Dr. Nicola Sochacka
Presentation
How building connected learning communities around STEM research and practice helped the College of Engineering at UGA to better respond to the COVID-19 pandemic (and how they didn’t)
In this presentation, I will describe the principles that guided the establishment of the Engineering Education Transformations Institute (EETI) in the College of Engineering at the University of Georgia. As the Associate Director for Research Initiation in this Institute, I will focus on my efforts to support technical faculty in designing, getting funding for, and implementing educational research projects. I will also describe the faculty development and community building goals of EETI, and how these activities placed our college in a strong position to respond to the COVID-19 crisis.
In the second half of my talk, I will describe the research design and findings from an NSF-funded RAPID project (#2028452) that we received to investigate the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on student, staff, and faculty experiences in our College. I will detail the novel, mixed methods research methodology we adopted, called SenseMaker®, and how we are using real-time results to improve the experiences of all members of our community, including challenges we are coming up against. I will conclude with a discussion of how to translate research findings into impact at the local and national level.
Biography
Dr. Nicola Sochacka is the Associate Director for Research Initiation and Enablement in the Engineering Education Transformations Institute (EETI) in the College of Engineering at the University of Georgia. EETI’s mission is to transform engineering education through building social capital and shared capacity around the scholarship of teaching and learning in engineering. To achieve this mission, Dr. Sochacka works closely with faculty and students across her college to design and conduct research on cutting-edge approaches to educating the engineers of tomorrow. Dr. Sochacka’s multi-pronged research program is underpinned by a deep appreciation for diverse perspectives. She works closely with faculty and students within and outside of engineering to design innovative qualitative studies that embody a focus on in-process research ethics and bridging the research to practice gap. Her current interests include scaling her and her colleagues’ pedagogical developments on fostering empathy in engineering to other instructional settings; increasing the capacity of technical faculty in her college to engage with and conduct engineering education research; and piloting a novel methodological approach called SenseMaker® to investigate and improve student experiences of studying engineering at UGA.