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This paper describes a National Science Foundation-funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site program conducted through virtual working environment. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, REU 2021 activities were conducted online through Canvas and Zoom communication platforms. The major aim of this program is to provide undergraduate students with experiences in engineering education research (i.e., education research in the context of engineering). This paper provides an overview of the program, and briefly describes the virtual working environment, and students’ research experiences during the 10-week program. A total of 11 undergraduate students, seven graduate mentors, and seven faculty mentors have actively participated in the program. The program is conducted in two phases: Phases 1 (i.e., Weeks 1-2) and 2 (i.e., Weeks 3-10). Phase 1 consists of preparatory and foundational work that is delivered to participants and will allow them to begin Phase 2 with some educational research foundation already established. The results of the project evaluation show that the program has made a positive impact on increasing education research skills and communication skills of the participating REU students. The participating REU students reported that the research projects they worked on increased their motivation and confidence for continuing to engage in engineering education research. Four participants (i.e., 36.4% of the total participants) suggested that, if available, they would prefer face-to-face over a virtual REU program. Another four participants (i.e., 36.4%) felt that both face-to-face and virtual would offer the same quality of research experiences, and 3 participants (i.e., 27.2% of the total participants) voiced their preference of virtual over face-to-face REU program.
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Team-based, transdisciplinary, and inclusive practices for undergraduate research
We report on an emerging undergraduate research framework from the NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduate (REU) Site in Computational Sensing at Rochester Institute of Technology. Unobtrusive observation of people's physiological, behavioral, cognitive, and environmental data is increasingly enabling new computing experiences. This REU Site recognizes the accumulating need for training emerging researchers to gain experience in and grapple with systematic collection, processing, analysis, and interpretation of heterogeneous human-elicited information. Instead of merely leveraging traditional physiological measurements, our research program takes a holistic approach to the capture and integration of such sensing data. For instance, the data may also include linguistic and eye movement behaviors, or social and geospatial contextual information. These modalities provide rich information. An example of a multimodal data collection scenario from a project in the REU Site's first year is in Figure 1. This project applied sensing for observing and measuring cognitive reactions as participants engaged in tasks involving web-based video lecturing.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1559889
- PAR ID:
- 10051265
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 5
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE.2017.8190553
