Guest post: Undergraduate mentorship in the time of COVID-19: What we’ve learned

This is a guest post by Jonathan Barros, Briana Martin-Villa, Lexi Golden, Jonathan Hernandez, & Callie Chappell.

I. Introduction: 

During this challenging time of COVID-19, our lives have been turned upside down. Jobs have been lost or radically altered, loved ones have fallen ill, and our daily routines have been upended. In light of these challenges, our research (especially if it is not COVID-related) may not seem that important. In this blog post, we would like to highlight why right now, undergraduate research experiences are especially important, and how good mentorship practices can help students through this challenging time. This post was written collaboratively by a team of undergraduate researchers at Stanford University and their mentor, a Ph.D. student. Based on our experiences working together over the summer, we would like to share some suggestions and best practices for mentors collaborating with undergraduate researchers working remotely. 

Embracing the Paradox: Lessons Learned from Teaching Virtual Field Courses

Intro from Meghan: This is a guest post from Alicia Farmer and Stephanie Shaulskiy from the University of Michigan’s Biological Station.

This is Stephanie and Alicia. We work as staff* for the University of Michigan Biological Station (UMBS), a teaching and research field station located near Pellston, Michigan in the state’s northern lower peninsula. 

When coronavirus forced our home institution’s instruction online in March, UMBS was less than two months away from welcoming several hundred researchers, instructors, students and staff to our Northern Michigan site for our usual field season. In a normal year, we offer 20 – 25 field courses, divided among a 4-week spring session, an 8-week summer session, and a 2-week late summer session. Once the university approved us to offer classes on-line, we gave our instructors the option of adapting their northern-Michigan, place-based classes to a fully remote and virtual environment, or canceling their class for this year. To our surprise and gratitude, fifteen instructors signed on. 

Because we had already been assessing outcomes and impacts of the UMBS field experience, we were set to pivot to an assessment of this year’s online instruction. What follows is a distillation of actions and lessons learned from our focus groups and individual interviews with faculty and students participating in our 2020 remote field courses.**

9 SUCCESSFUL SYLLABUS/COURSE DESIGN ACTIONS for REMOTE INSTRUCTION

as piloted by UMBS Spring/Summer 2020 Faculty

C = Builds Community
E = Heightens student Engagement with the content
F = Especially important to courses with a Field component
P = Builds sense of Place
S = Important consideration for course Structure or Syllabus 

1. Incorporate Physical Materials (C, E, F, P, S)

Students in one course wrote letters to each other. One faculty member sent the students items for an assignment; package “unboxing” happened in a Zoom session. Several lab classes (including Chemistry, Ecology, and Fishes) had UMBS staff assemble and mail lab kits to students.*** These enabled students to sample and study their local environments, including their residences. 

Materials sent to students in Biology of Fishes class

[Image caption: Materials sent to students in Biology of Fishes class. Image description: Items spread out on a table surface include a bucket, a minnow trap, a bundle of flags, flagging tape, a tape measure, rope, latex gloves, bait, plastic bags.]

2. Take advantage of and take into account students’ diverse locations (E, F, P, S)

For some classes, students sampled water and soil in their own kitchens, yards or neighborhoods. In other classes, students took photos or made sketches wherever they were living and added these to a common Box folder or Slack channel to share with each other. The instructor for the Biology of Fishes, where students were spread across the country, observed that everyone in the class enjoyed examining the regional data on fish communities that they could build by combining everyone’s individual data. Another faculty member observed that for many students, these excuses to be outdoors during the pandemic brought a “source of restoration and a calming during this moment.” 

That said, it helped to have flexibility built into assignments to accommodate students’ varying locations and access to the out-of-doors. In a pollinator lab, students needed to adjust the methods around what flower(s) were available where they were. In Plant Biology, the online identification resources were richer for some student locations than others. Assignments also needed to accommodate students who were unable to safely go outside. In a biology project, a home-bound student focused on doing a statistical analysis of the group’s data instead of collecting it. An art class student substituted kitchen produce for living plants to illustrate features like branching and spirals. 

