RAPID: Collaborative Research: Faculty Networks Supporting Rapid Transitions to Online Physics Teaching During the COVID-19 Pandemic

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To minimize the spread of the novel coronavirus within their communities, colleges and universities around the nation have closed their campuses. Most have also decided to pivot to online instruction so students can continue their education and remain on track in their degree programs. To accomplish this goal, faculty in all disciplines have scrambled to quickly move their in-person classes to an online environment. Many of these faculty have not had previous experience teaching online. Many who have experience are not fluent with either the technologies or the most effective methods for teaching and learning in online environments. This project will systematically explore the ways in which physics faculty members around the nation, under enormous time pressure, are interacting with each other in online networks as they transition their physics courses online. These online networks can also help faculty navigate the stresses of teaching online and the anxiety of ensuring that students have a beneficial educational experience. This project will gather and analyze data to describe the characteristics of these networks and how they may support the transition to online teaching of physics and other STEM disciplines during a crisis and beyond.Academic and social networks are critical elements of student life in STEM, and they are also important for instructors. During this crisis, faculty are drawing on professional social networks to support their transition to online teaching. Additional research is needed to understand these informal faculty networks and to link these networks to outcomes for faculty and students. Because the coronavirus-related transition to online teaching has been so urgent and widespread, the situation presents a unique setting in which to apply techniques of social network analysis to study the roles of professional networks on a large scale within a discipline. To this end, the project will collect data from three primary components: (1) a survey of physics faculty as they transition to online teaching; (2) follow-up interviews with faculty; and (3) Twitter data-scraping to identify groups that are promoting and sharing approaches to online teaching. The three data sets will be connected and collectively contribute to analyses of network growth, resource sharing, personal community growth, and mediation of anxiety among college physics faculty. The study intends to reveal the extent to which the crisis has: 1) mobilized latent networks and formed new networks around physics teaching; 2) made such networks more salient and productive; 3) built faculty members' efficacy beliefs about their ability to teach physics online; and 4) mediated their anxiety about teaching online. In addition to revealing how faculty networks are localized and nationalized, the results can contribute to a greater understanding of how social networks influence instructional decision-making on different scales. If so, these results can inform future longitudinal studies of the persistence of educational transformations that occur during a crisis response, which may have generalizable application in understanding institutional change successes and failures. This RAPID award is made by the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE: EHR) program in the Division of Undergraduate Education (Directorate for Education and Human Resources).This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.