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1. Innovative Use of Technologies to Teach Chemical Engineering Core Classes and Laboratories During the Covid-19 Pandemic at an HBCU

   Dua, Rupak (July 2021, 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access)

   Most chemical engineering core classes are best taught when students are exposed to a face-to-face learning/teaching environment. With the arrival of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the whole education system and the setting were disrupted at Hampton University (HU). Traditional in-person face-to-face classes were forced to move to remote instructions to maintain a healthy and safe campus environment and minimize the spread of COVID-19 on campus and in the community. As an instructor teaching core courses and unit operations laboratory in the Department of Chemical Engineering, it was challenging to move completely virtual and deliver instructions remotely without affecting students' learning outcomes. However, with the appropriate modern technologies and adapting to the students' change and needs, online teaching can be done efficiently and can still have efficient learning outcomes. Various activities were introduced to make the online/virtual class environment engaging in developing technical and professional skills and inducing learning for students. Using the latest educational tools and online resources, formative assessments were conducted throughout the course in an effort to improve student learning and instructor teaching. In addition to that, innovative ways of technology were also used to evaluate student learning and understanding of the material for grading and reporting purposes. Many of the modern educational tools, including Blackboard Collaborate Ultra, Ka-hoot, linoit, surveys, polls, and chemical engineering processes’ simulations and videos were in-troduced to make the synchronous sessions interactive. Likert-like surveys conducted were anal-yses to gauge the effectiveness of incorporation of technology during remote learning. This paper describes the innovative use of technologies to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic in the Chemical Engineering Classes. It will also explain the strategies to assess the mode of delivery efficacy and how to change the course of teaching to adapt to the students' changing needs. 

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2. Twitter: More than Tweets for Undergraduate Student Researchers

   https://doi.org/10.1128/jmbe.00326-21  

   Reyna, Nathan S.; Pruett, Christin; Morrison, Mike; Fowler, Jennifer; Pandey, Sumali; Hensley, Lori (April 2022, Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education)

   ABSTRACT During the COVID-19 pandemic, biology educators were forced to think of ways to communicate with their students, engaging them in science and with the scientific community. For educators using course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs), the challenge to have students perform real science, analyze their work, and present their results to a larger scientific audience was difficult as the world moved online. Many instructors were able to adapt CUREs utilizing online data analysis and virtual meeting software for class discussions and synchronous learning. However, interaction with the larger scientific community, an integral component of making science relevant for students and allowing them to network with other young scientists and experts in their fields, was still missing. Even before COVID-19, a subset of students would travel to regional or national meetings to present their work, but most did not have these opportunities. With over 300 million active users, Twitter provided a unique platform for students to present their work to a large and varied audience. The Cell Biology Education Consortium hosted an innovative scientific poster session entirely on Twitter to engage undergraduate researchers with one another and with the much broader community. The format for posting on this popular social media platform challenged students to simplify their science and make their points using only a few words and slides. Nineteen institutions and over one hundred students participated in this event. Even though these practices emerged as a necessity during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Twitter presentation strategy shared in this paper can be used widely. 

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3. Student Experience with COVID-19 and Online Learning: Impact of Faculty’s Ability to Successfully Navigate Technological Platforms for Remote Instruction

   Shuey, Melissa; Akera, Atsushi; Appelhans, Sarah; Cheville, R. Alan; De Pree, Thomas; Fatehibouroujeni, Soheil (July 2021, ASEE annual conference exposition)

   null (Ed.)

   This paper is based on a series of semi-structured, qualitative interviews that were conducted with students, by an undergraduate student and lead author of this paper, that focused on their experiences with educational technologies and online teaching pedagogy in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. As U.S. educators scrambled to adapt to online course delivery modes as a result of the first wave of the pandemic in the spring 2020 semester, those in the educational technology and online learning community saw the potential of this movement to vastly accelerate the implementation of online systems in higher education. A shift that may have taken 20 years to accomplish was implemented in two waves, first with the immediate forced shift to online learning in March 2020; and second, a less immediate shift to hybrid and online instruction designed to accommodate the different geographic variation in COVID-19 intensity, along with varied political and institutional ecologies surrounding online versus in-person instruction for the 2020-2021 academic year. With all of the rapid changes that were occurring during the spring of 2020, we wanted to investigate how students experienced and perceived faculty use of technology during this particular moment in time. This study documents this transition through the eyes of undergraduate students, and demonstrates the varied ways in which faculty navigated the transition to online learning. According to our interviewees, some faculty were thoughtful and competent and provided a supportive environment that paid attention to a students’ capacity for online learning, rather than maintaining traditional instructional practices. Others relied on practices from in-person instruction that were familiar, but appeared to be nervous in the new online teaching environment. Then there were those who seemed occupied by other concerns, where a focus on effective undergraduate teaching remained limited to begin with, and their approach to online instruction was driven by convenience. Our qualitative data clearly reveals that the ways in which faculty conducted their online courses directly impacted student learning experiences. In this study, we set out to document both the faculty instructional strategies in a hybrid/online environment and student accounts of those choices and their resulting experiences. While we continue to analyze this unique data set on this moment of transition in engineering education, we hope that this paper will also lead to policy recommendations regarding faculty adaptations to online instruction in general. We include some initial thoughts and recommendations below. 

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4. HSI Students' Experience with "Servingness" During COVID-19

   Hug, S.; Jurow, A.; Thiry, H. (January 2021, Dialogues in social justice)

   In March of 2020, higher education institutions across the U.S. closed their doors and converted to remote and online learning due to the COVID-19 health crisis. As the country adjusted to the “new normal” of living and working at home, the economic and psychological impact of self-isolation and business closures were felt strongly by those who were most economically and socially vulnerable. In this context, the evaluation team of the Computing Alliance of Hispanic Serving Institutions (CAHSI) implemented a survey of students studying computer science at Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) across the country to understand the impact of COVID-19 on their lives. In this paper, we identify the contexts in which students at HSIs continued (or failed to continue) their academic pursuits under great hardship. Our analysis highlights how the multidimensional framework of “servingness,” defined as a critical organizational, interactional, and ideological approach that many HSIs use to support their students, was experienced by students during the pandemic (Garcia et al., 2019). We argue that the practices and structures of servingness contributed to sustaining students’ well-being, dignity, and learning amid uncertainty. 

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5. Assessing the Reactionary Response of High School Engineering Teachers Offering a Novel Pre-College Engineering Curriculum: Lessons Learned from the COVID-19 Pandemic

   https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci13050427  

   Griesinger, Tina; Olawale, David; Saqib, Najmus; Reid, Kenneth (May 2023, Education Sciences)

   The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic forced a rapid transition of K-16 education to remote and online learning in the final quarter of the 2019–2020 school year. The disruption was extreme for all teachers in K-12 but particularly for teachers involved in pilot programs, such as the NSF-funded Engineering for Us All (e4usa) project. This paper reports the key findings obtained through systematic data collection from a pilot cohort of high school teachers who adapted a brand-new engineering curriculum during the COVID-19 pandemic, students who experienced the adapted curriculum, and a new cohort of teachers who were tasked with teaching the updated curriculum. 

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