Dna Learning Center Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

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The prize recognizes DNALC’s innovative science web portal that provides high quality educational resources to students, teachers and the public

Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. – Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s DNA Learning Center (DNALC) has been awarded the Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE) for its creation of a science education portal at www.dnalc.org that attracts more than 7 million online visitors annually.

The prize, established in 2009, recognizes the use of innovative, high quality, freely available online resources to promote and enhance science education. Winners are invited to write an essay about their resource for publication in Science. The prize-winning essay by the DNALC, written by founder and executive director David Micklos and his colleagues Susan Lauter, who leads the DNALC’s multimedia design team, and Amy Nisselle, who produces and evaluates its websites and apps, appears in Science on December 23.

Launched in 1996 to educate students and teachers about the theory and practice of DNA science, the DNALC’s website mushroomed into 18 different sites over the next 15 years. The sites serve either as virtual, multimedia-rich “textbooks” on core concepts in genetics and biotechnology or as platforms for online lab notebooks, and bioinformatics tools and workflows. The sites feature video interviews, 2-D animations, and interactive learning activities, and some even include “real-time” 3-D animations of cellular processes ranging from DNA replication to signal transduction.

The SPORE essay explains how DNALC.org evolved into a major science education portal; how the team overcame emerging challenges as the Internet itself changed; and offers a strategic blueprint for science organizations that share goals for science education online.

Despite creating a web portal that drew ~7 million visits at its peak in 2007, “we couldn’t simply say ‘build it and they will come,’ and rest on our laurels,” says Micklos. When changes in search algorithms precipitated a crash in visitation, Micklos spurred his team on to the ambitious goal of redesigning the websites to increase search engine visibility, a move that resulted in an “almost 10% increase in visitation in 2010,” notes Lauter. “A second revision in spring 2011 resulted in a 20% increase in visitation from June to November compared to the same time last year.”

In addition to using programming and software techniques to make animations and videos more visible, the team also worked to “disaggregate” their websites into searchable units. Instead of restricting content to its websites, the DNALC now routinely retools videos and animations for distribution through multiple channels, such as YouTube and apps for smartphones and tablets.

Even as the team implemented these measures, “we realized that it was important to find out whether our websites and programs really improve students’ learning experiences,” explains Nisselle, who subsequently led an effort to test whether two much-used websites, G2C Online and Inside Cancer, improved student learning. A rigorously planned experiment involving 12 teachers and 662 students in 28 high school and college classrooms across 10 states showed that “an engaging website can potentially increase student learning by one letter grade,” according to the authors.

The team’s latest successes include increasing access to bioinformatics tools and broadening their use in science education. The DNALC plays a key role in multi-institutional projects, such as the iPlant Collaborative, and brings students into the genome age by designing exercises that allow them to sequence and analyze genomes, including their own. “This is the first time in the history of science that students and teachers can work with the same data, with the same tools, at the same time as elite researchers,” says Micklos.

In his inaugural editorial in 2010, Science editor-in-chief Dr. Bruce Alberts explained SPORE as stemming from the idea that “being an outstanding science educator is as demanding and valuable to society as being an exceptional research scientist.” The achievements of the DNALC bear testimony to this idea.

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“Lessons from a science education portal,” appears in Science on December 23. The full citation is: David Micklos, Susan Lauter, and Amy Nisselle. The essay can be downloaded at www.sciencemag.org.

About CSHL’s DNA Learning Center:

The DNA Learning Center (DNALC) is the world's first science center devoted entirely to genetics education and is an operating unit of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, an important center for molecular genetics research. The Dolan DNALC, DNALC West, and Harlem DNA Lab extend the Laboratory's traditional research and postgraduate education mission to the college, precollege, and public levels.

About Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Founded in 1890, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) has shaped contemporary biomedical research and education with programs in cancer, neuroscience, plant biology and quantitative biology. CSHL is ranked number one in the world by Thomson Reuters for impact of its research in molecular biology and genetics. The Laboratory has been home to eight Nobel Prize winners. Today, CSHL's multidisciplinary scientific community is more than 350 scientists strong and its Meetings & Courses program hosts more than 11,000 scientists from around the world each year. Tens of thousands more benefit from the research, reviews, and ideas published in journals and books distributed internationally by CSHL Press. The Laboratory's education arm also includes a graduate school and programs for undergraduates as well as middle and high school students and teachers. CSHL is a private, not-for-profit institution on the north shore of Long Island. For more information, visit www.cshl.edu.

