RCN-UBE Incubator: U2-SAFE: Unifying Undergraduate Student Access to Field Experiences using The Virtual Field Platform

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This project will create a new network composed of staff at field stations and marine labs combined with faculty and students at community colleges, tribal colleges, professional student organizations, and minority serving institutions, and educators with video content creators. This research coordination network incubator will take the virtual learning products developed for the Virtual Field platform (thevirtualfield.org) in response to COVID-19 travel restrictions and improve and refine them with feedback from students. Only a small proportion of the hundreds of thousands of college students can be hosted at natural areas to conduct research and take classes. This project brings underwater coastal marine and estuarine communities, vast grasslands, alpine forests, and rocky foothills into the classroom with both recorded and live instruction and real scientists and graduate students as role models, enabling a broader range of college students to experience, observe, catalog, and explore the natural world. Place-based learning experiences have a profound effect on undergraduate students, creating deeper connections with the concepts studied, a long-term engagement in sciences, and exposure to developing STEM careers unfamiliar to these audiences.With a global distribution of 1268 terrestrial, coastal, and marine stations, over 75% affiliated with universities, Field Stations and Marine Labs (FSMLs) are in a unique position to respond to the needs of the next generation of undergraduate biology students. Unfortunately, many students are unable to visit these often-remote locations where hands-on research can be conducted. In addition, it can be extremely difficult to conduct cross-site comparative research in locations that are far apart. This project will take the videos and curriculum created previously, train FSML staff and associated faculty to develop additional material and hone the results with direct feedback from faculty and students to create adaptive modules for a variety of disciplines from geology to hydrology to biology.This project is funded by the Directorate for Biological Sciences, Division of Biological Infrastructure, as part of efforts to address the challenges posed in Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action (http://visionandchange/finalreport/).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.