Opening the Pathway: An Example of Universal Design for Learning as a Guide to Inclusive Teaching Practices.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) provides a flexible framework for supporting a wide variety of learners. We report here on a conference that presented the UDL framework as a way to increase success of deaf and hard-of-hearing (deaf/hh) students in introductory biology courses. The Opening the Pathway conference was an NSF Advanced Technological Education project focusing on raising awareness about careers in biotechnology and student success in introductory biology, a key gateway course for careers in biotechnology. The participants were professionals who work with deaf/hh students at pivotal points in students' educational pathways for raising awareness of biotechnology career options, including community college faculty, high school faculty at schools for the deaf, and American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters. The conference goal was to provide an effective, meaningful professional development experience in biology instruction. The conference explicitly addressed the role of a UDL approach in building accessible, inclusive, productive learning environments, particularly for deaf/hh students, and demonstrated how to make effective pedagogical practices, specifically case-based learning, inclusive and UDL-aligned in an introductory biology context. We describe the conference, conference outcomes for participants, and in particular the application of the UDL framework to create an inclusive experience.

Incubators: Building community networks and developing open educational resources to integrate bioinformatics into life science education.

While it is essential for life science students to be trained in modern techniques and approaches, rapidly developing, interdisciplinary fields such as bioinformatics present distinct challenges to undergraduate educators. In particular, many educators lack training in new fields, and high-quality teaching and learning materials may be sparse. To address this challenge with respect to bioinformatics, the Network for the Integration of Bioinformatics into Life Science Education (NIBLSE), in partnership with Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis (QUBES), developed incubators, a novel collaborative process for the development of open educational resources (OER). Incubators are short-term, online communities that refine unpublished teaching lessons into more polished and widely usable learning resources. The resulting products are published and made freely available in the NIBLSE Resource Collection, providing recognition of scholarly work by incubator participants. In addition to producing accessible, high-quality resources, incubators also provide opportunities for faculty development. Because participants are intentionally chosen to represent a range of expertise in bioinformatics and pedagogy, incubators also build professional connections among educators with diverse backgrounds and perspectives and promote the discussion of practical issues involved in deploying a resource in the classroom. Here we describe the incubator process and provide examples of beneficial outcomes. Our experience indicates that incubators are a low cost, short-term, flexible method for the development of OERs and professional community that could be adapted to a variety of disciplinary and pedagogical contexts.