Learning in place continued in the summer of 2021, as the Nebraska Math and Science Summer Institutes offered 15 courses via web conferencing, as well as three grant-funded courses in computer science, three online courses for the Master of Arts for Teachers degree, and one in-person course on the UNL campus.
NMSSI courses, grant courses and courses required for degrees welcomed 165 graduate students in NebraskaMATH and NebraskaSCIENCE for a total of 290 registrations in 23 courses. Fifteen educators from outside of Nebraska joined 135 distinct Cornhusker State teachers on this online journey.
Science offerings included the highly popular GEOS 898: Weather, Climate and Climate Change and new courses ASTR 898: Phenomena of Planetary Satellites, BIOS 897: Evolution in Action, SOCI 898: Using Systems Thinking in Network Science, and TEAC 893: Engineering in the K-6 Classroom.
Fellowships from the Mathematics department's Don Miller Fund and Jim and Doris Lewis Fund each helped 30 Nebraska teachers, respectively, with reducing tuition costs. Two funds from the Department of Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education assisted 24 teachers. Nineteen teachers were able to take STEM-integrated courses with fellowship support from the new Bosch Community Fund program, STEM Ambassadors. Fellowship support also came from the Center for Science, Mathematics, and Computer Education; the School of Biological Sciences; the Department of Physics and Astronomy; the Worlds of Connections grant in the Department of Sociology; and the College of Engineering.
Thank you for your support of our courses this summer. We hope to return to in-person courses statewide in 2022, as well as offer a few web conferencing courses along with the three online (asynchronous) MAT courses. To learn more about courses available this fall, see https://www.math.unl.edu/mat-schedule