The Society of Toxicology (SOT) Undergraduate Subcommittee is pleased to offer two upcoming webinars for undergraduate educators. Participants will be able to interact with and ask questions of the speakers. The descriptions of each webinar are below.
The Undergraduate Subcommittee has organized webinars on topics related to the teaching of toxicology to provide resources for educators outside the SOT Annual Meeting. The recordings of previous events can be accessed on the UEN Webinar page.
Academic Service Learning (AS-L) in an Undergraduate Pharmacology Course
May 13, 2015
12:00 Noon ET
Register Online
Presenter: Blase Billack, St. John's University, Jamaica, New York
Academic Service Learning (AS-L) is a type of active learning in which a student demonstrates knowledge and understanding of course objectives
through service to the community and reflection. The activity directs the student to “know by doing.” In this manner, the student, in effect, becomes a “teacher” during the service project. AS-L differs from community service in that the "service" portion of AS-L is a pedagogical component of the course, demonstrating in a tangible way to the student that he or she has mastered one or more of the course concepts well enough to effectively pass them on to another.
The reflection component allows the student to understand his or her strengths and allows the student to remediate learning deficiencies that may have been exposed during the service component. All in all, AS-L is a powerful and achievable way of engaging students in the classroom and giving them ownership of the coursework knowledge.
Learning Objectives:
An educator who participates in the webinar will be able to:
- Define AS-L.
- Understand how AS-L differs from community outreach or community service.
- Explain how AS-L can be incorporated into an undergraduate toxicology course.
- Describe the challenges and rewards associated with incorporating AS-L into a course.
- Outline the types of administrative support that can enhance the AS-L experience.
Use of Biological Pathway Databases, Primarily Open Source
June 4, 2015
12:00 Noon ET
Register Online
Presenter: Marc Gillespie, St. John’s University, Jamaica, New York
Sifting through the results of expression or other data rich analyses poses a daunting challenge to experienced and novel researchers alike. Numerous methods exist, all sharing the common theme of grouping the results in such a way as to assist the researcher in finding the underlying patterns in the data. Biological pathway knowledge bases provide a platform for the identification of pathways that are represented within the experimental data. Reactome is an open-source, open access, manually curated and peer-reviewed pathway database. Pathway annotations are authored by expert biologists, in collaboration with Reactome editorial staff and cross-referenced to many bioinformatic databases. Pathway and Expression Analysis tools analyze user supplied data sets permitting ID mapping, pathway assignment, and over-representation analysis. The rich detail of the Reactome data set combined with accessible analysis tools present toxicologists with an easy-to-use computational pipeline for biological pathway analysis.
Learning Objectives:
- Analyze expression data sets and other data rich experimental results.
- Describe the methods that are used for biological pathway analysis.
- Identify pathways that are over-represented within experimental data sets.
- Use Reactome, an open-source, open access, manually curated and peer-reviewed pathway knowledgebase.
- Describe ID mapping, pathway assignment, and over-representation analysis and include these analysis as modules within a classroom setting.