Mentoring Undergraduate Researchers in the Era of COVID-19

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Continuing to mentor undergraduate researchers during the current pandemic may not be a difficult decision for faculty in some disciplines. In other disciplines, particularly those that rely heavily on face-to-face interactions (e.g. social sciences, lab sciences), taking on an undergraduate student as yet another lab member, or devising a project that does not require close contacts with other people may be next to impossible.

If you are still wondering why you should consider mentoring undergraduate researchers or are not sure how to help guide undergraduate students through their research endeavors, here is an online Mentoring Undergraduate Research Handbook that was developed by faculty at Georgia College and State University. Although somewhat specific for faculty in liberal arts, the main points made in the book apply to all of us.

 

Additional Mentoring Resources

• Salient Practices of Undergraduate Research Mentors
• Self-paced Online Mentor Training
• Mentoring Undergraduate Research Virtually; from UT Knoxville
• Mentoring Students Virtually; from Cornell University

 

Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) Resources for Virtual Mentoring

• Virtual Undergraduate Research in Action -Highlights and How-Tos; recorded webinar in which CUR members discuss their experience in guiding undergraduate research virtually.
• CUR Covid-19 Forum: Virtual Mentoring; recorded discussion of questions related to virtual mentoring such as communication, collaboration, equity and inclusion, constraints, etc.

 

CUR Resources for Virtual Research Programs and Conferences

• CUR Covid-19 Forum: Virtual Conferences; recorded discussion of virtual conferences (e.g. logistics of organizing; ways to create high-quality value for students; strategies to enhance opportunities for inclusion and equity; summer research programs).
• CUR COVID-19 Forum: Summer Programming and Student Employment; recorded discussion of reasons for supporting, advocating, and/or maintaining a summer research program; types of possible structures (face-to-face, hybrid, virtual) and what these would look like; potential timelines; planning issues; ways to create and sustain community and prevent student and faculty burnout in a virtual program.
• CUR Covid-19 Forum: Virtual Research, Creative, & Scholarly - Part 1
• CUR Covid-19 Forum: Virtual Research, Creative, & Scholarly - Part 2; recorded discussion (in two parts) of conditions for continuing virtual undergraduate research; when to stop, suspend or delay; how to help students reach out to faculty; how to promote and manage online research collaborations with students; how to adjust projects to be productive in a virtual environment; how to establish realistic timelines; if face-to-face is allowed and required, how to ensure safe protocols.

 

Virtual Research Projects, Initiatives, Open Datasets, Resources

To identify or devise undergraduate research projects that are compatible with COVID-19 safety measures and minimize face-to-face contact, the following list contains virtual research projects/initiatives in which Southern Miss undergraduate students might be able to participate and datasets to which they have access. Many projects will need to be adapted and/or expanded to be suitable for upper-level college student and/or Honors thesis research. Please email Sabine.HeinhorstFREEMississippi if you have additional suggestions that can be added to the list.

 

Arts

• Zooniverse Projects in the Arts
• Mounting and Curating a Digital Exhibition

 

Humanities

• Digital Humanities Projects at Southern Miss
• Zooniverse History Projects
• Zooniverse Language Projects
• Zooniverse Literature Projects
• Teaching Undergraduates with Archives open access book
• CUR Remote Undergraduate Research Resources; links to a variety of datasets, Digital Humanities projects, Oral History projects, transcription projects, case studies

 

Social Sciences

• Zooniverse Social Science Projects
• Evaluating Science in the News
• Federal Reserve Economic Data
• National Health and Aging Trends Study Datasets; requires login to access public use data files
• Native Case Studies; case studies of relevance to Native Americans; listed alphabetically, and by theme, discipline, tribe
• Case Studies; collection of University of Washington Evans School of Public Policy and Governance; subjects range from advocacy and lobbying to urban planning; requires registration as a member to search cases and see case abstracts; requires $100 annual subscription to access case details and use for teaching purposes

 

