(From left to right Terry Marsh, Scott Harrison, George Garrity)
Course URLs:
http://www.msu.edu/course/mmg/445 http://bergamot.mph.msu.edu/ojs/index.php/mmg445
MMG 445 Basic Biotechnology is organized around class creation of content for an elegant online “journal” presenting MMG 445 student-authored, student-peer-reviewed summary articles.
Exercises facilitated by the eJournal accounted for 90% of the final grade, split equally between the students’ written review paper, the in-class presentation and associated PowerPoint, and the peer-reviews of classmate’s papers and presentations. Class participation accounted for the remaining 10% of the final grade.
Peer-based feedback from a wide range of perspectives exceeds what any one individual instructor may provide and yields critical exposure to the perceptions and consequences of students’ communication, prior to their entry into the professional world. MMG445’s use of this editorial web application in the undergraduate classroom for coordinating student mini-review articles provides a powerful new method for instilling students in the sciences with a real life experience as to how to engage in scientific communication and critique in a responsible and comprehensive manner.
“Open Journal Systems” (OJS, http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs), is a stable, popular and well-supported web application used to coordinate review and publication of more than 100 professional online journals. MMG 445 adopted this comprehensive editorial software application as a powerful medium for channeling the comments of multiple peer reviewers. The Open Journal Systems application helped students exchange written materials and coordinate hundreds of peer-to-peer student interactions in an archived manner, completely visible and structured to the supervising faculty.
Although complex, the multi-staged process of peer reviewing of articles in the literature is over a century old. By utilizing a peer reviewed article approach, instructors were able to coordinate and review students’ reviewing other students’ review articles. OJS was highly effective in facilitating quick turnaround times among student authors and student reviewers. The system automatically e-mailed various rolling deadline reminder messages that the instructors would have otherwise had to manually send out to each appropriate set of student authors and associated reviewers. By using OJS to handle most aspects of editorial scheduling, instructors were able to apply consistent standards of timeliness in feedback to the reviewers (7 days for feedback on written articles, and 24 hours for oral presentations).
Students benefit from presenting their polished documents to the world-wide web, since the topics they chose to study and develop typically related to their fields of study and desired careers. Their polished product can be a meaningful part of a professional portfolio to show prospective employers. The online journal archives prior years’ student work, making the longevity of these class assignments extremely apparent. Because dissemination of their authored content also serves a larger ideal for the preservation and sustainability of dynamically changing knowledge in biotechnology, students were asked to allow their authored work to be made persistently available to other students and the public-at-large.
Using OJS permitted the entire process of scholarship and classroom management to be traceable and repeatable both for MMG445 or, they expect, for other interested faculty. OJS is supported by multiple, active forums. For instructors wanting to delegate hosting and support, the cost is much less than $1000 per year from Simon Frasier University Library Support Services.
TeamGeorge Garrity, Professor
Terry Marsh, Associate Professor - Co-Instructor and online journal editor
Scott Harrison, Postdoctoral Fellow - Software support and Guest Lecturer
