Leveraging public data to offer online inquiry opportunities

Inquiry activities have become increasingly common in Ecology and Evolution courses, but the rapid shift to remote instruction for many faculty members in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has created new challenges for maintaining these student-centered activities in a distance learning format. Moving forward, many instructors will be asked to create flexible course structures that allow for a mix of different teaching modalities and will be looking for resources to support student inquiry in both online and in-person settings. Here, we propose the use of data-driven inquiry activities as a flexible option for offering students experiences to build career-relevant skills and learn fundamental ecological concepts. We share lessons learned from our experiences teaching a two-semester course-based research experience in global change ecology that leverages publicly available datasets to engage students in broadly relevant scientific inquiry.