Does the COVID-19 Pandemic Affect Excellence in Academic Research? a Study of Science and Engineering Faculty Members in China.

Research excellence is one of the key missions of universities and an important engine for socio-economic development. However, the outbreak of COVID-19 has affected academic research in many ways. This study examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the research performance of science and engineering faculty members in China's top research universities. It is found that the pandemic caused a decline in the numbers and quality of published articles, and the effects persisted over time. The negative effect of the pandemic on research excellence was more pronounced in the older faculty groups and departments of science. In addition, the pandemic has harmed international research collaborations among academics, which is likely to obstruct research excellence in the long run. In the end, this paper proposes several policy recommendations to reinvigorate universities' capacity for research innovation in the post-pandemic era.

Strengthening the Bridge between Financial Aid and Study Abroad

This article features a case study from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), a large, public, urban, research university, in which challenges in administering financial aid for study abroad early in the COVID-19 pandemic led the Education Abroad and Student Financial Services teams to revisit practices and protocols. This article describes compliance concerns, student service, administrative optimization, and interdepartmental relationships. The outcomes emphasize the importance of a strong, sustained partnership between university study abroad and financial aid offices, provide a framework for administrative structures in managing financial aid for study abroad programs, and highlight strategies to provide equitable study abroad opportunities.

Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning in a Language and Intercultural Communication Program during the "New Normal" in Thai Higher Education

This paper aims to explore how and the extent to which faculty staff and postgraduate students perceived and responded to the transformation from face-to-face to emergency remote teaching and learning during the "new normal" circumstances in higher education due to the unprecedented impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic globally. This case study focused on a group of ten faculty staff and fourteen postgraduate students in a Master of Arts Program in Language and Intercultural Communication at a research-based university in Thailand. Drawing upon the data from the open-ended questionnaire and semi-structured interviews conducted virtually, the findings, informed by Akabana et al.'s (2021) emergency remote teaching (ERT), revealed four key components, including faculty staff, postgraduate students, instructional practices, and institutional support. Faculty staff put efforts into adapting themselves to the "new normal" teaching environment without hesitation to upskill themselves in educational technology in order to meet the postgraduate students' learning needs. Although these four components of ERT are interlinked and overlapped with one another, they play a crucial role not only in postgraduate studies, but also research in the fields of language and intercultural communication studies. The "next normal" future for higher education in a post-pandemic era is to consider the positive solutions of the "new normal" experience during the emergency response period as a basis for reimagining and redesigning curriculum and instructional practices, as well as institutional support in terms of academic, social, and psychological dimensions for faculty staff and students. This study benefits curriculum designers, policymakers, teacher educators, and educational researchers to navigate the current crisis and prepare for the "next normal" higher education at national and global levels in the post-pandemic future.

University and Industry Collaboration in the Era of Smart Specialisation: Empirical Research on Sustainable Knowledge Transfer

The coronavirus disease-19 pandemic has forced universities worldwide to develop stronger crisis responses in order to support the surrounding communities more effectively. These solutions are based on collaborations between higher education institutions and industries that facilitate knowledge co-creation. Historically, universities have been knowledge-intensive institutions capable of producing additional findings through research. Currently, these organisations' most important contributions to national economies are related to universities' development of fresh knowledge and technical expertise. In parallel, all industries' business environments have become extremely dynamic, which requires companies to focus on new solutions, rapid development and cost efficiency. To cope with these pressures, industries have been forced to search for new partners, so university-industry collaboration (UIC) has become a key resource for managers seeking to promote innovation and technological development. This study explored the relationship between research and innovation based on smart specialisation strategies and UIC, including the roles of university-industry (U-I) joint research and academics' motivations for interacting with industries. Based on data collected from 841 Portuguese and Spanish researchers, the results reveal that smart specialisation policies' effects on UIC are driven by U-I joint research development and university faculty members' motivations for co-operating with industry professionals. The findings indicate that U-I research activities and universities' incentives to collaborate with industries fully convert smart specialisation strategies' effects into higher levels of U-I knowledge transfer. © 2022, Academic Conferences and Publishing International Limited. All rights reserved.

Creating a collaborative cross-institutional culture to support STEM women of color and women with family responsibilities at four midwestern research institutions

NSF ADVANCE has been instrumental in supporting institutional practices leading to the increased representation of women in STEM. However, research suggests institutional culture and practices evolve slowly, and much progress remains to create a collaborative and supportive work environment where women scientists, mathematicians, and engineers can thrive, particularly those with intersectional identities, including women of color and women with caregiving responsibilities. A partnership of four midwestern research universities joined together in late 2019 to adapt, design, implement, and assess the impact of a coordinated suite of programs intended to enhance the career success of women and underrepresented STEM faculty. The programs promote mentoring, male advocacy, and informed and intentional leadership as integral to campus culture, and foster community and cross-institutional data-based collaboration. This paper summarizes the programs designed and implemented to improve retention and job satisfaction of women in STEM fields with a focus on the intersectionalities of women of color and women with family responsibilities, including navigating the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, by creating support networks for these faculty. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.

