Boosting the Signal: A Digital Ecosystem for Authentic Research (DEAR)

The “Boosting the Signal”team supported community college student research in a new remote learning environment. Through generation of dynamic webinars & virtual spaces, novel strategies for recruiting faculty mentors, and support from peer mentors, we worked to create a virtual ecosystem forresearch that would inform practices in these areas for Portland Community College and other similar institutions in the Oregon Space Grant Consortium.We explored expanding a variety of mechanisms for engaging students and faculty in research, including remote activities in the Equity in STEMClub, regular Zoom “open labs”for research support, facilitating independent study “research”courses, and the use of virtual platforms like the STEM Center website, Instagram, and Discord for community-building/networking. Our primarygoals were to engage students in hands-on learning despite the virtual settings(emphasizing content aligned with NASA’s Science Mission Directorate), engage STEM faculty as research mentors, and create materialsand a sustainable platform for virtual support that could be disseminated for use in other OSGC affiliate institutions. Through this work in developing multiple entry points to research (and a culminating #mySTEMjourney campaign to gather feedback about awarenessand interest in undergraduate research), we found that many students and faculty were unaware of opportunities or felt a variety of barriers to engaging. Moving forward, areas our team intends to develop further include an expanded presence in virtual platforms such as Discord to buildasynchronous opportunities for resource-sharing, a website addressing misconceptions about undergraduate research, and mechanisms for faculty to receive mentorship training.