Welcome to QB@CC (Quantitative Biology at Community Colleges)! We are a network of mathematics and biology faculty (primarily at community colleges, but we are expanding to include 4-year institutions as well) working to create materials that both disciplines can use in their classrooms. All of the materials that we create (and adapt) are published as OER so that faculty and students worldwide can access them to foster an interdisciplinary approach to learning. We are so thankful that you've decided to spend some time with us today! 

We would appreciate your feedback! Below are some prompts, but we welcome ANY and all ideas you want to share!

1. Did this video encourage you to explore/support QB@CC by visiting our webpage? If so, what drew you? If not, what could we do differently to pique your curiosity?

2. Of our four pillars of equity, which speaks to you and the work that you are doing/would like to do in the future?

3. What concerns do you have about an interdisciplinary approach to teaching and learning? What challenges may you encounter and how can you overcome them?

4. How can we support you in fostering an interdisciplinary approach to teaching and learning? What are some of the things that are already in place that could support an interdisciplinary approach to teaching and learning?

5. How can we learn from you?! Share with us your approach to interdisciplinary learning and/or equity!

Thank you for sharing this video. I think that this approach has the potential to be a game changer both for helping students to better understand the connections between mathematics and biology and to serve as a model for making specific connections across disciplines more broadly. Interdisciplinary approaches to teaching and learning are difficult to accomplish because of the multiple systemic barriers that currently exist in higher education. I applaud your efforts to address some of these issues. When I worked at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, I was involved with a project that tackled these issues that you, your colleagues, and other visitors to this video might find of interest (freely downloadable):

“The Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher Education: Branches from the Same Tree.” 2018. https://www.nap.edu/catalog/24988.

I’m also hoping that you can provide some additional information about what you consider to be the successes of this project to date:

• The video points out that math and biology faculty are collaborating to develop these modules for use in biology courses. Do you know how many of these modules are also being used by math instructors in their courses to teach general math concepts?
• Do you have data about learning gains after students use the modules?
• Are learning gains specific to the topic explored by a module? Or, do you see that these skills transfer to other kinds of mathematical problems?
• The website shows the total number of views and downloads for each module. Do you know what proportion of each module is being viewed and downloaded by faculty vs. by students?
• Do you have any data about how many of these modules are actually being used in math or biology courses after they are viewed or downloaded?
• What is your communication strategy for alerting faculty in community colleges (and hopefully to baccalaureate institutions) about the availability of these resources?

Thank you again for submitting this video!

Yes!  Thanks for asking (in the video) us to propose modules.  I think synthetic biology would be a nice complement to the set of topics in the biology modules listed in the program website.  While I am biased toward synthetic biology—it does offer opportunities to engage learners in a paradigmatically different form of production and learning in life science.  

I wondered about the equity perspectives you are using—your video highlights culturally responsive approaches and I wondered if you could share a bit more what you mean by this for researchers having a difficult time applying this perspective in their research designs or learning interventions. 

In exploring your site, I noticed an "adaptation" metric and I wondered what it means and how you use it to guide your research, iterations, or project. Based on what I can tell it looks like a measure of who accessed and then modified a module for personal use.  If this is true I wondered what it means that there are few adaptations.  I am especially interested in this because of the points about universal design and equity raised in the video. 

Hi Jay,

Thanks for sharing the resources and asking pointed questions that will help us expand to consider many directions to take the project in the coming years.

Alys has responded to most of your questions. I will address some of the questions here:

• Do you have data about learning gains after students use the modules?
• Are learning gains specific to the topic explored by a module? Or, do you see that these skills transfer to other kinds of mathematical problems?

QB@CC has no direct scope to assess student learning gains. As Alys mentioned, our grant evaluator has sent out a climate survey to all the network participants and some of the survey questions may help collect indirect data on student learning gains. We may have to think of a next grant option to address this aspect of the QB@CC project.

• The website shows the total number of views and downloads for each module. Do you know what proportion of each module is being viewed and downloaded by faculty vs. by students?

Since we are not directly reaching out to students, my guess is that the students accessing these modules may be a really small number (closer to zero)... but that is 100% a guess on my part.

• What is your communication strategy for alerting faculty in community colleges (and hopefully to baccalaureate institutions) about the availability of these resources?

In addition to all the ways that Alys has mentioned about our dissemination, we also seek our partner organizations and institutions to help get the word out. We have professional societies and organizations like NABT, HHMI, NISOD, NROC, ATD helping us by posting calls for incubator and FMN participation in Fall and Spring, and several CCs that are QB@CC partners help us with the same. Lastly, with more conferences going in-person or having a hybrid model, we see an increase in QB@CC participants willing to present posters and workshops at these events. The hope is that such outreach from participants who have gone through the work with QB@CC will be effective ambassadors to recruit new participants.

We welcome, and greatly appreciate any help, support and ideas that you may have for us to do better.

Thanks - Vedham

 

Very interesting sounding project/program. However, what does a module look like? Can you give an example of an integrated math-biology activity or event? I am a bit unclear what this program looks like, I get what the goals are but…

Hello John,

Thanks for replying to my comments.

While I advocate for extracurricular STEM activities, I am still unconvinced of these programs' long-term impact on student's entry into the field and ultimate success in affecting the pipeline. Has your program been able to track the degree and longevity of effects on your participants?

Cheers,

Anne

 

Hi Anne! Great question! I am serving as the external evaluator for this project and others and your question is one that I love to study. While this particular project is in year 3 of funding so long-term effects are still early, I can speak to similar projects/programs I help to evaluate hosted on the same QUBES/BioQUEST platform where measures of student impact are demonstrated. Here is a link to one such program called BIOMAAP which is also on the QUBES hub that you may want to check out. With this project, I measured student impacts and trajectories for students in STEM Ed. programs as well as undergraduate biology students https://qubeshub.org/community/groups/biomaap Thank you again for the wonderful question!

Sondra LoRe