Neuromatch Academy (NMA) support and evaluation

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Neuromatch Academy (NMA) is an online summer school that will train about 7,000 neuroscientists in modern data science and modeling methods. These methods are the basis of considerable endeavors in industry and academia, including neuroscience, robotics, and cognitive modeling. This project will support student participation and evaluation of the academy.A central component of the education of neuroscientists is intensive summer schools, which usually run for two weeks. They are usually expensive, require travel, and open only to small numbers of participants. NMA aims to provide a three-week summer school in an online fashion providing outstanding quality of education. It uses teaching-assistant-led small virtual tutorials (about 10 students each), globally broadcast question and answer sessions through crowdcast, professor-guided project work, and a host of further approaches to produce a deep learning experience. Focusing on a tight interactions with other participants, TAs, and professors give it a unique profile among approaches to online teaching. In a post-COVID world, innovating in online education is of crucial importance and NMA has both a strong mission of innovation and a strong evaluation plan to make sure it delivers on its promise. The evaluation approach will consists of questionnaires sent to participants, TAs, and lecturers as well as a causal analysis to see how NMA affects subsequent text use and collaboration patterns.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.