs).

 

Links to the papers:

(1) How to Identify the Research Abilities That Instructors Anticipate Students Will Develop in a Biochemistry Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE). https://www.lifescied.org/doi/10.1187/cbe.17-12...

(2) Anticipated Learning Outcomes for a Biochemistry Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience Aimed at Predicting Protein Function from Structure: Implications for Assessment Design. https://iubmb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.10...

(3) Student Perceptions of Their Gains in Course-Based Undergraduate Research Abilities Identified as the Anticipated Learning Outcomes for a Biochemistry CURE. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jchemed.9b...

I got connected to the BASIL project because of a presentation at a conference (two conferences, actually--one got me interested, the second got me involved).  For me the conferences were especially effective because I was out of my normal "busy" environment, and so had some bandwidth to consider a new project.  It also helped to meet some of the team, as it helped me know it was a good fit.  We also have weekly virtual meetings, and those were a great way to get started slowly--I could see what others were doing, and how it could fit with my students, courses, resources and workflows.  It's been an amazing journey with this group so far, and I'm excited to see how much farther we can go!

Hi Stephen - thanks for watching our presentation. We incorporated student perspective and feedback informally when we were starting the process. We all taught the course for one or two iterations to see what worked best, talked with the students in our respective courses, and came back together to readjust. Stefan Irby's work did poll students directly and we are now at the point of assessing the Anticipated Learning Outcomes (ALOs) that Stefan codified with directed assessments. In this way we'll be able to know if the students are actually achieving those objectives and then we can adjust the curriculum accordingly.

In addition, we were passionate about empowering adopting instructors so that they could modify the curriculum to best suit their own goals and student populations. This is why it's in Word doc form so that instructors can freely alter or copy/paste. Indeed, even the core BASIL instructors each teach it a tad differenty (see our paper that describes this flexible implementation: https://iubmb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/1...).

 

Hi Wendy, thanks for your comments. You are reading our minds with your questions. Yes, our next phase is to expand to more institutions, to provide trainings (in person and online) to new adopters, as well as to expand the curriculum with more modules. We are also working this summer (hopefully with an NSF supplement) to move all of the wet lab modules to an online format, complete with simulations and data analysis. The computational modules are easily moved online already, so our hope is that by the start of the fall BASIL will also exist in a completely virtual environment.

Hi Chris - thanks for watching our video. I think that we had two big challenges. The first was logistics. The team members represented four time zones and finding a time in our busy teaching days to get together virtually was challenging. Some semesters we couldn't manage it and would hold two meetings/week and record them for the others to watch. The second was the barriers of a common language. As a team composed of computer scientists, biochemists, computational chemists, and educational researchers we all had to learn the language of each field - at least to the extent that we could understand viewpoints, barriers, etc.

Hi Josh, I believe we spoke several years ago about your Freshman Research Initiative. We are very interested in connecting with high schools. I will watch Dr. Stovall's video.

Hi Michael, thanks for visiting and for your comments. I will confess my ignorance - what is PD? We are learning to share this with other biochemistry educators and are talking about extending into closely related disciplines like cell biology. At the same time, we are thinking about the approach we are using and wondering how to go beyond our narrow focus on life sciences. What are your suggestions?