Grace Panther, assistant professor of engineering education in Civil and Environment Engineering and Heidi Diefes-Dux, professor of engineering education in Biological System Engineering are winding-up a National Science Foundation (NSF) Rapid Response Research (RAPID) project focused on the teaching experiences of undergraduate engineering instructors during the COVID-19 pandemic.
NSF RAPID funding allows researchers to propose projects when there is urgency to collect data. To put a positive spin on it - the COVID-19 pandemic presented a unique opportunity to study how instructors respond to a sudden change in instructional operations and policies.
“We are so thankful to all of the instructors who shared their stories over the last three academic semesters when things were uncertain and stressful,” Panther said. It is perhaps no surprise that faculty had to make changes to their teaching practices when UNL went remote in March 2020. New technologies had to be learned to deliver courses and new practice needed to be adopted to overcome student engagement challenges.
Now that UNL has returned to in-class instruction, the question is whether instructors will retain, modify, or add to these new teaching practices. Diefes-Dux and Panther will be looking into this question in a new three-year $349,997 grant from the NSF Research in the Formation of Engineers program.
“There was much talk in the engineering education community about the potential for the COVID-19 pandemic to spur unprecedented long-term change in the way we teach,” Diefes-Dux said. “Now we have the opportunity to see whether and how this happens.”
The researchers agree that this new project brings one big challenge – how to encourage participation of instructors who so far have not shared their stories. “In education research, bias can be an issue if you only hear from a fraction of a study population,” Diefes-Dux said. “With the support of Dean Perez and the engineering department chairs, we are looking forward to even wider instructor participation in this study. Only then can we really say what the long-term impact of COVID-19 has been on our teaching practices.”
Engineering instructors who teach undergraduate courses can expect invitations to participate over the next few weeks.
More details at: https://engineering.unl.edu/DBER/