NSF Awards: 1937267
This video is presented on behalf of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (AAAS-IUSE) Initiative.
In early 2021, AAAS-IUSE launched an ongoing call for submissions titled Lessons Learned: COVID-19 and Undergraduate STEM Education. This call for submissions was created to collect best practices, developed by IUSE Principal Investigators and other undergraduate STEM education leaders, for addressing challenges presented or exacerbated by COVID. These challenges do not affect all communities the same. Issues of access, equity, and inclusion are critical to broadening participation and developing effective best practices for STEM teaching and learning.
We received over 100 responses from the larger IUSE community identifying issues and innovations that educators are implementing in virtual and hybrid classrooms across the nation. While reviewing submissions, we quickly realized that the community wasn't just creating promising practices for teaching and learning in a pandemic, but was creating strategies that could transform the way we teach STEM forever. This summer we will disseminate these strategies to educators and administrators in higher education.
Our goal with this video is to introduce undergraduate educators to the rich collection of teaching resources that the AAAS-IUSE Initiative offers to broaden participation in STEM using inclusive and excellent practices that improve undergraduate STEM education.
Visit AAAS-IUSE to learn more about innovations, developed by the IUSE community, for addressing challenges related to teaching, learning, diversity, equity, and inclusion in undergraduate STEM education.
New to AAAS-IUSE? Here are a few good places to start:
Thomas Veague
Community Engagement Manager
Welcome! We hope you enjoyed our video: Leveraging This Moment to Transform STEM Education. The AAAS-IUSE Initiative supports faculty and administrators in undergraduate STEM education by disseminating research and knowledge about STEM teaching, learning, equity, and systemic change. We are grateful to the community of IUSE PIs, Co-PIs and STEM education experts who shared their creative strategies with us. We also want to give a special thanks to our interviewees for sharing their innovative projects in our video. You can learn more about the projects featured in this video on the Lessons Learned section of our website.
We’re interested in hearing how you think this time of disruption will influence undergraduate STEM education in the future. What teaching strategies have you developed during this time that can be adapted to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion going forward? What practices have you seen or implemented that hold promise for improving undergraduate STEM education?
Catherine Horn
Travis York
Vedham Karpakakunjaram
Ayse Tekes
Hello,
This is Ayse Tekes, assistant professor of the mechanical engineering department at Kennesaw State University. Thank you for watching the video. We developed a Matlab Simscape GUI App for undergraduate level mechanical vibrations and control theory courses along with their associated laboratories. The program allows the faculty and students to visualize the highly mathematical concepts. Please feel free to download the in-progress GUI App using the link below:
http://facultyweb.kennesaw.edu/atekes/Vibration...
Also, you might want to watch the following videos on how to run the simulations on the application:
Thomas Veague
David Thompson
Inspirational. Thanks for sharing these stories of creative approaches to STEM learning!
Thomas Veague
Catherine Horn
Travis York
Jennifer Carinci
Vedham Karpakakunjaram
Thomas Veague
Community Engagement Manager
Thanks, David! Glad to hear you enjoyed the video. The featured individuals, and their teams, have done amazing work to make STEM education more accessible to undergraduate students.
Catherine Horn
David Thompson
Inspirational. Thanks for sharing these stories of creative approaches to STEM learning!
Catherine Horn
Travis York
Catherine Horn
Moores Professor and Chair
Thanks for the amazing effort to be intentional in the opportunity to learn from what has certainly been an unwanted but real experiment in education over the last 16 months. I deeply appreciate the interest in "crowd sourcing" learning from a broad variety of efforts and agree that there is real potential for such efforts to result in more permanent transformations of how STEM teacher leaders are prepared.
As you are advancing this effort, I wonder what it calls up for you in terms of sustainable and at scale approaches to continue sharing learning. What is your effort teaching you about how networks of learners are created and what would you recommend, based on what you are finding, to organizations like the NSF and AAAS with respect to providing increasingly effective, dynamic approaches to supporting college STEM teachers improve their practice?
