4 posts tagged with "mbdh"

Members of the OCELOTS network convened via video-chat for a "networkshop," featuring Dr. Ann Russel's forthcoming learning module Healing the scars: Tropical rainforest carbon cycling. The meeting was also a chance for Midwest Big Data Hub Learning Innovation Fellow Anneke van Oosterom to share her work developing an interactive systems model for the module, using Insight Maker. These networkshops offer an opportunity for module authors to workshop their works in progress in a friendly collaborative environment. Participants make use of Gala's inline commenting feature to provide asynchronous feedback prior to gathering online.

OCELOTS (i.e., Online Content for Experiential Learning of Tropical Systems) is an international network of tropical ecologists, educators, media specialists, instructional designers and database engineers exploring best practices in research-based modules for teaching tropical biology and conservation.

Ann Russell is a terrestrial ecosystems ecologist at Iowa State University, with special expertise in the biogeochemistry of tropical and managed ecosystems. Her research addresses links between traits of plant species and ecosystem processes, focusing on species and management effects on belowground processes, and subsequent implications for human impacts on soil fertility and carbon sequestration. Her research is designed to enhance our understanding of human impacts on the biosphere, improve biogeochemical models, and help guide selection of species for sustainable management of agroecosystems.

Anneke van Oosterom is a sophomore double majoring in biology and data science at St. Catherine University. She is currently involved with the biology department at St. Kate’s through the Biology Club and as a microbiology lab prep assistant.

The Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub and the Gala Sustainability Learning Initiative at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability continue to build on the success of last year’s Learning Innovation Fellows pilot program with a second cohort of fellows. The student fellows, hailing from a range of midwestern institutions, work with faculty advisors at the intersections of the Midwest Hub’s “Cyberinfrastructure and Data Sharing” and “Data Science Education and Workforce Development” themes. The program brings together data science and sustainability, delivering open-access, data-enriched learning tools on the Gala platform, along with experiences and mentoring for student fellows.

See the full post at the Midwest Big Data Hub's blog

A recent University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability news piece, Growing the SEAS Gala Learning Platform with NSF Support, highlights ongoing NSF support for Gala's work:

All of these recent funding opportunities support Gala’s organic growth in content and community, both by supporting faculty and graduate students from U-M and other campuses to collaborate toward enhanced online offerings, both through new models of mentorship and through the actual coding of cutting-edge integrations with software such as Rshiny, Jupyter Notebooks, and more. The platform thus becomes a community where software skills, sustainability content, and socially inclusive learning and professional development combine to create more adaptive, accessible tools for learners of many backgrounds. Current resources, such as those relating to Michigan’s spectacular freshwater resources, and even a new crop of cases from users at North Carolina State University on the microbiology of biofuels processing, are being translated into other languages through a partnership with the U-M Language Resource Center and its “Translate-a-thon.” Making case studies available in additional languages invites diverse learners to take part in the program’s cross-cutting collaborative sustainability research.

Gala is a partner on a recently awarded Public Interest Technology "University Challenge" grant:

The grant to the University of Michigan (U-M) was awarded to principal investigator Rebecca Hardin, an associate professor at U-M’s School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS). The grant supports a collaboration between Hardin and a civil and environmental engineering team under the direction of Lutgarde Raskin, a professor at U-M’s College of Engineering. Building on the doctoral research of U-M student Matt Vedrin, with support from the National Science Foundation-funded Midwest Big Data Hub, the project uses U-M’s homegrown open source/open access learning platform learngala.com for data-rich learning tools. In collaboration with SEAS professor Kyle Whyte, partners from the City of Ann arbor, the BlueConduit startup, and U-M’s Blue Sky Initiative for water sector engagement, the team will look toward making responsive low-barrier-to-use learning tools created for classrooms, communities and workforces facing challenges in the monitoring and improvement of quality drinking water distribution systems. These tools can be shared among utilities in cities like Michigan’s Benton Harbor and Flint—and eventually, shared with rural communities and tribal water utilities.