Some faculty made (or asked staff to make) videos of specific habitats that students wouldn’t get to visit in person. Others used guest speakers to bring the wider world to the class environment.

 

[Image caption: A student heads out into the field for her Fishes Class. Photo credit: Sophia Margaritis. Image description: A young person with a mask covering her mouth and nose and a handful of orange flags stands in front of a lake. Everyone included in a picture gave permission for their image to be in this post.] 

3. Create Collaborative Teaching Teams

Spring faculty invited summer faculty to meet with them weekly. This allowed spring faculty to share what was working or not as summer faculty were planning their courses. It also gave spring faculty a venue for sharing their successes, frustrations and questions. 

4. Set Clear Expectations for Online Communication (C, E)

Faculty recommended

• surveying students in advance to see how many can attend synchronous sessions;
• surveying students in advance about wifi/connectivity;
• being explicit about what expectations are for course participation: is it okay to turn off cameras? to miss a discussion if you are feeling “Zoomed out?”;
• having a discussion with students in the beginning of the course to create ground rules (e.g. is Zoom Chat for Q&A only or for sidebar conversations? Who decides who speaks next?).

5. Keep Student Autonomy in Mind / Use Specific and Clear definitions of concepts (F, S) 

In a traditional field course, the instructor or GSI typically guides students through field work. In the virtual setting, students have more control over when and how they conduct their field work. Faculty perceived that students were empowered by this freedom; however, if students didn’t understand exactly what they were supposed to be doing, they might make mistakes that were hard to identify or correct after the field work was complete. For example, plant and fish identification often rely on looking at a specific part of the organism, but students might mis-identify because they were looking at the wrong structures. 

Several instructors noted that students collected less data on their own (and generally the data collected by the class spanned a wider geographic area) than they would have at UMBS. So while students were still able to participate in field work and the research process, their data required different analyses and conclusions than in a typical lab/project. 

Additionally, spring term instructors noted that if given the choice, students worked in individual and small group (2-3 students) projects, instead of forming the larger groups that are the norm in field courses. Rather than helping the usual 5 or 6 groups with their research ideas, instructors were working with closer to 10-15 group/individual projects. This required the instructor to spend much more time giving help and direction to different projects. 

6. Schedule Time and use different platforms to Build Community (C, E, F, S)

Some activities that let students and instructors get to know each other better included

• informal lunch gatherings where faculty ate their lunch with any students who wanted to come; sometimes faculty discussed things like their own career path or invited a colleague to talk about race or gender in the field;
• scavenger hunt where students had to find something that told the class something about themselves, such a book they’re reading or game the’re playing or their favorite thing in nature;
• on-line Adventure Race where teams of students worked together to solve clues that introduced them to Northern Michigan field sites;
• faculty v. GSI head-to-head online challenge (e.g. pipetting) with students picking sides in advance and watching a live competition;
• using side channels like discussion boards or chat channels as venues for ongoing and wider-ranging topics between course sessions.  

However, not all of these had high participation. It was the observation of some faculty that students didn’t want to be on Zoom any more than they had to. Platforms that allowed asynchronous interaction (chats, photo galleries) had more robust participation than extracurricular synchronous events.

Everyone used Canvas as the academic home for the course. But most faculty tried to approximate the more informal and immersive experience of field camp by engaging additional software:

• Slack for fun field photos, chats.
• Zoom for informal activities like a virtual campfire, a scavenger hunt, and brown bag  lunches where guest speakers shared their experiences as young scientists.
• Box for group collaboration and portfolios

[Image caption: The General Ecology class meets for a “virtual campfire” to just hang out and talk. Photo credit: Hannah DeHetre. Image description: A laptop screen view shows a Zoom call in progress. The dominant image is of a campfire with a lake in the background. Participants’ screen views are minimized along the side. Everyone included in a picture gave permission for their image to be in this post.]

