RAPID: Faculty Adaptability and Community Engagement when Teaching in a Crisis

新冠肺炎疫情令人担忧的蔓延已引发全国进入紧急状态。许多大学在2020年3月中旬宣布，所有在课堂上教授的课程将在本学期剩余的时间里在线授课。这一要求意味着教师别无选择，只能立即改变他们的教学做法。在全国范围内迅速改变教学实践的要求很少发生。在这种情况下，它可能标志着大学课程的教授方式和大学教职员工对教学的看法发生变化的关键时刻。众所周知，大学的教学实践，特别是技术领域的教学实践，在适应各种教育环境下的技术变化和对最佳做法的日益了解方面一直进展缓慢。例如，教育研究人员不再认为讲座对所有类型的学习都是最有帮助的。对新冠肺炎远程(在线)授课的回应正在展开，这为突破性研究提供了一个独特的一次性机会，以研究危机引发的教学变革如何影响教师的教学体验。快速反应基金将使教师能够实时记录在这场危机中的经验，并帮助解释在新冠肺炎活动期间产生的教师设计指导研究的结果。这项研究的结果将有助于未来努力建立教师的社区意识围绕教学。围绕教学建立更多的社区意识将通过改进教学实践而造福社会，这反过来又将提高学生的坚持性、学习和参与度。这样的改进最终可以使工程学毕业生做好更好的准备，以应对社会现在和未来面临的各种挑战。这个项目的总体目标是确定与典型教学情况下相比，在危机期间关于教职员工适应性和社区参与的认知和情感主题。为了实现这一目标，这项工作的目标是通过收集和分析通过调查和访谈获得的数据来跟踪教职员工在危机期间教学经验的变化。两个研究问题将指导该项目：1)在危机期间，工程学教职员工如何体验课程交付的突然变化(重点是认知、情感和社区参与)？2)这些体验在危机持续时间内如何变化？随着危机的进展，将使用混合收敛和顺序混合方法来跟踪教师的教学经验。数据收集将以认知和情绪的适应性框架维度为指导，并围绕社区参与收集更多数据。数据收集将包括每周简短的调查(n=75)和对工程学教师(n=10)和支持他们的工作人员(n=5)的三次半结构化现象学访谈(n=5)。这项工作将提供有关教师在面临以不同方式提供课程的迫切需求时的适应性和社区参与的基本知识，并可能有助于形成职业发展机会的设计，以促进采用基于研究的教学和教学技术。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The alarming spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has spurred a national emergency. Many universities announced in mid-March 2020 that all courses taught in classrooms will be delivered online for the remainder of the semester. This requirement means that faculty have no choice but to change their teaching practices immediately. The requirement to rapidly change teaching practices across the country has rarely occurred. In this instance, it may mark a critical time of change in how university courses are taught and how university faculty view teaching. University teaching practices, particularly in technical fields, have been notoriously slow to adapt to changes in technology and a growing understanding of best-practices under a variety of educational circumstances. For instance, lecture is no longer recognized by education researchers as the most helpful for all types of learning. The unfolding response to the COVID-19 mandate to teach remotely (online) provides a unique, one-time opportunity for ground-breaking research to study how crisis-induced changes to instruction influence faculty’s teaching experience. RAPID response funding will enable real-time documentation of the faculty experience during this crisis and help explain the results of studies of teacher-design instruction generated during the COVID-19 event. The results of this study will help future efforts to build faculty’s sense of community around teaching. Building a greater sense of community around teaching will benefit society by improving teaching practices which in turn will improve student persistence, learning, and engagement. Such improvements can ultimately lead to engineering graduates who are better prepared to tackle the diverse challenges that society faces now and into the future. The overall goal of this project is to identify cognitive and emotional themes concerning faculty and staff adaptability and community engagement during a crisis compared to those found under typical teaching circumstances. To accomplish this goal, the objective of this work is to track changes in the teaching experiences of faculty and staff during a crisis by collecting and analyzing data acquired through surveys and interviews. Two research questions will guide the project: 1) During a crisis, how do engineering faculty and staff experience a sudden change in course delivery (with a focus on cognition, emotions, and community engagement)? 2) How do these experiences vary throughout the duration of the crisis? A hybrid convergent and sequential mixed-methods approach will be used to track the teaching experiences of faculty as the crisis progresses. Data collection will be guided by the adaptability framework dimensions of cognition and emotions with additional data being collected around community engagement. Data collection will consist of brief weekly surveys (n=75) and three semi-structured phenomenographic interviews with engineering faculty (n=10) and the staff who support them (n=5) spread over the remainder of the semester. This work will contribute fundamental knowledge on faculty’s adaptability and community engagement in the face of an urgent need to deliver courses differently and could help shape the design of professional development opportunities that promote adoption of research-based pedagogies and instructional technologies.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.