The “Archive of Teaching Resources: Creating a Community of Practice” project is transforming the APS Archive of Teaching Resources Digital Library from an effective resource repository to a dynamic platform supporting a community of biology educators. Participating faculty will not simply be empowered to use digital resources to transform the teaching and learning in their classrooms. They will also use new Archive tools that promote discussion, sharing, and recommendations of teaching resources and strategies. Participants will discuss both how to use resources and their effectiveness in the classroom, that is, faculty will form a reflective community of practice.
The Archive will create and support “like-minded” User Groups who teach similar courses at similar institutions and help them identify and recommend outstanding resources to each other. It will provide online faculty development workshops – Archive Scholar Online Workshops – to teach expanded skills for finding and using high quality online materials and on annotating and sharing these resources with colleagues. Faculty who complete these professional development activities will be designated as Archive Scholars.
Archive Scholars will not only use DL resources for their own classrooms but also will document and share with other Archive users the impacts those resources had on students. The project will especially focus on recruiting and supporting minority faculty and faculty from historically minority institutions for both the User Groups and Archive Scholars activities. Finally, the project will evaluate these tools and professional development activities for their impacts on faculty skills and behaviors using a quasi-experimental design and will further document how faculty members use DL resources in their classrooms.