7. Check-in and Revise as necessary (C, E)

Ask students early and often how things are going. Venues our faculty used for this included Google forms, one-on-one meetings, GSI-led video discussions, and text group chats (on Slack channels and Canvas discussion boards). Be prompt and flexible in responding to students’ concerns. One instructor developed a daily to-do list after receiving feedback that students wanted more clarity on daily course requirements. Another reduced the amount of weekly Zoom meetings when students complained of burnout and loss of focus. They reworked the class to allow more work to be done asynchronously and saw the quality of synchronous meetings improve. Other classes added late-night office hours (staffed by GSIs) in response to students’ requests for help at times when they were working. 

8. Consider the Amount of Content (E, S)

Material takes longer to teach in a virtual setting compared to an in-person setting and students take more time to orient themselves when they are on their own without being directed by an instructor. In particular, any sort of experiment or guided learning takes longer and requires more time for explanation. Build in more time to explain assignments and go through expectations (and check in with students) than in a traditional semester. But don’t be surprised if students can have pretty thoughtful and thorough discussions. They are paying attention! One faculty described the coverage as “less material, more in depth.”

9. Be cautious when using analytical software programs (E, S)

Software was harder for students to use remotely. Many students struggled with R (a statistical program) and Excel, especially if this was their first time using them. In a remote setting, faculty can’t walk around a computer lab and peek over students’ shoulders. Especially in an asynchronous class, students can go a long way down an erroneous path without someone on hand to answer questions, catch errors, or ensure the software is doing what students think it is (e.g. one group ended up running a regression on text). If you’re using software, build in extra tutorials, open labs and office hours to address confusion. Faculty also found that students worked better with simpler and more straightforward data sets

BROADER CONSIDERATIONS

Additional topics came up repeatedly as we talked with faculty. We suspect you are hearing about these from other sources, so we won’t belabor them here. But they are worth being aware of. They get more to the heart of self-care, for students as well as instructors. Everything that’s true of students here is true of instructors whose non-academic lives are merging with work, too.

• Especially if students are attending classes from home or another off-campus location, the rest of “life” (e.g. family, employment, home and neighborhood concerns) is more in the foreground than when they live on campus.  
• Mental health issues may be more common and/or more severe while also being harder to detect in remote formats.
• Students expect 24/7 responsiveness more than ever. Many instructors stressed the importance of clearly communicating and then sticking to the hours they were available. Some tried to replicate the camp feel by holding late night office hours (usually staffed by GSIs) or being broadly available during waking hours; others maintained office hours as they do in a regular semester. 
• Even in a virtual environment, students could still learn a lot about the research process—how to interpret significant findings (or not finding significance) and when to use different kinds of statistical tests.

A final note from Alicia, Stephanie, and Meghan

While we did not specifically ask about how instructors considered accessibility and inclusivity in their courses, UMBS faculty discussed being flexible (e.g., giving parallel assignments depending on what environments were available near students), considering accessibility (e.g., working with students who did not have a good internet connection or working with students who could not go outside to do fieldwork because their country implemented a pandemic lockdown), and getting to know students (see “Schedule Time and use different platforms to Build Community” above). These are all practices that get recommended on lists for inclusive teaching. Accessibility and inclusivity are important topics that should be considered when designing all courses and the three of us wanted to make sure this was noted in this post. This resource has information on Access to Remote Instruction for Students and Faculty with Disabilities and this is a guide to inclusive teaching (aimed at UMich, but useful more broadly).

Footnotes:

*Stephanie is the Program Evaluator and Alicia is the Program Manager for UMBS’s Transforming Learning Program.