Really appreciate this project!
Cathy
Thomas Veague
Iris Wagstaff
STEM Program Director
Thanks so much for this question Catherine! During the last 16 months we have witnessed creative and innovative approaches and strategies to deal with the delays and disruptions to STEM teaching and learning. Some of the more promising efforts we have seen are the partnerships and collaborations between STEM faculty and industry, non-profits and community organizations who have reached out to support students. Some of these include subsidizing remote learning and teaching and resources, especially for labs that were shut down, and converting research and internships to remote or virtual formats to assist students in staying on track with expertise development. While we have definitely seen some challenges over the last year, we have been able to leverage the virtual environment to create communities of support and expand the opportunities for STEM faculty to share their research and best practices beyond publications and in more real-time formats that are timely regarding addressing student needs. We have seen some rich connections made between STEM faculty and the communities in which they reside which could be expanded and built upon moving forward to better sustain and scale efforts to support and transform undergraduate STEM education.
Thomas Veague
Catherine Horn
Catherine Horn
Moores Professor and Chair
Iris - Thanks so much for the additional detail and for the work you all are doing! So important.
cathy
Iris Wagstaff
STEM Program Director
Thanks again for your question and viewing our video Cathy! Additional learnings can be found at our new, publicly available resource Lessons Learned During COVID-19: Strategies Transforming the Future of Education, which includes recommendations from the IUSE Principal Investigators featured in our video.
Catherine Horn
Catherine Horn
Moores Professor and Chair
THANKS!
Christine Royce
Professor
Amazing! Very informative and motivational. I appreciated that the program is for undergraduate STEM education and students enrolled in those programs, but I wonder if the resources that have been developed have been publicized for high school teachers that may find use for them as well? I am suspecting that many of the resources could be used to help high school teachers broaden that pipeline to STEM fields through similar strategies.
I am also curious as to how many institutions beyond the three highlighted in this program are participating in the program as well. Thanks again.
Thomas Veague
Jennifer Carinci
Program Director, STEM Education Research; Principal Investigator for AAAS' IUSE and Noyce Grants
Thanks for your kind words and interest in high school teachers applying these learnings, Christine! Our recently launched AAAS-IUSE community (for which we would be happy for Showcase visitors to join and contribute expertise) includes over 6,000 subscribers – NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) Principal Investigators and project teams, as well as broader stakeholders engaged and/or interested in undergraduate STEM education.
As mentioned in the video when we put out a call to these experts around sharing promising practices for how they have adapted their practice to the challenges of teaching and learning during COVID-19, over 100 responses flooded in going beyond creating best practices for teaching in a pandemic and instead developing evergreen strategies with implications for broadening participation, increasing accessibility, and transforming the way we teach STEM!
Check out our new, publicly available resource Lessons Learned During COVID-19: Strategies Transforming the Future of Education, which currently contains more information and specific recommendations for educators (many of which could be adapted by high school teachers) from the remarkable IUSE Principal Investigators featured in our video.
So far our collection includes strategies for:
• course design,
• student engagement, and
• online labs.
Stay tuned as we debut more Lessons Learned strategies in the coming months to share many of the inspirational and transformative submissions received – including some from teacher educators around adapting clinical practice.
Thomas Veague
Jill Berg
Leadership Coach, School Improvement Consultant & Author
It's often said, "Never let a good crisis go to waste." This video provides a clear and inspiring example of how the crisis led your community to come together and create powerful changes that will endure to improve education into the future. I also appreciated the many voices in the video and your evidence-informed emphasis on impact. Kudos!
Thomas Veague
Lauren Manier
Program Associate
Thank you, Jill! We agree with your sentiment to “never let a good crisis go to waste”. We are excited to be sharing the work that Dr. López-Cevallos, Dr. Tekes, and Dr. Chen are doing to make their mentorship program, undergraduate STEM lab, and classroom more accessible, inclusive, and engaging during these challenging times.
