NSDL and its Biological Sciences Pathway BiosciEdNet (BEN). share a problem. “I am always meeting people who say, ‘It’s too bad there isn’t a website that offers peer reviewed biological material for teaching,’” says Terry McGuire, associate professor of genetics at Rutgers University. In fact, BEN and NSDL offer thousands of these sources.

Terry McGuire

Many advocates for digital education believe that the most effective way to build interest is to demonstrate the usefulness of digital resources in face-to-face presentations. This is the spirit of the new BEN Scholars Program. Twenty-one undergraduate faculty in the biological sciences, including McGuire, were chosen by the BEN Collaborative last year. They are now working to promote the use of digital libraries and inquiry-based learning in higher education biological sciences lecture and laboratory courses.

BEN Scholars receive training, recognition, and a small stipend while they develop new digital resources, add them to BEN’s online resources, and present them in outreach activities. “I have been teaching genetics for 22 years,” says McGuire. “I am using this program to get my problems and exercises into forms other people can use, so they won’t have to reinvent the wheel.” His first problem deals with pleiotropy, or the phenomenon of one gene affecting multiple phenotypes. It describes an experiment involving differing eye colors in several generations of blowflies. The handout gives data from the experiment and includes statistical significance tests and common errors students make when analyzing the data.

“A lot of teachers never go to scientific meetings, so regional meetings are often a more effective way to get the word out,” says McGuire. He is involved with SENCER (Science Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibilities), an NSF-funded program that connects science and civic engagement by teaching the scientific elements of complex public issues such as natural catastrophes, water quality, HIV disease, the Human Genome Project, energy alternatives, and nuclear disarmament. “When people go to SENCER meetings, they get all fired up — but people who didn’t go to the meeting do not care,” he says. “It just takes quiet persistence. After five years of coming back from these meetings, I noticed a phase shift. People started saying, ‘you do great stuff, why didn’t I know about it?’ If you show someone one resource they can use and show them how to use it, it will grow.”

The BEN Pathway is a resource for biology learning, study, and teaching; mathematics study and teaching; and science study and teaching in the United States.  As a digital library on biological and life sciences, it functions as a biology search engine, a biology teaching resource, a science teaching resource,and a source of information on biology.