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Bucks County Community College (Bucks) in collaboration with Drexel University (Drexel) is committed to increasing the number of workforce ready engineers and engineering technicians and to creating a blueprint for 2+2 engineering education programs nationally. Recently, educational reform took an unexpected turn to remote teaching due to the world-wide COVID-19 pandemic. Within our NSF ATE grant to enhance our present engineering technology curriculum we modified and enhanced instructional and student engagement methods to assure workforce readiness of our students in a remote world. Curriculum enhancements within the engineering technology (ET) occupational major at Bucks and the B.S. in ET degree program at Drexel, modifications to delivery of workforce development certification programs through the Bucks Center for Workforce Development (CWD), and college-wide student engagement strategies were implemented to assure quality education and student engagement. Modifications to credit courses included asynchronous online courses, synchronous remote courses, and hybrid courses, which combined remote and on campus laboratory instruction. Our CWD implemented hybrid instruction that included necessary resources for students such as tool kits and borrowed laptop computers. In addition, a college wide program called Bucks+ was implemented through the Bucks Business and Innovation Department to increase enrollment, retention, and workforce readiness of students. The Bucks+ program focuses on student engagement through competition within curriculum, and extracurricular endeavors that prepare students for industry. We will share our successes and challenges within our call to action to engage students in a remote world and to enhance their educational experience through innovative instructional techniques.
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Correlations between student connectivity and academic performance: a pandemic follow-up
Social network analysis (SNA) has been gaining traction as a technique for quantitatively studying student collaboration. We analyze networks, constructed from student self-reports of collaboration on homework assignments, in two courses from the University of Colorado Boulder and one course from the Colorado School of Mines. All three courses occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, which allows for a comparison between the course at the Colorado School of Mines (in a fully remote format) with results from a previous pre-pandemic study of student collaboration at the Colorado School of Mines (in a hybrid format). We compute nodal centrality measures and calculate the correlation between student centrality and performance. Results varied widely between each of the courses studied. The course at the Colorado School of Mines had strong correlations between many centrality measures and performance which matched the patterns seen in the pre-pandemic study. The courses at the University of Colorado Boulder showed weaker correlations, and one course showed nearly no correlations at all between students' connectivity to their classmates and their performance. Taken together, the results from the trio of courses indicate that the context and environment in which the course is situated play a more important role in fostering a correlation between student collaboration and course performance than the format (remote, hybrid, in-person) of the course. Additionally, we conducted a short study on the effect that missing nodes may have on the correlations calculated from the measured networks. This investigation showed that missing nodes tend to shift correlations towards zero, providing evidence that the statistically significant correlations measured in our networks are not spurious.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1839232
- PAR ID:
- 10361373
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ArXivorg
- ISSN:
- 2331-8422
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 2210.01207
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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