Adapting to a Covid/Post-Covid World: Evaluation of virtual learning environments.

Abstract:

In case you haven’t noticed, we have entered into a new era of education and life on Earth in general. While we will likely develop a vaccine to the Covid-19 virus, it won’t be the last pandemic and I believe this has changed the face of education. The new model of social distancing and virtual everything has moved into education and at the time of writing this we have numerous school districts in the US trying to develop a plan for the 2020-2021 school year. Inevitably, these plans will involve less student-student and student-teacher physical contact and to do so, they must leverage technology. Already we see virtual graduations, face-to-face programs in libraries and science centers going online, and NASA programs re-imagined to offer students experience at a distance. These new modalities of learning and experience present a new challenge for evaluation. As education changes and learners adapt, so too must we adapt the way we evaluate these experiences. This presentation explores the potential of evaluation of virtual learning experiences while grounding these ideas in an actual experience that occurred during the summer of 2020, sponsored by the education group at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. The program, Highschool Aerospace Scholars (HAS) has historically utilized a highly successful blended program incorporating an extensive online learning experience during the school year followed by a down select process to offer about a third of students a week-long onsite experience. The onsite experience challenges student teams to successfully complete a Mars-based mission and has utilized traditional pre and post surveys along with small group student focus groups to gather formative and summative feedback about the experience. Engaging students online means offering them choices in how they interact and share. Adapting this program into a HAS virtual experience presented a number of difficult challenges including how to continue to gather data on the impacts of the experience on the students. Engaging students online means offering them choices in how they interact, share, and produce. Evaluating such a diverse pallet of student artifacts poses unique challenges in measuring program impact and has yielded critical insights into future work.