Data from: Building communities of teaching practice and data-driven open education resources with NEON faculty mentoring networks

With the growing availability and accessibility of big data in ecology, we
face an urgent need to train the next generation of scientists in data
science practices and tools. One of the biggest barriers for implementing
a data-driven curriculum in undergraduate classrooms is the lack of
training and support for educators to develop their own skills and time to
incorporate these principles into existing courses or develop new ones.
Alongside the research goals of the National Ecological Observatory
Network (NEON), providing education and training are key components for
building a community of scientists and users equipped to utilize
large-scale ecological and environmental data. To address this need, the
NEON Data Education Fellows program formed as a collaborative Faculty
Mentoring Network (FMN) between scientists from NEON and university
faculty interested in using NEON data and resources in their ecology
classrooms. Like other FMNs, this group has two main goals: 1) to provide
tools, resources, and support for faculty interested in developing
data-driven curriculum, and (2) to make teaching materials that have been
implemented and tested in the classroom available as open educational
resources for other educators. We hosted this program using an open
education and collaboration platform from the Quantitative Undergraduate
Biology Education and Synthesis (QUBES) project. Here, we share lessons
learned from facilitating five FMN cohorts and emphasize the successes,
pitfalls, and opportunities for developing open education resources
through community-driven collaborations.