Student Perceptions of the Complete Online Transition of Two CS Courses in Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

In this evidence-based practice paper, we present results from surveys of students in two CS courses offered in Spring 2020 at Virginia Tech, a large, public research university: a programming-intensive CS2-level course and an upper division theory course, Formal Languages and Automata. Spring 2020 was extraordinary as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Universities in the US and across the globe switched to a complete online delivery mode instead of the traditional face-to-face mode. This was challenging to both educators and students, as the transition took place on short notice in the middle of the Spring 2020 semester. We were interested to know those course components students perceived as most beneficial to their learning, before and then after the online transition, and their mode preferences for each regarding online vs. Face-to-Face. By comparing student reactions across courses, we gain insights on which components are easily adapted to online delivery, and which require further innovation. COVID was unfortunate, but gave a rare opportunity to compare students' reflections on F2F instruction with online instructional materials for half of a semester vs. entirely online delivery of the same course during the second half. Although the instruction provided during the second half of the semester may not be the same as what would have been provided had the course been designed as a fully online course from the beginning, it did provide the opportunity for us to acquire insights for future instruction. Results indicated that some course components were perceived to be more useful either before or after the transition, and preferences were not the same for the two courses. Furthermore, to determine what course components need further improvement before transitioning to fully online mode, we computed a logistic regression model. Results indicated that for each course, different course components both before and after the transition significantly affected students' preference of course modality. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021

Strategies to Address Changes in Social Supports during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The pandemic of COVID-19 is disrupting engineering education globally, at all levels of education. While distance education is nothing new, the pandemic of COVID-19 forced instructors to rapidly move their courses online whether or not they had ever received prior training in online education. In particular, there is very little literature to guide instructors in supporting students in online engineering design or project-based courses. The purpose of this research is to examine engineering students' report of social support in their project and design-based courses at a large research university during the move to online instruction due to COVID-19 in the Spring 2020 semester and to provide recommendations for instructors teaching these types of courses online in the future. Our study is framed by social constructivism and social capital theory. We surveyed undergraduate engineering and engineering technology students (n=235) across undergraduate levels during the final week of the Spring 2019 semester. Survey questions included open-ended prompts about social supports and overall experience with the transition to online learning as well as name and resource generator questions focused on specific people and types of interactions that changed during the pandemic. We used qualitative content analysis of the open-ended responses along with comparisons of the name and resource generator to develop recommendations for instructors. Recommendations to increase students' social supports include: facilitating informal conversations between students and between students and the instructional team, grouping students located in the same time zones in teams, facilitating co-working sessions for students, establishing weekly structure, and utilizing some synchronous components (e.g., virtual office hours). © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021

Investigation of Technology-based Student Interaction for Social Learning in Online Courses

This work in progress research paper studied the use of technologies, platforms, and methods for interactions during the course and outside the course by the engineering students enrolled in the summer 2020 semester at a large Southwestern public research university. In March of 2020, this university migrated away from face-to-face teaching, like other institutions, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This migration resulted in the development of synchronous (remote) and asynchronous (fully online) courses that were offered to students through the remaining Spring and also the Summer semester of 2020. Previous studies have shown that student and faculty interaction along with student-student interaction have a net positive effect on student retention and learning. This study was designed to identify the tools-technology or platforms-and methods used for interaction in the summer 2020 courses. All students enrolled in engineering courses in summer 2020 were invited to take part in the survey. However, 315 students started the survey and only 93 respondents completed the survey fully. While there are useful data from the entire starter group, this study looked at the data generated by the 93 respondents who completed the survey. The student responses indicate that most faculty, whether teaching synchronously or asynchronously, supplemented their courses with some technology or platform that facilitated live interactions (Zoom, Google Meet, Blackboard Collaborate, Microsoft Teams). Even though the students were moderately satisfied with the technology/platforms and methods that were used, they showed a higher degree of satisfaction for courses that used active learning and other methods for student engagement. For social learning, the students used GroupMe, text messaging, or Zoom calls to interact with each other outside of class. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021

Welcoming and Building Community for Graduate Students through Remote Tech Environments