**The courses and instructors included in this analysis:

• Art in Nature, Cathy Barry (UMich)
• Biology and Ecology of Fishes, Amy Schrank (UMN)
• General Chemistry Lab, Levi Mielke (UIndy)
• General Ecology – 4 sections, Curt Blankespoor; Paul Moore (BGSU), Bob Pillsbury (UW-Oshkosh), Brain Scholtens (College of Charleston)
• Great Lakes Arts Cultures and Environments (GLACE) Program (AMCULT/NATIVEAM 311, ANTHRCUL 298, ENGLISH 221, ENGLISH 320) – Ingrid Diran (UMich), Kendall Babl, Jennifer Metzger (UMich), Daegan Miller, Margaret Noodin (UW-Milwaukee)
• Intro Biology Lab, Cindee Giffen (UMich)
• Plant Biodiversity in the Digital Age, Charles Davis (Harvard) and Susan Fawcett

***If someone other than the instructor is assembling and distributing the kit, they should send a kit to the instructor, too, so they know what materials students have to work with.

Supporting BIPOC researchers in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Note from Meghan: This guest post is a revised version of one that briefly appeared last month.

Over the past few months society has once again had to face the stark inequities that disproportionately affect Black, Indigenous, and other racial minorities. The senseless murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Chantel Moore highlighted police brutality against Black and Indigenous people, and ignited protests across the globe. The disproportionate impacts of COVID 19 on people of color are highlighting systemic racist structures in access to health care and other social networks.

These events have prompted renewed calls to examine systemic racism in all sectors of society, including academia and its many subdisciplines. The fields of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) are overwhelmingly white. Minorities in the biological sciences and EEB face many different types of discrimination. Personal stories shared on Twitter using hashtags such as #BlackinSTEM and #BlackinNature have highlighted the unique risks of conducting field work as a Black scientist. Within ecology we need to confront not just the current systematic bias, but also the legacies of colonialism.

Black, Indigenous and other people of color (BIPOC) have once again faced calls to educate the majority on how to address these problems. Doing so can require revisiting deep wells of pain and trauma. Much has been written about what has to change, on how to be a better ally, and on how to self-educate. This is important and necessary, yet much of what has been written centers whiteness, and focuses on the work the dominant majority should undertake.

What remains unsaid is how current BIPOC researchers can navigate their careers while biased and racist structures are not yet dismantled. An unspoken premise for the careers of BIPOC is that they will figure out on their own how to navigate systemic bias, while also performing unpaid or unacknowledged labor to help educate their scientific peers about these issues.

Guest post: 8 Lessons for Teaching over Zoom

Post author: Morgan Tingley

It has been a long ten weeks. As SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing COVID-19, was spreading rampantly across the United States in late March, most colleges and universities were returning from spring break, looking forward to finishing the academic year and the relief of summer. Here at the University of California – Los Angeles, however, we are on a quarter system, and our new “spring term” started on March 30^th, just two weeks after campus officially closed and all classes moved online. As campuses shuttered across the country, an incredible diversity of resources were shared online for how to teach remotely. These resources often included conflicting advice, and also frequently assumed that instructors had months or years to re-design courses around online education.

After quickly becoming both overwhelmed and frustrated with the available advice, I figured that if I just entered the term with a sense of both humor and empathy, the students and I would be able to figure it out. Ten weeks later I’ve emerged mostly unscathed and feeling vastly more proficient at remote lecturing. So for those of you who are currently enjoying your summer breaks, but are starting to feel nervous about the fall (or spring 2021) semester, I’ve assembled below my top lessons for teaching over Zoom.

Guest post: Two tenures

Note from Meghan: this is a guest post by Gina Baucom, following up on one she wrote earlier this year.

Most people have a person in life that was highly influential or made them feel understood, and that they in turn loved or deeply appreciated. For me, this was my aunt.

Janie Raye McWhirter*, my mother’s sister, was a painter — she focused on abstract impressionism, and was somehow associated with the Black Mountain Collective. She lived in Swannanoa, North Carolina, in a cabin on some land that she bought straight up with cash even though she was the daughter of a plumber, whom so far as I can determine put the ‘t’ in practicality and, as she told me, sometimes cruelty. Janie had a woodshop for building the frames for her canvases — which enabled her to generate paintings as large as 3 by 2 m (SUPER fun to move btw) — and bookshelves for her gazillions of books. Beyond reading and woodturning, her other hobby was hiking. We are not sure how many times she hiked the Appalachian Trail, but we know it was at least a few. She was incredibly independent and capable, not really interested in men, and never married or had kids. She lived by herself for the majority of her life and taught others how to paint, which in her words, meant she taught people how to think. In my opinion, she was a major badass.

