Background/Question/Methods
Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a framework within which your students could develop, with your help, and see the expectations of independent research experiences, complete assignments and organize their work products, and even share their thoughts and findings with peers and colleagues? This is the aim of a faculty project to develop Blackboard®-based course templates for managing and supervising undergraduate students in “special studies”  research courses and activities.  At many college campuses, these are courses and activities associated with faculty-student research mentoring in science disciplines, like ecology. This initiative is intended to preserve and even scale up these valuable opportunities for informal learning in lean budget environments by using technology to improve the (1) efficiency and effectiveness with which informal learning activities are monitored and supervised; (2) organization and accessibility of student work products and artifacts; and (3) validity and reliability of learning outcomes assessment and grading. In addition, these course templates will improve the means by which informal learning activities like independent research can be evaluated and generate elective credit for majors. Lastly, providing templates to faulty for supervising and assessing these valuable informal learning opportunities will address concerns expressed by accreditation agencies.

Results/Conclusions

A team of 9 faculty are working to develop this technology, modeling it with their own student researchers, and assessing its effectiveness for improving student learning, enhancing the ability of faculty to mentor more students, and supporting peer-peer and student-faculty collaboration. Initial working groups of faculty provided information about effectively preparing students for undergraduate research experiences, identifying the capacities students strive to achieve in these experiences, measuring the breadth of student learning and achievement, and examining what makes these experiences so successful in engaging and retaining students in STEM degree programs. This was used to build the prototype template that will be demonstrated and is being tested now. Results indicate how this framework can be used to improve scientific reasoning abilities, communication skills, and engagement of students, while faculty can gain increased efficiency and ability to guide and prepare more student researchers for real world experiences.