An OCELOTS Workshop at the ATBC Annual Meeting in Oaxaca, Mexico

Agile online open educational resources that immerse learners in real-world tropical research can make learning experiences more inclusive for students. This also provides them with transformative educational experiences that prepare them to tackle pressing needs in tropical biology and conservation. A new network, OCELOTS (Online Content for Experiential Learning of Tropical Systems), is supporting the creation and implementation of open-source online modules by bringing together a diverse community of tropical biology researchers and experts in active-learning pedagogy, interactive data tools, multimedia content creation. 

This workshop will provide an overview of Gala, a free, user-friendly platform available for tropical biologists to create innovative, multi-lingual, online modules. In this hands-on workshop, we will introduce participants to a process that enables tropical biologists with no prior programming experience to turn their field-based research into engaging multimedia-enhanced online modules. The Gala platform enables authors to embed multilingual content, data learning tools, and interactive media into their research-based modules.

We will demonstrate how to create a module on the Gala platform and showcase examples of existing OCELOTS modules. Participants are encouraged to bring their own ideas for new modules and will receive feedback as they initiate the process of creating their own research-based module. OCELOTS participants will also share their experiences in implementing these modules in their courses that they teach. We will provide information about our upcoming workshops for creating new modules and adopting existing modules into courses. 

This workshop will empower tropical biologists to translate their research into online teaching resources for undergraduate students worldwide. The goal is also to broaden participation in the OCELOTS network, to bring together researchers, so that we can learn from each other how to refine the process of module creation. Through this participatory process, we aim to increase access to engaging instructional material, to broaden international involvement of tropical researchers, to connect participants in this new OCELOTS network early on, and to allow for true co-construction of knowledge that moves us forward in creating, adapting, and adopting these modules in tropical biology and conservation.