Education

Over the last few decades there has been an increasing focus on education research in STEM disciplines globally. Although science educators, including academics teaching microbiology at universities, have been engaging in research on teaching methods in their classrooms for many years, the importance of scholarship of teaching and learning and publishing on research relating to teaching pedagogy has only recently been more widely acknowledged. Education research now underpins teaching approaches across science disciplines including microbiology. Teaching today is student focussed with a move away from the didactic ‘sage on the stage’ approach to strategies designed to enhance peer to peer engagement in the classroom and collaborative-learning approaches. Microbiology teaching has always had a strong active-learning component in the form of student laboratory classes, but increasingly, active learning is also being introduced more broadly into course design. This requires both education-focussed academics and continual innovation and reflection in education practice.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a marked shift from face-to-face teaching to hybrid online–face-to-face classes and online classrooms. Although 2023 has seen a return to on-campus study, there has been a mixed response to the return to face-to-face learning by students, and this highlights the need for more flexible approaches to delivering university courses. As an increasing number of mature-age students enter university, providing flexible study options is a priority for many Australian universities. However, online learning can be challenging for educators particularly in relation to developing suitable assessment items. In microbiology, we need to ensure that the language and concepts underpinning important microbiological theory are understood before more complex thinking is possible. Appropriately assessing the breadth of students that we teach and providing ways for excellence to be recognised is challenging. Another key issue for educators today is dealing with artificial intelligence (AI) technology and chatbots, such as ChatGPT. Can this technology be used to enhance our teaching rather than reflexively banning it?

In this education-themed issue of Microbiology Australia, educators teaching in various universities have contributed articles on a range of topics from AI, teaching microbiology to health professionals and in secondary schools, to the development of online tools for teaching. We hope you will find the articles in this edition interesting. To those of you who are engaged in teaching, we hope these papers may be a great start to further discussion and reflection on your own teaching practice, and contribute to the development of innovative ways to teach the wonderful subject of microbiology. Please join the Education Special Interest Group and use the resources on our web site (https://www.theasm-edsig.org.au/) and come to the next EduCon in Brisbane. Meeting other science educators and hearing about their enthusiasm and dedication will change your teaching for the better.

Conflicts of interest

Thiru Vanniasinkam and Megan Lloyd are guest editors for this issue of Microbiology Australia but did not at any stage have editor-level access to this manuscript or those that they authored while they were in peer review, as is the standard practice when handling manuscripts submitted by an editor to this journal. Microbiology Australia encourages its editors to publish in the journal and they are kept totally separate from the decision-making processes for their manuscripts. The authors have no further conflicts of interest to declare.