ON DEMAND: Flipping a Student Research Course: Lessons Learned During the First Run (5 mins)

Abstract

UNIV 495 is required for students funded by OSCAR’s Undergraduate Research Scholars Program (URSP) during the school year. The course is designed to cover introductory level material about research ethics, poster writing, abstract writing, and to provide opportunities for students to share their results and to interact with other student researchers, forming a community of scholars. Feedback from the students suggests that they find the community building aspect of the course to be valuable, but that the course itself is not as relevant to their individual projects as they would like and that they could use the time to actually work on their projects. In order to revise UNIV 495 so that it is more interactive and more obviously related to the students’ own projects, I attended the Course Redesign Academy in January 2020 with the goal of flipping at least part of UNIV 495. I am teaching the partially flipped version of UNIV 495 for the first time in spring 2020. The revised course will be described and student feedback will be discussed in the context of the new course design. Given the changes due to COVID-19, the presentation will also discuss changes made when moving the course on line.