Here is the voicethread link for my project pitch.

https://voicethread.com/share/13979888/

Jessica Elena Brodsky and Elizabeth Sergile

Instructions

---

For this semester-long project, you will be asked to write a proposal for research project in which you will analyze data from the U.S. Census to answer a question of your choosing.  You will work together with a small group and coordinate via Microsoft Teams to complete this project. Beginning of the Semester: Preliminary Analyses

1. Start by learning about the United States Census: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Census
2. To create your group for this project, you will rank your top five regions of the United States. I will use this information to group students based on shared regions of interest. 
3. Once groups are formed, you will be provided with the Census data file for 2010.
4. You will be asked to conduct preliminary analyses on your region’s Census data by providing descriptive statistics about your region (descriptive = describing). This will also help you get to know what data is collected by the Census.

East North Central Illinois (IL) Indiana (IN) Michigan (MI) Ohio (OH) Wisconsin (WI)	East South Central Alabama (AL) Kentucky (KY) Mississippi (MS) Tennessee (TN)	Middle Atlantic New Jersey (NJ) New York (NY) Pennsylvania (PA)	Mountain Arizona (AZ) Colorado (CO) Idaho (ID) Montana (MT) New Mexico (NM) Nevada (NV) Utah (UT) Wyoming (WY)	New England Connecticut (CT) Maine (ME) Massachusetts (MA) New Hampshire (NH) Rhode Island (RI) Vermont (VT)
Pacific California (CA) Oregon (OR) Washington (WA)	South Atlantic Delaware (DE) Florida (FL) Georgia (GA) Maryland (MD) North Carolina (NC) South Carolina (SC) Virginia (VA) West Virginia (WV)	West North Central Iowa (IA) Kansas (KS) Minnesota (MN) Missouri (MO) Nebraska (NE) North Dakota (ND) South Dakota (SD)	West South Central Arkansas (AR) Louisiana (LA) Oklahoma (OK) Texas (TX)	Click here to make your selections.

Middle of the Semester: Identifying Your Research Question

1. Now that you are familiar with types of Census data collected and your region, you will identify a research question that you can answer using Census data for your region. To help you identify your research question, first think about the target audience for your proposal – this it the group of people that would be interested in some of the data collected by the Census. Then , think about what research questions that group of people would be interested in answering. Make sure that you can justify why this research question is of interest to your target audience.
2. To demonstrate that it is feasible to answer your research question using the Census data, identify the specific variables that you will need to extract from the Census data for your analyses.
3. With your group, complete Module A5 of the Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap to help your group determine how you will organize and document your project. This is a great opportunity to get familiar with Microsoft Teams and determine which features of this tool you will use for managing the different parts of your project. 
4. In class, each group will be asked to briefly present your research question, variables of interest, and project documentation plan to the class. You will have the opportunity to revise these three components based on feedback from me and your peers before submitting this part of the assignment.

End of the Semester: Addressing Your Research Question

1. Now it’s time to write your proposal. In this proposal, you should:
   1. Provide descriptives of your region using Census data from your region
   2. Describe your target audience
   3. Provide your research question
   4. Explain why this question would be of interest to your target audience
   5. Identify variables of interest
   6. Identify descriptive and inferential tests that you will conduct and explain why they are appropriate for your data and research question
   7. Describe how you will visualize your results and explain why the visualization is appropriate for your data
2. Once everyone’s proposal are submitted, you will be asked to peer-review each others proposal using the online rubric available here (see below for Evaluation Rubric).

Evaluation Rubric

---

 Using this rubric document, evaluate each division’s proposal. Use a new copy for each division you will evaluate. Please use this link to deposit your completed evaluations.  

Response: Course Context

---

A brief statement of the context of the course (discipline, level, institution type, instructional mode, is it real or imagined) This assignment is for an Introductory Statistics course that qualifies as Quantitative Reasoning course, as defined by CUNY Pathways. The course is taught face-to-face. This course is imagined, though Liz has taught Intro to Business Statistics and Statistics for Social Sciences; and Jessica has taught Experimental Psychology at Hunter, which incorporates review of basic statistical concepts and tests. Course Goals:

• Understand foundational statistical concepts
• Conduct and interpret appropriate statistical tests
• Apply statistics to real-world problems
• Demonstrate findings and conclusions using interpretative software
• Communicate and participate in group work both face-to-face and virtually

Why is this the final?

