Breaking Out of the Academic Pipeline.

For many graduate students, the academic path may not be the best fit, and with limited faculty positions available, many students are now looking to other career possibilities. University programs are helping students to explore and pursue alternative careers.

Physics meets biology: The joining of two forces to further our understanding of cellular function.

Some biological questions are tough to solve through standard molecular and cell biological methods and naturally lend themselves to investigation by physical approaches. Below, a group of formally trained physicists discuss, among other things, how they apply physics to address biological questions and how physical approaches complement conventional biological approaches.

Education evolving: teaching biology online.

The rise of massive open online courses (MOOCs) is shaking up education. For science professors, the Internet offers new opportunities and technological tools to develop new materials, rethink curricula, and teach more effectively, benefiting students both on campus and on the web.

Teaching genetics with integrative thoughts of conservation biology.

Biodiversity losses along with the exponential growth of global human population and human-provoked over-exploitation of natural resources. Genetic factors played an important role in the conservation of endangered species. Conservation genetics is a cross-field disciplinary of genetics and conservation biology. The course of conservation genetics is not available in colleges and universities, and the course of genetics does not directly reflect the content of biological conservation. We have taught genetics with integrative thoughts of conservation biology. In the form of case studies, we have integrated recent advances of research and technology in the relevant fields into the genetics classroom. As a result, we improved the undergraduates' motivation and interest in active learning, provoked the mutual promotion of "basic knowledge of genetics, awareness of ecological protection, and cultivate interdisciplinary thinking", and set up the groundwork for cultivating interdisciplinary talents who not only master solid basic knowledge, but also have the concept of ecological civilization.

Biology lessons in times of COVID: The pandemic has forced educators to teach and instruct online with varying success and challenges.

Since COVID-19 hit last year, lecturers and professors have been exploring digital and other tools to teach and instruct their students.

Innovations in teaching undergraduate biology and why we need them.

A growing revolution is under way in the teaching of introductory science to undergraduates. It is driven by concerns about American competitiveness as well as results from recent educational research, which explains why traditional teaching approaches in large classes fail to reach many students and provides a basis for designing improved methods of instruction. Discipline-based educational research in the life sciences and other areas has identified several innovative promising practices and demonstrated their effectiveness for increasing student learning. Their widespread adoption could have a major impact on the introductory training of biology students.

Teaching with core concepts to facilitate the integrated learning of introductory organismal biology.

Despite the call from biology educators for students to learn the biological sciences as a unified whole, the teaching of introductory organismal biology is still largely arranged into separate sections that tend to focus exclusively on the biology of individual taxonomic categories (i.e., animals and plants). Conversely, this paper presents a strategy for combining the teaching and learning of introductory animal and plant biology using the core concepts of biology and physiology as tools for integrative learning. The paper outlines the positioning of organismal biology within a two-semester introductory biology course, the topical organization of an integrated organismal biology module around shared physiological functions, the use of core concepts to facilitate the combined learning of the biology of animals and plants, and some instructional practices that can support core concepts as learning tools for organismal biology. Examples of how core concepts serve to integrate the organismal biology of animals and plants are described and explained. The goal of this approach is to show introductory students that the mastery of core concepts can help them integrate their understanding of organismal biology. More broadly, students acquire skills in using core concepts as learning tools in biology that should enable them to better assimilate more advanced concepts and to achieve a more unified study of the biological sciences as they progress through the curriculum.NEW & NOTEWORTHY This paper is 1) a personal view on why the teaching of introductory animal and plant biology ought to be more integrated and how an integrated module for introductory organismal biology can be designed, and 2) a practical guide to instructors on how core concepts can be used as learning tools to promote the integrated learning of introductory organismal biology.

Teaching Dynamics to Biology Undergraduates: the UCLA Experience.

There is a growing realization that traditional "Calculus for Life Sciences" courses do not show their applicability to the Life Sciences and discourage student interest. There have been calls from the AAAS, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the NSF, and the American Association of Medical Colleges for a new kind of math course for biology students, that would focus on dynamics and modeling, to understand positive and negative feedback relations, in the context of important biological applications, not incidental "examples." We designed a new course, LS 30, based on the idea of modeling biological relations as dynamical systems, and then visualizing the dynamical system as a vector field, assigning "change vectors" to every point in a state space. The resulting course, now being given to approximately 1400 students/year at UCLA, has greatly improved student perceptions toward math in biology, reduced minority performance gaps, and increased students' subsequent grades in physics and chemistry courses. This new course can be customized easily for a broad range of institutions. All course materials, including lecture plans, labs, homeworks and exams, are available from the authors; supporting videos are posted online.

Anatomical self-efficacy of undergraduate students improves during a fully online biology course with at-home dissections.

