Integrating Concepts in Biology
We recently published a digital textbook, Integrating Concepts in Biology (http://www.bio.davidson.edu/icb) that answers a national call for change in the way biology is taught (http://visionandchange.org). Although the curricular goals detailed in the Vision and Change report are widely accepted, ours is the first textbook to implement these recommendations. Our approach is also fully compatible with the recent redesign of the Advanced Placement test in biology. AP Biology teachers can download our concordance here (Excel file).
To support this growing national need for new materials and pedagogies, we have created integratingconcepts.org, a community forum where faculty from around the country can communicate and share their experiences using our approach to teaching and our textbook. The site will begin as a resource for users and potential adopters of our textbook, but will ultimately become a site for any teacher who might want to explore or adapt our approach to their science course.
While we provide many resources for instructors and offer webinars on how to teach introductory biology using our approach, teachers who adopt our text are likely to develop their own supplementary materials and pedagogies that might be of interest to other adopters. The forum we create will offer them a chance to share their approaches and experiences with other users. Our digital textbook publisher, Trunity.com, offers users the ability to add their own content to their version of the textbook, but no one outside their class can see that material. www.integratingconcepts.org will be a place where they can upload and share their additional content, whether they are videos, images, assessment tools, or favorite case studies.
In addition, we have developed an approach to teaching laboratory that parallels what goes on in our classroom. In www.integratingconcepts.org we will create a space for laboratory exercises that we use, with instructor guides, student instructions and more. Having our own domain will allow faculty from around the country to share their laboratory exercises and experiences with a wider audience.
Finally, integratingconcepts.org would be a home for mathematical modeling and computational tools for teaching introductory biology. The textbook has approximately 50 Bio-Math Explorations, many of which include interactive Excel files and open-source agent-based models to illustrate the modeling concepts. We would host a modeling forum where we can share existing models with a wider audience, and users can post their own variations and insights from these models.