Public release date: 22-Dec-2011
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Contact: Natasha Pinol
npinol@aaas.org
202-326-7088
American Association for the Advancement of Science

Web sites cover a huge range of topics -- and bring real science participation to students

When Dave Micklos and his colleagues launched Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's DNA first Learning Center Web site, Micklos says they just wanted to "get a little information online about our institution." Fifteen years later, that Web site has grown into a portal to 18 different content areas, offering more than 7 million viewers a year fascinating, interactive genetics learning experiences.

Because of their remarkable scope and value as educational tools, Science magazine is honoring the DNA Learning Center (DNALC) Web sites with a Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE).

Science magazine developed the Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE) to promote the best science education online materials. The acronym SPORE suggests a reproductive element adapted to develop, often in adverse conditions, into something new. These winning projects can be viewed similarly, as the seeds of progress in science education, despite considerable challenges to educational innovation. Each month, Science publishes an article by a recipient of the award, which explains the winning project. The article about the DNALC Web sites -- written by Micklos, multimedia design team leader Sue Lauter and Web site producer and evaluator Amy Nissette -- will be published on December 23.

"We want to recognize innovators in science education," says Bruce Alberts, editor-in-chief of Science. "At the same time, this competition will promote those Web sites with the most potential to benefit science students and teachers. The publication of an article in Science on each winning site will help guide people to important online resources, thereby promoting science literacy."

"The Web sites act as a gateway," says Melissa McCartney, editorial fellow at Science, "providing access to the world of molecular biology, genetics, bioinformatics, biotechnology, genetic disorders, cancer, neuroscience, and plant genetics. Visitors explore topics through animation, videos, online lab notebooks, and interactive inquiry-based experiments."

Micklos, whose background and education are in biology education and science journalism, came to the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1982 to start its first development and public information offices. He was hired by Nobel Prize-winner James Watson. Watson, who helped deduce the structure of DNA, was a pioneering advocate of communicating scientific advances to the public, especially to ward off the kind of public distrust that had previously grown up around such topics as recombinant DNA and cloning.

"Before that time, scientists did science and nothing else," Micklos says. "Jim Watson was very prescient in knowing this had to change."

As part of the effort to communicate Cold Spring Harbor's work to the public, Micklos worked to get the DNALC onto the Internet. Once it went live, its functionality and educational value quickly evolved, keeping pace with a rapidly changing online environment. By 1998, it included bioinformatics tools that allowed students to create, share, and analyze real genetic data. In "distributed experiments," or experiments that allowed participation in different locations, students were able to isolate DNA from their own cheek cells, and use online tools to amplify the mitochondrial control region of those cells. Then, after free or low-cost processing, the students' DNA sequences could be uploaded to a database and, using bioinformatics tools, the students could compare their sequences to those of classmates, world populations, and even extinct hominids.

More than a million students have uploaded their DNA data, basically engaging in the kind of experiments that professional scientists conduct.

"At least some of the science that kids learn in school should mirror what scientists are doing today, and this allows that," says Micklos, who points out that the portal's biggest audience is high school and college students. He explains that, because of the Internet, students and teachers can for the first time in history work with scientists' real data, at the same time that scientists are working on it, and with the same tools.

Science-based research has shown that the DNALC Web sites have quantifiable effects and can increase student learning by one letter grade.

In the essay in Science, Micklos and his colleagues point out that the Internet allowed them great opportunities to provide rich, effective, hands-on learning experiences. Adapting to the Internet's evolution, however, was not always easy.

The original DNALC Web site had already hit 7.1 million visitors annually by late 2006, but in early 2007, the site's rising wave of visitation crashed. Search engines had begun to determine the popularity of Web sites, and the DNALC had to break up the site's content into pieces, and label and organize that content to increase the probability of its appearance in searches. The creators of the site also had to move aggressively into apps, YouTube, and blogs.

"The point is we have to make information available to people in the way they want it," says Micklos.

By 2010, the number of visitors per year was back up to 7.1 million.

Micklos says he relayed the challenges of getting the DNALC site to where it is today because he hopes that one of the effects of winning a SPORE award will be helping other science educators with their online objectives.

"I know that people are hitting the wall with their Web sites," he says, "so I wanted them to see that we had some problems, but we surmounted them. If you're going to be a leadership organization, you have to help people understand how you solved problems."

The bottom line, he says, is that online learning is inextricably linked with science learning.

"If we're going to do well in science," Micklos says, "we're going to have to do well on the Web."

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To visit the DNALC Web sites, go to http://www.dnalc.org.

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Public release date: 22-Dec-2011
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