Introduction

BeeSpace Educator is a video-rich curricular resource for high school and college students that teaches about honeybee genomic biology, using materials that were originally presented at a weeklong educational summer camp. BeeSpace Educator combines video presentations, slide decks, presentation transcripts, background information, still image galleries, and a study guide, into an easy-to-navigate system. I created it using the Articulate Presenter system, which allowed for both online use and cross-platform installation.

My Role

I developed BeeSpace Educator independently, in my capacity as coordinator and education lead for the scientific research project that sponsored the camp. In doing so, I collaborated closely with my immediate supervisor, who considered it a key outcome of the entire research project. BeeSpace Educator was also crucial to my own analysis of the research project’s education outreach, which became the topic of my doctoral dissertation in educational psychology.

I developed BeeSpace Educator for three key purposes: first, to provide a rich record for the project’s archives about the whats, hows, and whys of BSEW 08, capable of providing direction for future scientific projects; second, to document the participants’ own teaching and learning for analysis in the dissertation; and finally, to deliver a free-standing curriculum that interested students could access and learn from anywhere, anytime.

The Challenge

The BeeSpace Project was a National Science Foundation-funded exploration into genomic bases for honeybees’ social behaviors, carried out by researchers at the University of Illinois from 2003-2008. Scientific discovery was the key goal, but throughout the project lifecycle, project researchers also endeavored to share their findings and discovery processes with young learners in innovative and meaningful ways. As project coordinator and education lead, I played key roles in proposing, developing, and delivering curricular materials and occasions for learning, while working closely with subject-matter experts and collaborating schoolteachers. As a PhD candidate in educational psychology, I focused my dissertation work on how these teaching and learning experiences took shape, and on what their participants learned from them.

BeeSpace outreach evolved through six complex instances of curricular planning, development, and instruction. Each instance built on successes and sought to overcome difficulties encountered previously, and so the sixth instance emerged as the project’s best-worked-out educational outreach. This was BeeSpace Education Week 2008 (BSEW 08), which brought together five project scientists, 12 high school students, and the students’ biology teacher for 20 hours of hands-on, minds-on learning activities at the project’s outdoor beehive labs and indoor genomics and computer science labs.

The Approach

The three development purposes each influenced the approach I took to designing and developing BeeSpace Educator. BSEW 08 generated a wealth of curricular materials: more than 20 hours of live video lessons capturing teaching and learning; hundreds of still images from the classrooms and indoor and outdoor labs; more than a dozen worksheets; full transcriptions for all lectures, and more. It was important to make these publicly available in an organized fashion, for the benefit of the project’s fiscal sponsors, other scientific projects, learning theorists, and teachers and learners around the world. Also important was developing this set of materials in a way that could mesh with and contribute to other BeeSpace project outputs, such as the templated website I had created and was managing, and conference presentations and scholarly publications that members of the research team were preparing. For these reasons, a web-accessible resource was desired. It had to be well organized and capable of incorporating rich-media as well as text-based materials.

Potential development tools included content-management systems, like WordPress or the BigMedium platform that scaffolded the project website; full-on learning management systems like Blackboard or Moodle; presentation software such as PowerPoint; and courseware-development systems like Adobe Captivate or Articulate Presenter. In the end, I settled on Articulate Presenter ’09 primarily because it enabled creation of a visually attractive BeeSpace Educator site built on common standards, whose individual lesson screens could link presentation videos, lecturers’ slide decks, lecture slide sets, and text-based worksheets in an organized manner, and because it allowed for easy export from the Presenter format to a plain-HTML website. Thus, there would be no need for end-users to have direct or continued access to Articulate’s proprietary development tool. To ensure that BeeSpace Educator would be available even for people who could not access the site – either because they did not have connectivity, or because the website itself might not exist forever – I also pressed a version onto CD-ROM using a freely available tool, FlyingAnt Server, that could run on both Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh computers.

Key Interface Elements

From discussions experiences gained in early outreach iterations and ongoing discussions with educators, fellow researchers and other major project stakeholders, it became evident that several kinds of resource would be critical to a successful online delivery of essential elements of the workshop week's interactions. First, there would need to be good-quality video capture of all lectures, tours, and other formal interactions between the young learners and scientists. Second, supporting elements of the scientists' prepared presentations would need to be made available, such as their slide sets and transcriptions of their talks. The Articulate Presenter interface offered straightforward ways to show these.

Impact and Reflections

BeeSpace Educator became a key project output. It was the focus of presentations I and other project researchers delivered at conferences including the American Academy for the Advancement of Sciences and the American Educational Research Association and of articles in several educational publications. It was kept online for several years beyond the project's end and attracted attention from web visitors both in the US and abroad. It was also

Impact was limited, however, by the fact that it was created for a limited-term research project, and as an outreach aim secondary to that of the project's scientific discovery mission. Project researchers had only limited opportunity to discover how it was used by learners, beyond some related short-term follow-up I had been able to take on with the learners who had participated directly in the workshop week.

Even so, BeeSpace Educator remains important as a proof of concept, as the BeeSpace education outreach overall does, and as a trace of this kind of learning experienced live. It might still be enlightening at some future time to bring learners to it who had not experienced the project in other ways, to trace whatever potential it might have for supporting meaningful learning beyond the live setting.