2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Promoting undergraduate students’ persistence in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields is critical for meeting national calls to strengthen the future STEM workforce. National data has shown that of all students who enter a STEM degree program, less than 40% earn a STEM degree within six years. Calls have been made to produce an additional one million STEM professionals to maintain the countries’ relevance in these fields, thus an annual increase in the number of students who graduate with a STEM degree is required to meet this demand. These calls also emphasize the need to increase graduation rates for students belonging to groups that are underrepresented in STEM, as they currently leave STEM majors at higher rates than their represented peers. Undergraduate research experiences are frequently implicated as a means for increasing interest in STEM fields and STEM graduate programs, and are correlated to students persisting to graduation. While research experiences can positively influence persistence in STEM fields, there are inequities in who gets to participate in these experiences. The limited number of undergraduate research opportunities available and the structure of the selection process can contribute to existing inequities.
In Spring 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced universities to quickly move to remote instruction. In response, we created the altREU program, a fully online research experience for undergraduate students to continue to provide students with opportunities to conduct meaningful research and develop critical skills during this time.
Here we describe the ‘alternative’ Research Experience for Undergraduates (altREU) model and report on student experiences in this online research program. In 2020, sixteen students from US institutions participated in the program. The altREU program was designed to attract research-interested students and to broaden participation in undergraduate research. To understand the student’s experiences, we collected observations and conducted exit interviews. Twelve of the sixteen students successfully completed the altREU program. Overall, the participants expressed that the online nature of the altREU program did not, to their knowledge, impact their ability to successfully conduct research. Our findings suggest that online research programs may provide a comparable experience to in-person research programs, with the added benefit of potentially reducing barriers that students may face to accessing in-person research opportunities. This paper summarizes the design of the program and gives suggestions for fully online research participation based on program assessment and student feedback. We believe that the altREU model can be relatively easily replicated across institutions.