This bulletin board is intended for all those college, university, and high school faculty members who are interested in or actively involved in teaching science courses. It is also intended for use by graduate students who are learning how to teach or who are about to embark on their professional career in academia. Although the emphasis will be on the biological sciences, we know that the boundaries between scientific disciplines are often fluid, and that instructors of young students often face the same problems in many different classes. Thus, anyone who has a question or problem with teaching introductory science courses is welcome to participate.

This board has been developed with several ideas in mind, however, these goals may quickly evaporate and will evolve rapidly as we try to find our niche in the increasingly crowded superhighway of user groups. One goal is for this board to serve as a forum for young, inexperienced faculty members who need to find information about particular topics or ideas on how to handle tricky, difficult, or unfamiliar situations. On this board, feel free to ask any question or seek solutions to any problem regarding your course that you are trying to resolve. Of course, I hope people treat each question with careful consideration and each user of this board with respect. Remember that once all of us were young, naive, inexperienced, and enthusiastic. Some of us are now only naive. We hope that young faculty members will view this board as a place where they can receive help, ideas, and suggestions from those who can serve as on-line mentors.

I also hope that young faculty members begin to establish contacts with each other as they begin their academic careers. It can be healthy to find like-minded colleagues who are concerned and interested in teaching and who are faced with the same problems as you and experiencing the same frustrations and positive emotions about teaching.

I also welcome to this board those individuals with much teaching experience who wish to re-think their curriculum and the way they teach. Certainly all of us still have much to learn about how, when, and if students think and our roles in helping them learn about science.

Another major goal for this board is for it to become a source of resources for teaching the sciences--but this is not a solicitation for advertisements! However, if you know a good video that illustrates a specific concept, a good book or article, or an address or contact person for materials that are difficult to find, I hope you will share that information with us.

Also, I hope that users of the "Handbook on Teaching Undergraduate Science Courses: A Survival Training Manual," will comment on the book itself and thus provide me with feedback about how I might revise it before publishing it commercially. Tell me what sections you don't like and what parts you think need revision. Of course, constructive criticisms are always best when they include suggestions to help resolve the identified problems, and not just the complaint itself! [If you are not familiar with it, you may want to look at the Table of Contents of the Manual; there are instructions on obtaining a copy.]

Finally, I hope that you will identify other information that would be useful to you or other instructors of undergraduate science and that could be added to this web site. There are other boards "out there" that are useful, and I urge you to visit them. One such board is BioLab. It is my desire to provide a different service than other boards, allowing us to grow with time as more and more undergraduate faculty find their way to the Web with their myriad problems related to teaching science and their solutions. I hope you find this board useful--please help me make it so. -Gordon Uno (email: guno@ou.edu).