Guest post: Strategies for helping your research reach a wider audience

Note from Meghan:  This is a guest post from Richard B. Primack and Caitlin McDonough MacKenzie; Richard has written guest posts for us before, including one on using a professional editor. This guest post is on a topic that I get asked about regularly when I travel for seminar trips, so I suspect it will be of interest to readers. I’ve added some thoughts of my own throughout the post below.

 

As scientists, we love our research and want to share our findings far and wide. As ecologists and conservation biologists, we especially hope that our findings affect policy, management, or everyday stewardship. And funding agencies remind us that we must ensure our research has broader impacts that benefit society, beyond just publishing scientific papers. But how do we effectively communicate our research? Here, we share some tips about how researchers can communicate research to the media, and reach audiences beyond peer-reviewed journal readers. We use examples from a recent paper of ours published with co-authors.

Make your research exciting—identify your hook. In our recent paper, Phenological mismatch with trees reduces wildflower carbon budgets, published in Ecology Letters, we emphasized that we are building on the observations of Henry David Thoreau; Thoreau was the “hook” that we use to attract much of the interest in our research.

Make the message easy to understand—tell a story. We wrote a press release that told a story about our research and highlighted key points in non-technical language and without jargon. Even though Richard’s academic home of Boston University does not generally issue press releases about scientific papers, our summary helped reporters quickly understand our work, its significance, and potential angles that could interest readers or listeners.

(From Meghan: if you’re having a hard time finding your hook or story, there are some great resources. Randy Olsen’s And, But, Therefore structure is great, and laid out in detail in his book, Houston, We Have a Narrative. The Aurbach et al. “half life” activity (described here) is also a helpful way to find your message.)

Provide informative, high-quality photos. We take many photos to illustrate our research and the key results. Sometimes these photos are carefully staged to illustrate the research process or results. Reporters are more likely to write a story if excellent photos are available.

Having good photos, such as this carefully arranged shot of Primack working in the field, helps to create media interest.

(From Meghan: these are so important, and often people forget to take them! I agree that carefully staged photos are valuable. Getting videos is very helpful, too, including for reporters to use as “B roll”. I recently shared various short snippets with a reporter—I was glad to have them, but also wished I had more! Another example of how videos can be helpful comes from this recent story by some of my colleagues at Michigan, which went viral because a student on the trip, Maggie Grundler, thought to pull out her phone and capture a quick video of a very cool interaction.)

Reach out to the media and be responsive.  We emailed our press release and eye-catching photos to contacts in the media. One of them liked the story and wrote an article about our work for the Boston Globe. He was writing the article on tight deadline, so we promptly answered his numerous questions.

(From Meghan: A couple of things related to this: first, reporters are often working on much, much tighter deadlines than we are used to—they might need to file the story by the end of the day they contact you. So, you need to be quick about responding to them, but it also helps to give them as much lead time as possible. Second, reporters generally will not share their story with you ahead of time for you to review. It’s very different than working with a university press officer!)

One thing can lead to another. The Boston Globe writer pitched the story to National Public Radio, and he will interview us for a radio program in April.

(From Meghan: One thing can lead to another….or not, or maybe it does but with a big delay. One of the things I didn’t really appreciate when I first started doing more science communication is that you can spend a lot of time talking to a reporter and it can end up going nowhere. [example 1, example 2] It can be really frustrating! If anyone has advice on how to make this less likely, I’d love to hear it!)

Get with social media. Caitlin tweeted about the article, creating buzz in the twittersphere. We wrote a short summary of our paper for our lab blog—essentially a shorter, more conversational version of the press release—with links to a pdf of our article. Our lab blog has been viewed around 100,000 times in 6 years, so we estimate that this will be 500 views of this story, a nice complement to the Twitter buzz.