---

Statistics is one the most challenging courses for instructors to teach (Conners, McCown, Roskos-Ewoldsen, 1998). Challenges include motivating students, helping students overcome their math anxiety, reconciling wide variations in students’ performance, and ensuring content retention. One of the most challenging aspects of an introductory statistics course is helping students see the relevance of the knowledge and skills they are learning to the issues in their lives. Students often leave a statistics course with more knowledge, but no change in their attitudes or perceived ability in statistics and worse perceptions of the usefulness of statistics (Sizemore & Lewandowski, 2009). Therefore, the goal of this assignment is to help students apply the knowledge and skills they’ve gained in this course to answering a research question that they consider to be relevant. We chose to break this project up into a 3-part semester-long final project because it is an introductory-level course and we wanted to be able to provide students with feedback and guidance throughout the assignment. We also wanted students to have time to practice communicating and collaborating via an online tool, like Microsoft Teams.

Technologies

---

 Microsoft Teams provides a cohesive platform for communications, working in groups, collecting information. Teams empowers students to create groups, work plans, documentation and to track deliverables in a way that allows them to be in charge of the workflow and to practice using a tool that is being used in the workplace across various industries. Students will get to add this to their resumes. 

SPSS and/or Excel will be used for data-analysis and to produce data visualizations. These tools have easy-to-navigate interfaces, and will produce insights for discussion.PowerPoint will be used to share proposed methodologies and insights.  The rubrics for evaluation are Word documents that will be collected via Teams and shared with each group.

Evaluation Rubric

---

The evaluation rubric is from the Association of American Colleges and Universities. This rubric is considered a standard in assessing quantitative reasoning and quantitative literacy skills nationwide. By using this students will gain the experience of using external criteria to frame their assessments. Students will also provide structured feedback to their colleagues. 

Hi everyone,

For the past 15 years I’ve worked as an educator with adolescents and youth ages 14-25 in emergency contexts. Since Wednesday afternoon when received the news that we would move our classes on line, as students and as professors, I’ve been thinking more and more about some of the things I’ve learned through this work. I’ve especially been thinking about how I’ll use these lessons in my online teaching.

As an exercise for this class, I thought I would write them up as professional practice for myself – as a humanitarian responder I’m supposed to be quick with ready, practical, reliable guidance for other educators, so I’ll give that a try and see how I do in this emergency (more about the term “emergency” below). I also thought it would be interesting to think and write about how I can try to put some of the lessons I’ve learned into practice in designing and carrying out my undergraduate class online. I hope what I’ll come up with might be interesting and even useful reading for the you.

In this post I’m offering an outline of the key points I’ve include in my draft. For my explanations, examples of how this has worked in other contexts, ideas about how I’ll work these into online teaching, and a whole bunch of caveats, please see the draft attached.

That attachment is DRAFT and I know it is a rough one! I’ve written this as quickly as possible to get it written. In case you might find it helpful I wanted to share it with you – and I’m wondering if you think I should edit and refine it to share with others. I’ve found it helpful to write it (so thank you if you read it, and thank you if you can find patience with anything you feel I got wrong). Also, please please forgive me if my tone is off – sanctimonious or patronizing – I don’t mean to position myself as an “expert,” just trying to share things I find helpful. (Feel free to share feedback on my tone to make it better in the draft).

Please also share any further feedback if you feel I might work on this and make it a resource for other educators. I would also LOVE your ideas about whether or how you might put these into practice ein your own online teaching.

Finally, all of this comes with one big caveat that I’ll share here: Many of these lessons are designed especially for educators like me who do NOT have formal training in psychology, by people who do have such training, and have worked in emergencies. And I know many of you are studying psychology, and know more than I do. If you are a psychologist or psychology student/specialist, please read these in context; please correct me if I got anything wrong.

Here are my key lessons:

1) Psychosocial wellbeing – young people’s emotional wellbeing and social roles and relationships – is most immediately and negatively affected when students’ formal education is disrupted. Conversely, education in an emergency can be designed to play a key role in fostering and supporting their psychosocial wellbeing.

2) We and our students are under significant stress, and it is affecting us all right now.

a. We are dealing with significant worry and uncertainty about the outbreak itself, and how it will affect our lives in the coming weeks and months.

Education in an emergency be a powerful tool to operationalize young people’s human need to feel hopeful and feel a sense of productive agency over their future.

b. Our roles, relationships and routines have been completely disrupted through the closure of “regular” school.

