Hello, SABER!

I'm sharing an invite and initiative from HHMI - see below!

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Dear Colleague,

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s BioInteractive program, in collaboration with biology education researchers from 2-year and 4-year institutions, are collecting information about what guides instruction in your introductory biology course. We are seeking to gain a basic understanding of course elements, including course description, grading policies, teaching practices and schedule. 

This work is a continuation of an ongoing project. Last fall, we reached out to the teaching community and collected a large set of learning objectives to use in our effort to develop a freely available database of higher-order assessment items aligned to learning objectives for introductory biology. We collected over 3000 learning objectives. Many thanks to those of you who contributed! 

When we sorted through the submissions and categorized them by topic, we found what faculty submitted are not proportionate to the representation from the coverage in leading textbooks. This prompted us to ask: What topics are actually taught most often in an introductory biology course? We hope you will help us answer this question by sharing your syllabus with us. 

We ask that you submit your entire syllabus including a tentative course schedule (see example below) and complete the general information questions within the survey: institution type where you teach (2-year, 4-year bachelor’s or master’s granting, or 4-year PhD-granting), the last year you taught the course, course title, audience (majors, non-majors, mixed majors, allied health), duration of the course (12 weeks, 16 weeks, etc.). 

If you would like to participate, please complete the survey and submit your syllabus. BioInteractive will send you a small token of appreciation (a $25 gift card) as a way of saying thank you.

Please note, you will be asked to upload your introductory biology course syllabus as a .doc, .docx, or a PDF. All identifying personal and institutional information will be removed prior to analysis or you are free to remove those sections before submission if you prefer. 

We will accept entries until 11/15/2020 or when we reach 150 submissions.  

Thank you so much for considering!

Peggy Brickman, Alexa Clemmons, Liz Co, Melissa Csikari, Scott Freeman, Cara Gormally, Kelly Hennessey, Jenny McFarland, Jenni Momsen, and Rebecca Orr

Example of weekly topics covered: