PARENT SESSION
Oral Session #68: Ecological Education -- Research and Theory.
Presiding: L. Mueller
Wednesday, August 7. 1:00 PM to 4:45 PM. Grand Ballroom West, Radisson.
Teaching Issues and Experiments in Ecology (TIEE) is designed to help ecology faculty teach better: What works best and how do we know?
D'Avanzo, Charlene*,1, Grant, Bruce2, Udovic, Dan3, Lederer, Dan1, Taylor, Jason4, 1 School of Natural Science, Amherst, MA2 Department of Biology, Chester, PA3 Department of Biology, Eugene, OR4 Ecological Society of America, Washington, DC
ABSTRACT- TIEE (Teaching Issues and Experiments in Ecology) is a web and CD-ROM based resource designed to help ecology faculty incorporate more student-active approaches into their ecology lectures and laboratories. ESA members helped us in the pilot stage, and we are happy to report that the full development of TIEE has been supported by NSF. Our goals for TIEE are ambitious. We intend to provide a resource for all ecology faculty interested in changing their teaching - a resource that is rich, serves many needs, stimulates faculty to think more deeply about teaching and learning, is easy to use, and that provides a forum for interaction via the web. The web-CD ROM format allows TIEE to reach a very large audience, but evaluating its effectiveness is a real challenge. Can faculty improve their teaching using a web-based resource? What aspects of TIEE are most useful? Exactly how are teaching workshops critical to the success of resources such as TIEE? Which faculty are most likely to benefit from TIEE (e.g. to what extent will TIEE publications address the rewards system)? How can we coordinate the faculty network of TIEE users as a tool to conduct research and test questions about the value and effectiveness of active learning and inquiry-based instructional methods to teach ecology? We will address these questions by describing TIEE's design and evaluation plan and explore the implications of this project role to other science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) digital library teaching resources.
KEY WORDS: ecological education, experiments to teach ecology, issues to teach ecology, digital library