Education in an emergency can recreate and restore this space for young people, giving them a negotiating tool to make time for themselves, and an opportunity to connect with their peers.

c. We are all facing more social isolation than usual, and this may increase. And social isolation can be much more stressful and unhealthy than we realize.

Education in an emergency can reintroduce these opportunities for students to take at least some time to themselves, possibly connect with others and have something to look forward to in an otherwise boring, isolating day.

3) Normal responses to intense and sudden onset stress fall into two categories:

1. Extra-energetic feelings, such as being jittery, forgetful, crying, irritable, angry, jumpy, talkative, laughing or crying
2. Feeling exhausted, lethargic, depressed.

Again, these are NORMAL responses to intense stress. We need not see them as signs of mental health problems that will have long-term consequences for our students (more on that, below).

Education in an emergency can accommodate students’ intensified feelings and behaviours, giving them some helpful ways to cope with these feelings without pathologizing them.

4) Education during and after an emergency can recreate helpful structure and routine for young people, giving them some possible solutions for the practical problem they are facing, and relieving stress.

5) Young people benefit when their education during and after an emergency gives them the option to take a break from the “emergency.”

6) Educators can be most helpful and avoid harm by using education practices they know well, while avoiding improvising with psychological diagnoses, terminology and clinical practices in an education context (unless they have relevant, specific training in those areas of psychology). It is especially important to avoid the term “trauma” in our own thinking, in our assumptions about how emergencies are affecting us, and in the way we talk with our students.

7) Friendships and peer relationships are especially important and helpful for young people during an emergency, and education create opportunities to build and strengthen these relationships.

8) Educators who work directly with young people in emergencies are among the people positioned best to connect them with other essential services and supports they may need.

9) Young people have the ability and the human right to make an active, positive difference in an emergency. Education can open opportunities for young people to formulate their own ideas and opinions with respect to their situations, and take action to pursue their priorities.

… and being helpful to our students can help us as educators, too. Thank you for reading this, and thereby giving me a chance to feel better by feeling helpful!

“The traditional system of scholarly communication is outmoded, expensive, and suboptimal. And, exploitative too!” (Cirasella)

“As enrollment pressures and funding shortcomings continue to shape higher education decision making, many schools switch to OERs. Clearly, free is cheaper than alternatives. Clearly, more students, especially low-socioeconomic-status ones, will be better able to afford a textbook and even education in general. But are OERs as good as traditional, albeit costly, resources? It is too early to tell from the research so far.” (Gurung)

For this set of readings, the authors provide a detailed account of what is Open Access, and what are the current debates revolving around OA (in academic publishing, academic institutions, libraries, and other professional organizations). Cirasella begins by highlighting the exploitative relationship in academic publishing, particularly by describing the labor process behind it: beginning with the research conducted by scientists whom are sponsored by government or university funds (either in state-funded institutions or with government-sponsored grants – such as NSF/NIH/NEH), which then their research is published on scholarly journals (which in many cases are owned by for-profit companies). Finally, the universities need to pay the publisher in order to grant access to the articles and scientific production that was created with government-sponsored funds. In other words, this is a cycle that, not only is exploitative to those that conduct the labor, but at the same time restricts the access to the scientific production that was conducted, in many cases, by government and tax payer sponsored funds. She continues to elaborate and describe the labor process: a system that is rooted in inequality, exploitation, and extraction through free labor, “peer-reviewing” (a.k.a. “service to the profession”), which concludes with the researchers surrendering their copyrights to the publishers. This also is extremely costly for libraries whose budgets have shrunk in the last decade, meanwhile the costs to gain access to the databases have increased. Cirasella proposes Open Access as a solution: accessible at no-cost, increase in accessibility, institutional savings in the long-term, and broader access to knowledge production.

All this conversation on Open Access reminded me of the decision made by the University of California last year, in which the institution cancelled its contract with Elsevier https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/03/01/university-california-cancels-deal-elsevier-after-months-negotiations
This sends a political message to the for-profit academic publishing industry, but as the article mentioned, this doesn’t undermine their power.

Having stated this, how can we continue to push this conversation when profit-driven systems (such as the corporate university) are part of the institutional exploitation (i.e. adjunct labor, underfunded laboratories, underfunded doctoral students)? What other spaces can we foster in order to publish academic scholarship that don’t necessarily rely on the traditional academic journal? Can OA Journals become a solution to this issue, or are they just one alternative in this profit-driven system? How are some of the “Open access myths” (Suber) still undermining the mission of this publishing system?