The purpose of the Miller Open Education Mini-Grant was to redesign the graduate course “Molecular Phylogenetics” (EEOB563) around the use of Open Educational Resources. This transformation involved three parts:
- Transitioning the website of the course to GitHub;
- Adopting an open source textbook and supplementing it with additional materials;
- Developing a set of tutorials that will combine OERs available elsewhere as well as exercises developed for this course.
Transitioning to GitHub
Practically all course materials are available at the new GitHub site (https://isu-molphyl.github.io/EEOB563/), with another GitHub repository (https://github.com/ISU-MolPhyl/EEOB563-Spring2019) that allows students to download and keep updated on all supplementary course materials on their own computers. Both repositories are located within the “Molecular Phylogenetics @ Iowa State University” organization, allowing easy collaboration with other faculty members.
Adopting an open textbook
The course used an open source textbook “Lecture Notes: The Mathematics of Phylogenetics” by E. S. Allman & John A. Rhodes, available on GitHub: https://jarhodesuaf.github.io/PhyloBook.pdf. Because of the narrow focus of this book, it was supplemented by additional resources, including journal articles and lecture notes.
Developing tutorials
An important part of the class are laboratory exercises. Almost all of them were updated during the semester and transitioned to the GitHub for an easier maintenance and better version control: https://isu-molphyl.github.io/EEOB563/labs.html.