Engaging undergraduate students in ecological investigations using large, public datasets: Distributed Graduate Seminar

• Teresa Mourad
• Wendy K. Gram
• Bruce Grant

Collaborative website for the group

Abstract
The Ecological Society of America (ESA), in close partnership with NEON Inc., will facilitate a distributed seminar to focus on examining effective student activities and assessment strategies for using large public datasets in the classroom. The rapidly increasing availability and quantity of publicly accessible large scale datasets present an outstanding opportunity for minority-serving and small undergraduate institutions to introduce their students to a new digital age of ecology and environmental science. The teaching activities to be developed, implemented and assessed through this seminar aim to enable undergraduate students to both better understand ecological concepts and equip them with fundamentally critical quantitative ecoinformatics skills as the demand for a data-savvy workforce grows steadily in the 21st century. The seminar itself will be evaluated for its potential as a model for future faculty development. The teaching activities will be made available in a variety of sources and the pedagogical implications of these educational activities will be synthesized for publication in Frontiers, ESA’s well-respected multi-disciplinary journal.