Bridging biology education and industry: Sustainable strategies to align curricula, streamline updates, and reduce instructor workloads
Session Type
Presentation
Room
Physics and Astronomy, room 106
Start Date
16-7-2025 11:30 AM
End Date
16-7-2025 12:00 PM
Keywords
Continuous Improvement, Curriculum Design, Constructive Alignment, Learning Outcomes, Academia-Industry Alignment, Workforce Readiness, Nationwide Collaboration
Primary Threads
Curriculum
Abstract
The Canadian bioscience industry anticipates over 65,000 job openings by 2029, yet a persistent misalignment remains between workforce demands and the skills of biology graduates. While graduates often receive solid academic foundations, employers continue to note gaps in essential technical, transferable, and industry-specific skills. These gaps pose a challenge in a rapidly evolving field such as biology, where educators continually strive to keep curricula updated and students navigate the unclear pathways of career readiness. This session showcases a practical roadmap for addressing these challenges through continuous improvement and sustainable teaching practices, inviting participants to consider how these tools might be adapted to their own discipline. Resources such as a Common PLO Framework will first be used to guide attendees in understanding the alignment between biology curricula and program learning outcomes. This will then be followed by an analysis of gathered ethics-approved stakeholder perceptions, which will highlight shared priorities and gaps among both industry and biology higher education. To bridge these disparities and ensure united alignment, a Curriculum Update Checklist will be proposed – a tool that can be utilized and adapted by audience members for the development or revision of their own programs. Attendees will leave equipped with evidence-based, actionable strategies that can be used to fill identified gaps within biology education and the industry, as well as the training and guidance to administer their own continuous improvement. By introducing these tools and resources, this presentation hopes to ease the constraints of instructors and industry professionals having to continuously monitor and uphold current industry standards within biology higher education. Participants are encouraged to bring their own device to engage with the electronic resources.
Elements of Engagement
Participants will start with a Menti poll to reflect on their biggest challenges in updating curricula, then dive into a Think–Pair–Share discussion to surface common gaps educators observe. Using the CPF and Curriculum Update Checklist, each attendee will draft a brief roadmap for continuous improvement, identifying one immediate action, one longer-term plan, and any needed resources. A QR code linking to the Checklist will be provided so participants can easily download, adapt, and build on the tool for their own programs.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Bridging biology education and industry: Sustainable strategies to align curricula, streamline updates, and reduce instructor workloads
Physics and Astronomy, room 106
The Canadian bioscience industry anticipates over 65,000 job openings by 2029, yet a persistent misalignment remains between workforce demands and the skills of biology graduates. While graduates often receive solid academic foundations, employers continue to note gaps in essential technical, transferable, and industry-specific skills. These gaps pose a challenge in a rapidly evolving field such as biology, where educators continually strive to keep curricula updated and students navigate the unclear pathways of career readiness. This session showcases a practical roadmap for addressing these challenges through continuous improvement and sustainable teaching practices, inviting participants to consider how these tools might be adapted to their own discipline. Resources such as a Common PLO Framework will first be used to guide attendees in understanding the alignment between biology curricula and program learning outcomes. This will then be followed by an analysis of gathered ethics-approved stakeholder perceptions, which will highlight shared priorities and gaps among both industry and biology higher education. To bridge these disparities and ensure united alignment, a Curriculum Update Checklist will be proposed – a tool that can be utilized and adapted by audience members for the development or revision of their own programs. Attendees will leave equipped with evidence-based, actionable strategies that can be used to fill identified gaps within biology education and the industry, as well as the training and guidance to administer their own continuous improvement. By introducing these tools and resources, this presentation hopes to ease the constraints of instructors and industry professionals having to continuously monitor and uphold current industry standards within biology higher education. Participants are encouraged to bring their own device to engage with the electronic resources.