| Norman Chonacky - The Evergreen State College, and |
| James Myers - The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory |
The Collaboratory for Undergraduate Research and Education (CURE) project involves seven colleges and universities in the northwest working for undergraduate science reform in partnership with two non-profit service organizations and the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Washington. These are: Bellevue (WA) Community College; Heritage College (Yakima); Portland (OR) State University; Reed College (Portland); The Evergreen (WA) State College; University of Washington; University of Wyoming; Northwest Academic Computing Consortium; Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education. The premise of the CURE is that research and education are deeply linked: that to learn one must do research, and to do research one must learn. Clearly, reform of undergraduate science education is what is on the nation's mind and using real science in all curricula is the vision. The unequivocal message of its recent report Shaping the Future is that the NSF intends to support educational innovations that make "direct experience with the methods and process of scientific inquiry" accessible to all undergraduate students.
The goal of the CURE is to bring science resources from PNNL into undergraduate institutions to reduce the distance between science education and science practice. It has been under development for more than two years. An article in the spring edition of this Quarterly described both this project and its research-based antecedent at the PNNL's Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL).
The present article will build on the earlier one by presenting some of the details and results from an exploration of the CURE concept conducted in an intensive, three-day workshop at PNNL last October.
The EMSL is a Department of Energy facility in Richland Washington at the site of the Hanford reservation where the DOE produced plutonium for fifty years. EMSL's mission is to accomplish basic research that will facilitate the decontamination and clean-up of this site. The EMSL is richly endowed with supercomputing facilities, advanced instrumentation compatible with its mission, and some of the best scientific research minds in the country. Its research mission is accomplished by a number of programs and labs.
These programs focus on developing a molecular-level understanding of physical, chemical, and biological processes that underlie environmental remediation, waste processing and storage, and human health effects. Its approaches to its research are interdisciplinary, including fundamental molecular science, measurement science, its macromolecular structure and dynamics program, and its theory, modeling, and simulation program. Among the EMSL's facilities are its cluster dynamics lab, surface kinetics lab, nanometer surface mapping and spectroscopy lab, a gigahertz NMR, and its molecular science computing facility. It is well beyond the scope of this article to describe EMSL research or resources in any detail. However, to supply context for our analysis, Table 1 briefly illustrates EMSL research.
| Table 1: EMSL Research Programs - Goals and Objectives | |
|---|---|
| Core Research Programs | Goals |
| Molecular Processes in Processing Science | to develop innovative techniques for retrieving, treating, and disposing of stored radioactive wastes efficient separation of radionuclides destruction or conversion of hazardous wastes colloid chemistry and behavior durability of waste forms. |
| Molecular Processes in Contaminant Fate and Transport | to understand the migration of contaminants in the subsurface to develop innovative solutions for passive and active remediation of contaminated soils and groundwater, mineral structure and reactivity, interfacial chemical and physical processes, chemistry of aqueous solutions, and the chemical, physical, and biological processes involved in bioremediation |
| Molecular Aspects of Health Effects | to understand how the human body copes with chemical insults to contribute to the establishment of science-based health guidelines, molecular mechanism(s) leading to DNA damage and repair or misrepair, and the response of cells to toxic chemicals and radiation |
| Crosscutting Research Programs | Goals |
| Fundamental Molecular Science | to understand the fundamental molecular processes underlying condensed phase and interfacial processes in the environment, and model molecular systems needed to understand complex environmental processes |
| Measurement Science | to develop innovative techniques for measuring and characterizing complex chemical systems, advanced analytical techniques needed to detect molecules in a complex matrix, and chemometric techniques to analyze data from complicated systems |
| Environmental Molecular Sciences Collaboratory | to develop an advanced computing and communications infrastructure to support EMSL as a collaborative research facility, telecomputing tools designed to support collaboration between geographically-distributed scientists, and a new generation of research instruments that permit remote instrument monitoring and control, as well as scientific data sharing and analysis |
| Computational Modeling of Molecular Processes | to develop theoretical and computational models of molecules and molecular processes, molecular modeling software and a user environment for molecular simulations, mathematical algorithms, and a software development framework for massively parallel computers |
To support the EMSL's function as a "shared-use" facility, for the past several years DOE has invested in developing a telecomputing infrastructure - the Collaborative Research Environment [CORE] - to enable scientific research collaborations between EMSL staff and "outside" scientists without requiring physical co-location. The CORE allows real-time remote collaborations and interaction with remote instruments and software. It also provides "discretionary-time" access to remote databases and visualizations, and to an electronic notebook for collaborative archiving and sharing - all launched and coordinated using familiar WWW interfaces.
In October 1996, NSF funded an intensive workshop - "An Exploration of a Collaboratory for Undergraduate Research and Education" at which faculty and EMSL researchers explored the opportunities and challenges of applying this research collaboratory concept to reform undergraduate science education. This workshop gave insights into what researchers working with undergraduates, both at CURE institutions and elsewhere, might do in the future using the CORE to access the laboratory's resources.
