QUBES: An education gateway for professional development, OER sharing, and project support

The Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education & Synthesis (QUBES; qubeshub.org) project has adopted a "scientific gateways" model to accelerate undergraduate biology education reform. As such, QUBES provides an accessible and integrated cyberinfrastructure that makes it possible to coordinate and streamline the work of a diverse and distributed community of biology educators. The QUBES services include an online professional development model (faculty mentoring networks – FMNs), an open educational resources publication and versioning platform, diverse types of community hosting, workshop support, and access to cloud-based computational resources. The integration of these functionalities within a single gateway provides important opportunities for both individual faculty and education projects to engage with the professional community and amplify their scholarship. We argue that professional participation through a scientific gateway reflects a more robust and responsive set of strategies for collaborative STEM education reform.