Student enrollments in online college courses have grown steadily over the past decade, and college administrators expect this trend to continue or accelerate. Despite the growing popularity of online education, one major critique in the sciences is that students are not trained in the hands-on skills they may need for the workforce, graduate school, or professional school. For example, the Association of American Medical Colleges has recommended that medical schools evaluate applicants on their motor skills and observation skills, yet many online biology programs do not offer opportunities for students to develop these skills. In on-campus biology programs, students commonly develop these skills through hands-on animal dissections, but educators have struggled with how to teach dissections in an online environment. We designed a fully online undergraduate biology course that includes at-home, hands-on dissections of eight vertebrate specimens. Over three course offerings, we evaluated changes in four student outcomes: anatomical self-efficacy, confidence in laboratory skills, perceptions of support, and concerns about dissections. Here, we describe how we implemented at-home dissections in the online course and show that students taking the course gained anatomical self-efficacy and confidence in multiple laboratory skills. Based on open-ended responses, the students perceived that their experiences with the at-home dissections facilitated these gains. These results demonstrate that at-home, hands-on laboratories are a viable approach for teaching practical skills to students in fully online courses. We encourage science instructors to introduce at-home laboratories into their online courses, and we provide recommendations for instructors interested in implementing at-home laboratories.

Educators' Views on the Use of Dissection and Dissection Alternatives in American Biology Classrooms.

Animal dissection remains a common practice in American biology classrooms, despite the availability of dissection alternatives to study anatomy and physiology. Indeed, there is a growing body of evidence in the literature suggesting that the use of alternatives leads to the greater achievement of learning objectives, as compared to dissection. To better understand the current use of and attitudes toward dissection and alternatives, a nationwide survey of (mainly high-school) biology teachers (n = 2687) was conducted. Most educators believed that learning objectives related to biology subject content could be met through the use of alternatives, yet they preferred the hands-on experience of dissection. Most educators allow their students to use alternatives if requested, although few teachers ask students about their preference for using an animal specimen versus an alternative. Educators cited student engagement as the main factor driving their decision to choose between dissection specimens and alternatives, and felt that cost is the biggest barrier to implementing alternatives at their schools. Additional perspectives on dissection and alternatives were shared by survey participants. Since alternatives can be used to meet learning objectives associated with dissection, we recommend their use as replacements for traditional animal specimens, in line with the replacement, reduction and refinement of animal use in education, according to the Three Rs principles.

Beyond the lab bench: Pathways in inclusion, equity, and diversity in biology education and social justice.

Over the past six years, I describe my personal journey into promoting inclusion, equity, and diversity in biology education and social justice. In my personal journey, I will describe how I found my passion in mentoring and teaching Native American, Latinx, and non-traditional undergraduates in cell and developmental biology. I will also describe how Dr. Karen Gross' concept of lasticity aligned with culturally-responsive teaching and mentoring can help foster transformative learning for all undergraduates.

Ten simple rules for making training materials FAIR.

Everything we do today is becoming more and more reliant on the use of computers. The field of biology is no exception; but most biologists receive little or no formal preparation for the increasingly computational aspects of their discipline. In consequence, informal training courses are often needed to plug the gaps; and the demand for such training is growing worldwide. To meet this demand, some training programs are being expanded, and new ones are being developed. Key to both scenarios is the creation of new course materials. Rather than starting from scratch, however, it's sometimes possible to repurpose materials that already exist. Yet finding suitable materials online can be difficult: They're often widely scattered across the internet or hidden in their home institutions, with no systematic way to find them. This is a common problem for all digital objects. The scientific community has attempted to address this issue by developing a set of rules (which have been called the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable [FAIR] principles) to make such objects more findable and reusable. Here, we show how to apply these rules to help make training materials easier to find, (re)use, and adapt, for the benefit of all.

Fostering Systems Thinking in Biological Education Using the Example of Plant Hormones.

Systems thinking is an increasingly recognized paradigm in education in both natural and social sciences, a particular focus being, naturally, in biology. This article argues that plant biology, and in particular, plant hormonal signaling, provides highly illustrative models for learning and teaching in a systems paradigm, because it offers examples of highly complex networks, ranging from the molecular- to ecosystem-scale, and in addition lends itself to the use of real-life biological objects.

It's in the syllabus or is it? How biology syllabi can serve as communication tools for creating inclusive classrooms at a large-enrollment research institution.

Syllabi are usually required by institutions of higher education and often are the first exposure that students have to a particular course. Instructors can use syllabi as a mechanism to convey important information to students. Moreover, a syllabus can be considered a tool to create inclusive biology courses by transmitting information to all students equitably. In this study, we examined 75 biology course syllabi collected from a research-intensive institution to examine what content instructors include. We reviewed the syllabi to determine the presence or absence of elements and assessed to what extent there were differences in the presence or absence of certain syllabus elements based on course level and course size. We found that instructors are most likely to include content about course expectations and least likely to include content about creating positive classroom climate on their course syllabi. Despite university requirements, many instructors did not include the university-mandated criteria and they did not include elements that could increase how inclusive students perceive the course to be. However, instructors more often included inclusive content when it was required by the university. We also found that students enrolled in upper level courses and small enrollment courses are provided with less content on their syllabi, which we would then interpret as a less inclusive syllabus. We discuss the implications of how these results may differentially impact students in these courses and how the syllabus can be a tool for creating more inclusive college biology courses.