Creating community among new graduate students in a COVID world prompted the development of a two-week virtual orientation program for engineering and applied sciences graduate students at a research university. Despite the complexity of multiple time zones, technology challenges, and the virtual space, the program sought to accomplish three goals: (1) community building among students;(2) intellectual engagement with faculty in the home departments;and (3) career development as a foundation for their overall graduate school experience. Participants (N=350 MS or PhD students) were introduced to support services (e.g., health and counseling, ombuds) and student organizations, attended workshops on digital literacy and technology tools, gained perspective from alumni and industry panels, and began their personal career development plan. Evaluations were highly positive, with means of 3.5 - 4.4 on a 5.0 scale, with 5 being very satisfied. Additionally, 98 first-year PhD students were also enrolled in a rigorous and comprehensive online asynchronous TA training, with high satisfaction scores from those who completed the training. While virtual delivery may have limitations, this program has clearly demonstrated that a pre-arrival program can add value to the graduate student on-boarding process and improve the welcome culture at educational institutions. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021

Examining Faculty Barriers and Challenges in Adopting Ethical Pedagogies in Online Environments

Our study examines the challenges and barriers that faculty experience during a major undergraduate curriculum shift at a US research university. As a part of the revised curriculum, faculty are required to include ethical reasoning and/or global awareness as a portion of their program. However, a majority of the faculty involved in the program were not primarily trained in ethics or global education. As a result, many faced institutional barriers and challenges when attempting to incorporate practices and pedagogies into their classroom. With the outbreak of COVID-19 in the past year, students and faculty have had to adapt to online teaching formats which present an additional set of difficulties for faculty in developing ethics and global education pedagogies. To better understand the barriers that faculty are facing, we conducted semi-structured interviews with around 20 faculty across the university. The interviews included discussions of the pedagogy's faculty used within their newly designed courses, who faculty interacted with and how they gained the ethical and intercultural competencies, and the challenges faculty faced in redesigning the courses. Preliminary results have found that some of the more common challenges that faculty are facing is the lack of institutional guidance and resources, the lack of support from other faculty, and a lack of time to implement the required changes. Moving forward, we plan to expand this study to reinterview faculty as the program progresses and faculty learn more about how to teach in online settings. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021

Supporting Postsecondary Faculty Transition to Rapid Online Teaching & Learning

North Carolina postsecondary faculty, similar to faculty around the world, who prepared their spring 2020 semester courses for face-to-face delivery, were required to quickly transition to Rapid Online Teaching and Learning (ROTL). This transition was expected within a short time frame, often one to two weeks, and for many faculty members, both time and resources to incorporate design practices found in high-quality online courses were limited. Faculty members demonstrated great determination and grit as they shifted to remote teaching and learning with a focus on the student success, even while feeling overwhelmed and disrupted themselves. Researchers examined two faculty-support programs designed to assist with the shift to online teaching during the COVID-19 crisis: one at a research-intensive, land-grant university and another for faculty at 58 community colleges, some of whom are enrolled in a CPED Ed.D. program. Lessons learned and thoughts on planning for future semesters are examined.

Quantifying the publication preferences of leading research universities.

Research universities have a strong devotion and advocacy for research in their core academic mission. This is why they are widely recognized for their excellence in research which make them take the most renowned positions in the different worldwide university leagues. In order to examine the uniqueness of this group of universities we analyze the scientific production of a sample of them in a 5 year period of time. On the one hand, we analyze their preferences in research measured with the relative percentage of publications in the different subject areas, and on the other hand, we calculate the similarity between them in research preferences. In order to select a set of research universities, we studied the leading university rankings of Shanghai, QS, Leiden, and Times Higher Education (THE). Although the four rankings own well established and developed methodologies and hold great prestige, we choose to use THE because data were readily available for doing the study we had in mind. Having done that, we selected the twenty academic institutions ranked with the highest score in the last edition of THE World University Rankings 2020 and to contrast their impact, we also, we compared them with the twenty institutions with the lowest score in this ranking. At the same time, we extracted publication data from Scopus database for each university and we applied bibliometrics indicators from Elsevier's SciVal. We applied the statistical techniques cosine similarity and agglomerative hierarchical clustering analysis to examine and compare affinities in research preferences among them. Moreover, a cluster analysis through VOSviewer was done to classify the total scientific production in the four major fields (health sciences, physical sciences, life sciences and social sciences). As expected, the results showed that top universities have strong research profiles, becoming the leaders in the world in those areas and cosine similarity pointed out that some are more affine among them than others. The results provide clues for enhancing existing collaboration, defining and re-directing lines of research, and seeking for new partnerships to face the current pandemic to find was to tackle down the covid-19 outbreak.