GOLDEN, COLORADO: Research shows that active learning and frequent formative assessments lead to better student outcomes for all and give underrepresented minority and low-income students a disproportionate boost.[1] But while the data are clear, instructors who are committed to teaching high-structure courses often have to create their own materials.
“High-structure courses (those that provide students with high doses of active learning and ongoing feedback in between exams) improve metacognition and learning, but most STEM classes are not taught this way. Without an intuitive platform, designing high-structure courses can be too time and labor intensive for busy instructors.”
This is why Scott Freeman, a leading textbook author and education researcher from the University of Washington, has teamed up with other education experts to produce a comprehensive courseware platform for introductory biology.
“The Codon Learning platform teaches students how to learn,” Freeman said. “This project is all about helping students gain metacognitive skills and develop stronger study habits, while meeting all of the key learning objectives for content knowledge and skills development that people expect in a rigorous course for biology majors.”
For Freeman, this effort builds on decades of research in undergraduate STEM education and cognitive science. Most recently, he was part of a team funded by the National Science Foundation that developed learning objectives (LOs) for Majors Biology with input from over 600 biology instructors. The Codon Learning team has now organized the 216 LOs that emerged from this effort into the 72 instructional sessions found in a typical year-long course. Current work focuses on building the teaching materials and assessments required to support student mastery of these LOs.
Freeman is passionate about the possibilities of using the Codon platform, with its emphasis on self-regulated learning, to help all students succeed. “The students in this course are our future doctors and scientists and entrepreneurs and will be tackling issues like public health, climate change, and the extinction crisis. We need to help them to think like scientists—and to know that they can do real and important work,” said Freeman.
According to Ben Roberts, Codon’s CEO, Freeman signed with the startup for a few key reasons. First, quality. “Codon makes high quality content and meets students where they are—students will learn from dynamic, early-career scientists who can not only tell a great story about biology but also why they chose it as a career,” said Roberts. Second, cost. Roberts commented that “the big publishers squeeze as much money as they can from students. We will not maximize profits over student learning. Our courseware costs $35 per student.”
But in the end, Roberts feels that the key reason Freeman signed with Codon was because he likes working with the team, which is made up of educators who “share Scott’s mission and will stop at nothing to make it happen.”
[1] Is Lecturing Racist? by Scott Freeman and Elli Theobald, Inside Higher Education, September 2, 2020
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Scott Freeman is Lecturer Emeritus at the University of Washington (UW). The recipient of a UW Distinguished Teaching Award, he has published research on how innovative approaches to teaching science benefit all students, but particularly students from disadvantaged backgrounds. He is the author of the textbooks Biological Science and Evolutionary Analysis, which have sold over 500,000 copies and been translated into multiple languages, and the popular book Saving Tarboo Creek, which is for general audiences.
Codon Learning has created a novel and intuitive courseware platform that simplifies the process of building high-structure courses for instructors, while simultaneously teaching students a better way to learn.
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Contacts:
Codon Learning
Ben Roberts
info@codonlearning.com