Business

• Framing the Undergraduate Research Experience: Discovery Involvement in Retailing Undergraduate Education article
• Research Projects with Federal Reserve Economic Data book; downloadable as EPUB Version
• Federal Reserve Economic Data
• S. Government Datasets

 

Nursing and Public Health

• Kent State University Public Health and Nursing Datasets and Resources
• Public Health-related Government Datasets and Resources
• Centers for Disease Control Public Health Image Library

 

STEM

• Zooniverse Biology Projects
• Zooniverse Climate Projects
• Zooniverse Medicine-related Projects
• Zooniverse Nature Projects
• Zooniverse Physics Projects
• Zooniverse Astronomy Projects
• Scistarter Citizen Science Projects
• iNaturalist Projects
• Datanuggest Projects; need to be adapted to college level
• Citizen Science Projects at North Carolina State University
• Microbial Gene/Genome Annotation Platform for Undergraduates: GENI-ACT
• Biomedical Citizen Science Hub
• Computational and Systems Biology Challenges
• StarGeo RNA Expression Data Analysis
• Various Bioinformatics Projects
• Projects Related to Adaptation of Debian Operating System
• Open Bioinformatic Foundation Projects
• The Paleobiology Database , see also Fossilworks
• Using Virtual Landscapes for Remote Teaching Webinar
• Using GigaPan for Remote Teaching Webinar
• Using Google Earth for Remote Teaching Webinar
• Examples of Remote Instrumentation Use; examples of undergraduate research enabled by remote access to electron microscopes; from University of South Florida
• Cell Science Datasets, Analysis Tools and Information about Human Cells from The Allen Institute for Cell Science Research
• Molecular Biology Case Studies; manuals include Build Your Own Case Study instructions
• Environmental Science Datasets; from Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE)
• S. Geological Survey Datasets and citizen science projects for various STEM disciplines
• National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics Datasets
• Sloan Digital Sky Survey SciServer Astronomy Research Projects
• Network of Conservation Educators and Practitioners Resources; datasets, simulations, case studies
• Gendered Innovations in Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment; Stanford University case studies to illustrate how sex and gender analysis leads to innovation
• Queensland University of Technology Library datasets and repositories;
• Nasa Space Science Data Archive; space science mission data archive
• S. Department of Energy Data Explorer; DOE projects, collections, datasets
• DataOne Data Catalog; NSF-funded multi-organization collaboration; very large number of STEM datasets
• EPA Toxic Release Inventory Program Data
• Open Access Directory List of Repositories and Databases; ordered alphabetically by STEM discipline
• Tiny Earth Digital Microbiology Labs, Activities and Resources; from University of Wisconsin; activities related to antibiotic production, novel antibiotic discovery in soil through studentsourcing

 

Interdisciplinary/Multidisciplinary

• The Wild Sourdough Project; see also: Sourdough Podcast, The Great Sourdough Mystery, and The Sourdough Microbiome
• Guide to Virtual Museum Resources, E-Learning, and Online Collections
• Doing Fieldwork in a Pandemic
• European Union List of Datascience Projects; several U.S. projects are listed that can be performed at home; most projects are suitable for multiple disciplines
• S. Government Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing Projects
• CUR Remote Undergraduate Research Resources; links to a variety of datasets, Digital Humanities, Oral History, transcription projects, case studies
• S. Census Bureau Datasets
• National Health and Aging Trends Study Datasets; requires login to access public use data files
• S. Government Datasets
• Open Science Framework Datasets, materials and collaboration opportunities
• National Center for Case Studies; cases in broad range of STEM areas, communication science, linguistics, etc.; teaching notes and answer keys are password-protected and require account registration and subscription
• Gendered Innovations in Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment; Stanford University case studies to illustrate how sex and gender analysis leads to innovation
• United Nations Datasets
• University of Bath Datasets; interdisciplinary and discipline-specific search possibilities; datasets range from code-based data to social sciences data and STEM data
• Case Studies; collection of University of Washington Evans School of Public Policy and Governance; subjects range from advocacy and lobbying to urban planning; requires registration as a member to search cases and see case abstracts; requires $100 annual subscription to access case details and use for teaching purposes