Publish on-line. To generate publicity within our Boston University community, we wrote an article for BU Research, using the press release as a starting point. This article further widened the audience who will hear about the research, with relatively little additional effort on our part.

Leverage institutional networks.  The other co-authors of our paper reached out to their universities and media contacts, sharing our press release. The paper received added coverage in institutional publications and websites of the University of Maine and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

(From Meghan: another reason this can be useful: one press officer might not be interested or might not have the time, but someone else’s might.)

Send out pdfs.  We emailed a pdf of our paper to 100 colleagues in our field, along with a very short email summarizing the key points of the article, again pulling from the same basic story in the press release and blog and Twitter posts.

Each paper and project are different, but hopefully this post has given you some ideas of things to try.

Other resources:

Compass – https://www.compassscicomm.org

The Op Ed Project – https://www.theopedproject.org/pitching

Cahill Jr, J. F., Lyons, D., & Karst, J. (2011). Finding the “pitch” in ecological writing. The Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, 92(2), 196-205.

Merkle, B. G. (2018). Tips for Communicating Your Science with the Press: Approaching Journalists. Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, 99(4), 1-4.

Guest post: I am a scientist. Ask me what I do, not where I am from “originally”.

Note from Meghan: This is a guest post by Gergana Daskalova, a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh.

I recently attended the British Ecological Society Annual Meeting, one of the biggest scientific conferences in the calendar year of an ecologist. Over the course of just one day, I got asked where I am from 18 times. I counted because in just four years of attending conferences, meeting with seminar speakers and engaging in similar activities, I have been asked where I am from way too many times. When the pattern repeated itself on day one of the BES conference, I thought I could do the actual count on day two of the conference. I, like many other of my fellow conference goers, get these questions at a very high frequency probably because our looks or accents give away that “we are not from here”. Though it may seem like an innocent question –  where are you from? – it leaves me feeling like my fellow ecologists are more interested in why I stand out than why I belong.

To counter the question in a productive way and to get the focus back on my science, over the last year, I have made a point of replying that I am from the academic institution where I am doing my PhD. People always follow up with “No, I meant where are you from originally?” The problem is not that I want to hide where I am from, the problem is that in a professional scientific environment, where I am from shouldn’t matter. When people make general chat at conferences with a group of PhD students, most of them get asked what they do. When the conversation makes its way to me, I get asked where I am from. Followed by comments about my country of origin. Cool! Exciting! I’ve never been to that country. Why did you come here? What a poor country. Was it hard living there? The list goes on. Only just over half of the 18 people that asked me where I am from originally then went on to ask me about my work.

Guest post: Coding Club – trying to overcome the fear factor in teaching and learning quantitative skills

This is a guest blog post by ecologists Isla Myers-Smith and Gergana Daskalova from the University of Edinburgh. In case you missed it, they wrote a wonderful guest post this summer on iPads and digital data collection in the field.

Ecology is a fast-paced science, with possibly hundreds of relevant papers published every week and new techniques and quantitative skills being developed all the time. It is easy to feel very behind and overwhelmed. The quantitative skills taught in undergraduate and graduate programs in ecology often lag behind those used in the literature. As ecologists at different stages of our academic careers, who have felt (and still do sometimes) pretty behind the eight ball in terms of quantitative skills, we wanted to do something about that for our students and peers. And that is how we came up with the idea of Coding Club.

How did it all begin?

Just about two years ago we had an idea. What if we set up an informal group and a website to teach key quantitative skills that could be useful to undergrads, grad students, postdocs, profs and ecologists working outside of academia? What if that website was built in a way that anyone could contribute tutorials or help to make the existing tutorials better? What if we taught people how to learn in their own working environment and how to develop their workflow using best practices in open science like version control from the very beginning? What if this content was aimed at people who felt afraid, anxious and behind in their own quantitative skills development. This was the beginning of Coding Club.

The Coding Club website where we host all of our tutorials on data manipulation, data visualisation, modelling and more!

