| NSF Org: |
OAC Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) |
| Recipient: |
|
| Initial Amendment Date: | July 2, 2018 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | July 2, 2018 |
| Award Number: | 1829718 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Alan Sussman
OAC Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) CSE Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering |
| Start Date: | August 1, 2018 |
| End Date: | July 31, 2021 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $40,515.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $40,515.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
|
| History of Investigator: |
|
| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
101 COMMONWEALTH AVE AMHERST MA US 01003-9252 (413)545-0698 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
|
| Primary Place of Performance: |
MA US 01035-9450 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
|
| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
|
| Parent UEI: |
|
| NSF Program(s): | CyberTraining - Training-based |
| Primary Program Source: |
|
| Program Reference Code(s): |
|
| Program Element Code(s): |
|
| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.070 |
ABSTRACT
Cyberinfrastructure empowers the growing knowledge economy in the United States, and plays a role in defense, homeland security, agriculture, and commerce by providing powerful computational resources to support data analytics and modeling. However, many scientific disciplines currently face the question of how to seamlessly integrate cyberinfrastructure training in their educational programs. Students and researchers in these disciplines thus often lack experience in using the most advanced tools and techniques to grapple with the crucial global challenges they are being trained to investigate. This project addresses this challenging problem by creating a clear curriculum model for educators - an Hour of Cyberinfrastructure (Hour of CI) - that integrates cyberinfrastructure skill building into domain-specific curriculum, with a clear learning goal for students: try cyberinfrastructure for one hour. Geospatially-based lessons in this project draw on real-world problems from social sciences, environmental sciences, and geosciences to make them accessible and meaningful to students in many scientific disciplines. Hour of CI lessons are available via an easy-to-use science gateway for broad-scale educational use. The project broadens access and enable community adoption of cyberinfrastructure for the nation's future scientific research workforce thus serving the national interest, as stated by NSF's mission: to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity and welfare; and secure the national defense.
The Hour of CI project is a nationwide campaign introducing hundreds of diverse undergraduate and graduate students to cyberinfrastructure. Modeled on the "Hour of Code, the Hour of CI project is building a sustainable learning community and scalable training environment to train almost two hundred educators and over five hundred graduate and undergraduate students at institutions ranging from R1 universities to two-year teaching colleges in the short-term and potentially thousands more in the long-term. The project is developing 17 interactive, online lessons for students and creating supplementary curriculum materials for instructors. Hour of CI lessons are being developed using a learning outcome centered Backward Design Process in which students are exposed to cyberinfrastructure, establish conceptual foundations, and build a core set of skills to help them achieve Cyber Literacy for Geographic Information Science, which requires learners to be knowledgeable in eight core areas: cyberinfrastructure, parallel computing, big data, computational thinking, interdisciplinary communication, spatial thinking, geospatial data, and spatial modeling and analytics. The project lowers the barrier to entry for educators and students by building on a science gateway called the GISandbox to provide a cyberinfrastructure-enabled training environment accessible through a web browser for all Hour of CI lessons. The sustainable learning community built during the course of this project will continue to expand adoption of the Hour of CI beyond the project period.
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.
PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
This project provides undergraduate and graduate student learners with foundational knowledge and skills in the areas of cyberinfrastructure and geographic information science (GIScience) in the form of cyber literacy for GIScience. On our website, www.hourofci.org, and using the production-level Hour of CI environment we created, we deployed a Gateway Lesson and 4 of the 8 planned Beginner Lessons. Unfortunately, given problems keeping our outside collaborators engaged in our project during COVID disruptions, lesson development, review, and revision took up a significantly larger than anticipated amount of time for project team members which led to a reduction in our ability to complete the full set of Beginner Lessons by the end of the project period. However, while this collaborative grant has ended, given that the main grant continues under a no cost extension, we anticipate being able to achieve delivery of all 17 of the originally planned lessons.
Even given the delayed delivery of lessons, our pilot generated over 200 active user accounts and 181 responses to our post-lesson learner survey with hundreds more inactive accounts that may be used in fall 2021 (piloting for several instructors was disrupted and/or delayed due to the pandemic). Despite the disruptions, we reached approximately 40% of our target of 500 diverse learners in our pilot program while we were understaffed and academic colleagues were otherwise overwhelmed.
To enable long-term sustainability of our project outcomes, we developed and released our “Lesson Development Guidelines” manual on our website. This document incorporates our guiding strategies, best practices, and adopted lesson patterns into a framework for Hour of CI lesson development, which will guide the immediate development of our eight Intermediate Lessons and make it possible for others to add additional lessons in the future.
Additionally, we created a production-level Hour of CI environment based on the GISandbox science gateway that is openly available via GitHub. This was tested during our pilot program. Using our system guides and examples, others will be able to implement a similar environment on their own systems.
Our planned outreach to the community through workshops and presentations was mostly curtailed. However, we were able to reach small numbers of enthusiastic potential users through two brief webinars and intend to reach many more in the coming year. We created a community mailing list with almost 100 instructors and directly engaged several instructor piloters and their learners to begin building a sustainable community of practice beyond the project period.
COVID-related disruptions caused significant problems and delays for the project. Frequent interruptions and additional administrative/teaching burdens for all PIs, project members, and students led to project delays. Therefore, while the roll out of all originally proposed lessons and outreach to the broader community did not happen within the funding period of our original collaborative grants, we have extended the project effort under our main grant for an additional year. Our revised project plan extends our first pilot into Fall 2021 to provide additional flexibility given disrupted instruction in Spring 21. While our original lesson development process expected all Beginner lessons to be developed concurrently, with developers working together as a cohort, COVID disruptions made it essential for our development schedule to become open and flexible. Thus, development of the Intermediate Lessons will progress asynchronously as developers are available.
Last Modified: 09/01/2021
Modified by: Forrest Bowlick
Please report errors in award information by writing to: awardsearch@nsf.gov.