Thomas Veague
John Coleman
Thank you for sharing information in your video and Abstract. We continue to explore ways to positively impact teaching and learning strategies that improve students grasp, retention, and application of STEM course content. Your content helps.
Thomas Veague
Thomas Veague
Community Engagement Manager
Thanks for your comment, John! We're glad to hear you found this content helpful. Our IUSE community works hard to identify those positive strategies that make STEM teaching and learning more inclusive and accessible.
More information on the strategies featured in this video can be found on Lessons Learned During COVID-19:Transforming the Future of STEM Education (with more strategies coming soon). Our community also contributes to a monthly blog series focused on empowering evidence based systemic change to advance equity and a workshop series that explores supporting students and faculty online, adapting in-person teaching for an online environment, and promoting equity through pedagogical approaches.
Howard Dooley
This is a great video and motivator to visit the IUSE website for other practices! I keep hearing people talk about "getting back to normal" when, I believe, there is a new normal that is a more 21st century pedagogy that will increase diversity and belongingness in STEM. Thanks for the video!
Thomas Veague
Thomas Veague
Community Engagement Manager
Thanks for the kind feedback, Howard! There are so many opportunities to learn from this period of disruption to improve the way we teach and learn STEM. I agree that we should be headed towards a "new normal" built on lessons we've learned to make STEM education a more diverse and inclusive space. I keep thinking about this piece where Dr. Stephanie August wrote about taking this moment to envision a brighter future for STEM, and then making it a reality: How Disruption Allows Us to Reimagine Convergent STEM Ecosystems.
Thanks again for your comments!
Rose Kendrick
Thanks for the creative student engagement strategies!
Thomas Veague
Community Engagement Manager
Thanks for saying so, Rose! We're excited to release more student engagement strategies from our submissions. More details on these strategies and future ones can be found at Lessons Learned During COVID-19: Strategies Transforming the Future of Education.
Daniel López-Cevallos
Hello,
The STEM Leaders Program (SLP) at OSU was previously funded in 2014 through an NSF IUSE # 1432810. In 2019, the SLP successfully transitioned from grant to university funding through a collaborative partnership between the Colleges of Agricultural Sciences, Engineering, and Science, and the Office of Undergraduate Education. To date, almost four hundred students have completed our program.
During these challenging times, we listened to our students and stakeholders to address the needs that are important to them—in this case, launching and adding to our on-going program, the STEM Buddies initiative. We appreciate the leadership of our SLP Program Coordinator, Stephanie Ramos, and the work of our student program assistants in making this possible. We hope you enjoy our contribution, and we look forward to supporting current and future STEM Leader students.
You can find more about our program here: https://stemleaders.oregonstate.edu/
Thomas Veague
Daniel López-Cevallos
Hello,
The STEM Leaders Program (SLP) at OSU was previously funded in 2014 through an NSF IUSE # 1432810. In 2019, the SLP successfully transitioned from grant to university funding through a collaborative partnership between the Colleges of Agricultural Sciences, Engineering, and Science, and the Office of Undergraduate Education. To date, almost four hundred students have completed our program.
During these challenging times, we listened to our students and stakeholders to address the needs that are important to them—in this case, launching and adding to our on-going program, the STEM Buddies initiative. We appreciate the leadership of our SLP Program Coordinator, Stephanie Ramos, and the work of our student program assistants in making this possible. We hope you enjoy our contribution, and we look forward to supporting current and future STEM Leader students.
You can find more about our program here: https://stemleaders.oregonstate.edu/
Thomas Veague
Stephanie Ramos
We've learned so much from this past year and we look forward to reviewing and continuously improving the STEM Buddies system for our upcoming cohort of students. I am inspired by all the great work we as educators across the country have done to adapt to all the changes that come our way. We have more to do, but this year gave us the opportunity to try and learn how we can continuously support our students. Please let us know if you have any questions or want to talk about the STEM Leaders Program at Oregon State University.
Thomas Veague