 

What is Coding Club?

Coding Club combines online and in-person resources to help teach quantitative skills to ecologists at all career stages. We have focused on trying to overcome “code fear” and “statistics anxiety”. Statistics anxiety – the worry about a lack of quantitative skills – and code fear – the fear of programming – can prevent people from learning. By building a sense of community around the development of skills, we hope to overcome the fear factor of ecology involving more code and math than people sometimes expect.

Part of the Coding Club team and snapshots of some of our workshops. Check out our team page for the full list of undergraduates, postgraduates and profs that have contributed to Coding Club! Photo credit for image on left: Sam Sills

 

Peer-to-peer teaching helps to reduce the fear factor

In Coding Club, we focus on peer teaching and interaction rather than having “trained experts” leading workshops as we feel people engage more when they are less intimidated. All of our teaching materials are developed by people who are actively learning data science skills at the same time as teaching them. We avoid hierarchy (though we love content on hierarchical modelling!) and encourage participation across different career stages from undergrad students through to PhD students, postdocs and staff. Moving away from the professor-student model and allowing everyone to engage as teachers and learners can be a pretty powerful way to break down barriers.

If you're new to R or need a brush up I HIGHLY recommend @our_codingclub! Their free tutorials are the best I've seen: they walk you through every step, the graphics are pretty, & they're Scottish so they use fun words like "keen". Great for ppl w coding anxiety!

— Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (@paigebyerly) September 14, 2018

Coding Club covers a growing number of different quantitative skills

The Coding Club website contains a growing list of tutorials aimed at all levels of quantitative skills useful for ecologists and beyond. We cover topics from intro to advanced R tutorials, version control, data visualization to working with large datasets. We have a lot of R content but we don’t just do R! We are currently working on developing more tutorials using Python for process-based modelling and the Google Earth Engine for remote sensing analyses. We have been using the tutorials to teach in-person workshops at the British Ecological Society conference and at universities around the UK, but the tutorials are there online for everyone to use, provide feedback on or suggest revisions through GitHub. We are always looking for people to develop new content as well!

A sample of the Coding Club tutorials, including a tutorial on how to make tutorials on GitHub. Data visualisation, mixed effects models, Stan models and more over here.

 

Quantitative learning should be active and not passive

We believe that the best way to teach coding and quantitative skills is through a problem-based approach that is question driven. We try to avoid approaches like ‘live coding’ as it encourages learners to be very passive with the subject matter and we believe this results in lower retention of the new material. To effectively learn a new skill, it is vitally important to know why you might want to learn that skill in the first place and to have a question that you want to answer to motivate you to learn. We also recognize that people learn in different ways and at different paces. In our in-person sessions, we encourage people to take as long or as little time as they wish to complete the tutorials. We believe this casual, non-compulsory and non-assessed nature of Coding Club also helps to reduce the fear and anxiety associated with quantitative skills.

 

Coding our way towards finding out how population trends vary among different taxa, with cookies along the way. Not pictured: the standard error cookie. We forgot to make one, but of course we are all for reporting the uncertainty around effect sizes!

 

Quantitative skills are not hard – they just take some work to learn

We believe teaching quantitative skills is all about overcoming fear and building confidence. We try to avoid labeling skills as “hard” or “easy”, because we don’t want people labeling themselves as quantitative or not, or pre-judging the limits to their own capabilities. We aim to train people to be able to answer their own questions, resolve their own coding problems and seek out new skill sets independently. We are trying to teach people to train themselves beyond the timespan of a single workshop or course. Finally, we don’t think there is only one way to teach quantitative skills and promoting a diversity of approaches will reach the most people.

 

Coding Club has exceeded our expectations!

