In this Open Scholarship Café focusing on Open Education, Dr. Carlos Goller tells us about his work in empowering undergraduate and graduate students to be scientists and
scholars is challenging, with constantly emerging technologies often
impractical to bring to teaching laboratories. As part of small (10-18
student) upper-division courses, Dr. Goller and colleagues have created public WordPress sites
for several molecular biology courses enrolling undergraduate and
graduate students from a broad range of disciplines and programs. The
sites are populated with student-produced creative works they are
willing to share publicly. Depending on the course, students create
lessons, podcasts, video tutorials, and case studies that are designed
to be accessible to a broad audience, reliable, and engaging.
Every
semester students contribute additional resources and use existing
student-produced materials as supplemental readings, revising and
updating as necessary. Dr. Goller believes that in courses without
textbooks, because of the nature of fast-paced evolving scientific
technologies, student scholar co-creators provide much-needed accessible
information that others can leverage to understand the powerful
applications of modern scientific methods. This is also an opportunity
to engage stakeholders and the global campus community. How can we
promote openness and use of these resources beyond our niche courses?
Speaker Bio
Dr. Carlos Goller
I
am an Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Biological
Sciences and teach in the Biotechnology Program (BIT, biotech.ncsu.edu)
at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC. My research interests
include molecular microbiology, metagenomics, high-throughput
discovery, epidemiology, history of disease, science education, and
outreach activities. I am also interested in teaching with technology
and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Importantly, I love
co-creating with student scholars and learning together by connecting
courses, undergraduate research, and open educational resources.