 Hello, my name is Carlos C. Gullar and I'm an Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at North Carolina State University. Today I want to talk to you about promoting a culture of co-creation and equity through coarse wordpress sites on advanced molecular technologies. These slides are available at go.ncsu.edu forward slash open ed 21. Our learning outcomes are to describe two challenges associated with teaching courses on topics that are specific and constantly evolving, to list three different assignments for undergraduates and graduate students that contribute to open educational resources and can serve as supplemental course materials. To explain the potential discussion assignments centered on openness, equity and intellectual property that can be incorporated into courses with OER assignments such as these. To identify two potential connections between these wordpress sites that will allow for broader use of these resources. And finally, I want us all to evaluate potential approaches to increase connectivity and sustainability of these resources. I'll first describe my philosophy of no throwaway assignments and then provide three examples of how we can share our interests in high throughput technologies, share our voice and teach others about metagenomics and share intriguing cases that engage and educate about the power of yeast. What do I do and teach? I teach molecular biology courses including high throughput discovery, metagenomics, yeast metabolic engineering, and biotechnology and sustainability. I'm a microbiologist by training and I am intrigued by microbial communities and how we can harness their power. And I love the idea of co-creating and learning. And the video that's playing on the right is John Hipp, an undergraduate research student from the summer of 2015. And John is programming at Liquid Handler, a robot to do experiments. So my no throwaway assignment policy centers on a couple of principles. I want assignments that support students in reaching the course objectives and gaining professional skills. I want these assignments to exist beyond the LMS and be able to help others learn the material. And these assignments should promote respect and value for intellectual contributions and sharing. I often use this graphic. We strongly believe in reusable and publishable student assignments and encourage students to share their assignments with others as part of wordpress sites such as the ones I'll describe or even as peer reviewed case studies that are published. The high throughput discovery course focuses on using high throughput approaches and automation for molecular biology discovery. High throughput technologies are constantly evolving and each course participant has different research interests. There is no textbook on this topic for an upper division undergraduate and graduate course and this is a challenge. And students in the course co-create e-portfolios that provide accessible lessons on high throughput technology topics of their choice and accessibility or a plus one way of engaging with the content is a required element of this assignment along with a reflection. So on the screen you'll see an animated screen capture of the high throughput discovery wordpress site with blog posts. So I commit to blogging openly. The contributors are listed and all the topics you see on the screen are contributions students have made with learning objectives, a graphical abstract and some way of engaging with discussion questions or video or audio that engage the audience. Another example is the Bit Metagenomics class where I want students to share their voice and teach others about microbial communities and how we can use genomics to analyze these communities. So the Metagenomics course focuses on the use of bioinformatics tools to analyze microbes around us and even within us. There are numerous tools and approaches for Metagenomics now. And this makes it challenging because there is no textbook on this topic for an upper division undergraduate and graduate course. All students in our course create podcasts that provide short 10 to 15 minute accessible lessons on Metagenomic topics of their choice. They are challenged with the prompt of explaining a complex topic to the public using metaphors and engaging sound bites. Graduate students in the course create video tutorials and provide scripts to teach others about Metagenomic tools and approaches. And again, this is an example of our Bit 477-577 Metagenomics course, WordPress site. And we have a fantastic digital media specialist, Jason Evans-Groth, who helps us record some of the student podcasts. And the graduate students create tutorial short videos with scripts on using some of the complex bioinformatic pipelines. We also distill all our class notes in a collection of course notes that gets updated with every course offering. And all of this is publicly available on our WordPress site and the link is included below. And on the slides I've included some examples of student podcasts. Another exciting case is a class I get to teach with Dr. Claire Gordy. This course is focused on yeast metabolic engineering and how we can use yeast to produce commercially relevant and important products that help human health. In ways that are sustainable. And this is with Dr. Gordy. So there is a wealth of knowledge about yeast genetics. The textbooks on this topic are either very specialized or inaccessible for novice learners. And groups of students in this course are challenged with creating case studies that require research on how yeast can be used to promote sustainability. So groups of three or four undergraduate and graduate students work together to do research on the topic and create a case study that can be used to engage the public at future students in learning about yeast metabolic engineering to create commercially relevant products in sustainable ways. And as part of their case studies they have to explain why this contributes to sustainability and what the technologies are that were used to engineer the yeast. Participants share their learning through video tutorials, infographics and pamphlets to inform others as part of their final e-portfolios. So this is an example of our WordPress site with several student products including infographics, Instagram campaigns, as well as the case studies that are hosted on the Learn Gala platform that you can see on the screen where the case studies are really nicely formatted. Students can include links and graphics and learn about using fair use graphics or creating their own. Finally, I want students to contribute and engage the public so that we can empower all participants to explore other resources shared openly and explain concepts in their own voice. And these assignments persist beyond the course and really can be used by others from this set of courses and we've shared them with other institutes and universities, for example, the new school and Alamance Community College. And this promotes a culture of co-creation and equal access to resources that may not be available to institutions that don't have the equipment to do some of these experiments. And the courses and WordPress sites can be connected to share techniques and applications. For example, the Metagenomics class uses some resources from the high throughput discovery class. So how can we contribute and combine course projects and OEP to promote sharing and learning? So let's talk.