As of October 2018, the Coding Club website has received over 160,000 visits from over 73,000 unique IP addresses from over 180 countries. Our tutorials have been contributed by people from multiple universities (University of Edinburgh, University of Aberdeen, McGill University, Ghent University, Aarhus University) and used for quantitative training across several institutions so far (University of Edinburgh, University of Aberdeen, University of St Andrews, Queens University Belfast, Dartmouth College, Hebrew University, Calvin College, Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and more), and we are hoping to reach out further! If we can set up a network of people at universities and research institutes around the world who can work together to develop quantitative training from the ground up, then maybe we will all feel just a little less overwhelmed by our fast-paced discipline.

The international audience of Coding Club – it’s been great to get feedback from people using our tutorials around the world!

 

The start of the new academic year feels like a fresh start. A chance to purchase some new office supplies, catch up on all the science missed over the summer, start a new work routine to enhance productivity and to set yourself some new challenges. Now that the term has started, maybe it is time for you to take the plunge and learn a new quantitative skill.

 

Are you a student or group of students wanting to increase your own quantitative skills? Are you someone who has a cool analytical technique that you want to share with your peers? Are you a prof. who wants to encourage your students and mentees academic development? Are you someone who feels like the quantitative training you got years ago is not enough for the ecological research today and want to brush up on your skills? Do you have thoughts on how we can improve quantitative training in ecology? If you answered yes to any of these questions, please comment below, check out the Coding Club website and get in touch if you are keen to join the team!

Guest Post: iPads and digital data collection in the field

From Meghan: This is a guest blog post by ecologists Isla Myers-Smith and Gergana Daskalova from the University of Edinburgh. I loved their comment on my post on our new lab notebook backup system and asked them if they could turn it into a guest post. I was very happy that they agreed! Isla and Gergana are off to the Arctic this summer with the Team Shrub field crew for another year of hopefully successful digital data collection. To find out more about their research check out the Team Shrub website and blog (https://teamshrub.com/).

Guest post:

Two things have really changed my academic life over the past five years: the first is embracing GitHub for version control of code, data, manuscripts and my research group’s individual and combined science, and the other is switching over to digital data collection. For ecologists who haven’t made the switch from paper field books to iPads and digital data collection it is not as scary as you might think!!!

Caption: Collecting plant phenology data – the recorder sitting in the back with an iPad! (photo credit: Jeff Kerby)

The benefits of going digital

Digital data collection can be more rigorous with error checking as data are collected to prevent mistakes. Data can be better backed up. And finally, it forces us to put thought into the structure of data before we collect it (significant digits, continuous or categorical data, are the data unrestricted or constrained to a particular range or particular set of values, etc.), which helps down the road when it comes time for analysis. Digital data collection has saved days, if not months, of data entry each year for my team and has allowed us to go from ecological monitoring in the field to analysis of results within hours instead of days. Our work flows are streamlined and our iPads are waterproof, so data collection can occur under any conditions – and we work in the Arctic, so we experience it all from wet to dry, hot to cold, rain, snow, you name it.

Guest post: Women and relationships in academia: a curious journey of self-reflection

Note from Meghan: This is a guest post by Merritt Turetsky (@queenofpeat on twitter)

It’s not the first time a survey caught me by surprise. There was that time I glanced through a Cosmo survey – a guilty pleasure on a long flight – and realized that I was now lumped into the oldest age category.

How did that happen?

I actually like being mature, so was able to brush this off fairly quickly. But this survey was different. It somehow felt more personal. And I can’t stop thinking about it.

This survey was part of a department-wide review of gender balance issues. For years, I talked glowingly about my department, with a sense of pride that came from being part of an environment with strong women. When I was hired, I negotiated with a female chair. There was a good balance of female professors across full and associate rankings. Plus, there were several couples in the department. In my mind, this was all evidence that my department supported women in STEM and work-life balance. And as my husband and I accepted separate advertised positions and joined the department in 2008, we became yet another couple in a family-friendly work place. As a group, we seemed like we were on the right track towards gender equity.

Right?

Over the past month, we’ve taken on some self-analysis and it has revealed a few surprising trends. Despite our feel-good aura, our gender balance has not budged in the past 20 years. Females comprise 20% of our faculty, and this has been more or less constant.