The workshop was an historic opportunity to bring science faculty from many disciplines to meet with interdisciplinary science researchers and to charge them with imagining how, in the context of a prototypical telecomputing environment, to bring the laboratory into the classroom - the classroom into the laboratory. An agenda for this workshop, with goals and descriptions of process, are in Table 2.
| Table 2: Original Agenda for the Exploratory CURE Workshop | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Goals | Processes | Major Activities | |
| Day 1 | Experiencing the CORE tools, and their scientific and collaborative contexts. To learn about ourselves, consider workshop and project goals, and accept assignment by groups to a practical question as reference frame for working. | Listen to accounts of the EMSL, it's mission, it research areas and its commitment to collaborative and interdisciplinary research | Work with CORE tools, sample the CORE computing environment being designed for remote research, engage in critical discussion of the collaboratory vision. |
| Day 2 | Doing collaborative science with tools, and developing its educational contexts. To explore how scientific discourse works within the CORE, to project oneself into a scientific collaborative relationship, and create and air wholesale ideas for educational uses. | Engage in scientific dialogue using the CORE. | Invent ways to explain/demonstrate/learn about ongoing scientific research work, invent ways to incorporate research work as a resource in model educational scenarios, reflect critically upon and treat these exchange experiences. |
| Day 3 | Testing realities, and addressing practical questions of an R&D model project. | To critically test values and practice as implied by educational collaboratory applications, and to focus the past days' experiences on addressing those practical questions relevant to a prospective, full-scale, model research and development project. | Decide what's in it for each of us, and what are our individual costs, treat worst case scenarios and the culture gap, report on practical questions, draw and debate conclusions, formulate a plan of action for further project development. |
We began Day 1 learning about the EMSL, its facilities and programs, both from laboratory administrators and the participating researchers. To induce specific perspectives into our work, we grouped ourselves around one of three categories of collaboratory target: curriculum innovation; faculty development; or student-conducted research. Our last major activity was meeting and testing the CORE tools together.
Day 2 centered around intensive, focused use of the CORE. First faculty formed affinity groups around researchers according to their science interests, and each researcher tried to describe on-going work to her/his group using the CORE as the medium. Later we reversed these roles with faculty demonstrating, through the CORE tools, how they might use the researcher's work in their curricula. There was a seminar to debate two quite different visions of what should be the functional goals of a telecomputed work environment.
By day's end the participants were able, with considerable enthusiasm and proficiency, to write down dozens of specific ideas they had for research-based learning activities. The compendium (N = 44) of these suggested, research-based learning activities served as a database for the following day's work.
Day 3 was chiefly dedicated to using the database to synthesize educational collaboratory models that we could conceivably develop. This work was done separately by each group, for curriculum innovation, faculty development, and student-conducted research. The groups met to report their results individually and to discuss them in consort. Both laboratory and academic voices presented what they saw as crucial issues. We ended with a consensus and a schedule for producing a proposal for a full-scale, multi-year project to develop an educational collaboratory model testbed.
We first examine connections that faculty made with the research. EMSL's organization is multidisciplinary and its problem-centered work, directed toward solving problems of compelling public concern, is interdisciplinary - cutting a wide swath across traditional academic disciplines and curricula. Its research programs are exciting from the scientific point of view and interesting from the public point of view. These are significant assets for the prospects of their use in educational programs covering a wide range of scientific scope and detail. But these same characteristics pose considerable challenges for integration of EMSL resources into curricula and into educational institutions conventionally organized along rigid, departmental lines. These realities became clearer, later.
The appeal of the EMSL research was evident from the outset. The introductory session for CORE tools on the Day 1 was punctuated time and again by episodes of faculty groups going off with researchers to their labs to see instruments and talk shop. Faculty from schools having ongoing research gravitated toward the instruments, seeking those capable of extending their own research capabilities. For example, the extraordinary precision of EMSL mass spectrometers appealed to chemists and physicists who were synthesizing materials and wished to know their compositions, enabling them to tackle very complex, high molecular weight molecules. On the other hand, faculty without ongoing research were more interested in programmatic, collaborative approaches than instruments. For example, a physicist, biologist, chemist, and geologist from several institutions found common cause in the reactive transport of subsurface chlorocarbon plumes. This suggests that cross-disciplinary, collaborative research may take root quicker in the latter rather than the former institutions. One participant where annual theses are required of all his senior students hoped that EMSL research programs might provide more continuity and coherence for student research, and a salutary departure from the practice of every student, every year "starting from scratch".
Table 3 lists the CORE tool suite as it was at the time of the workshop, and describes them in a some detail. Note that most of these tools support synchronous interactions of collaborators with one another (or with instruments). Only the Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN) is specifically designed as an asychronous tool. While the former type imitates "being there" for collaborators who are not in the same location, the latter represents a kind of sharing that doesn't require simultaneity or co-location. In this sense it goes "beyond being there" and is rich with new possibilities. The fact that synchronous capability is so heavily represented in the current tools suite while asynchronous capability was an interest of the faculty suggests significant "cultural" differences - work habits, values, and priorities - between laboratory and schools that will need to be addressed in developing educational collaboratories. This issue is critical in considering how one might organize and operate a research-based learning community which would involve not only many institutions, but also many distinct types of institutions.
| Table 3: Synopsis of Collaborative Research Environment Tools | |
|---|---|
| Name | Function |
| CORE Session Manager/Desktop Executive | One-click method to start or join multi-tool collaborative sessions from a WWW page launches sessions, tracks active sessions, accounts for participants and tools being used |
| CORE: Chat | Real-time message exchange, standard chat box for exchanging text messages |
| CORE: WebTour | Synchronous exposition of WWW pages for rapid presentation or discussionsynchronize WWW browsers (one user goes to new URL, then all other browsers automatically follow), lecture mode (one user in permanent control), peer-peer mode (any user preempts control) |
| CORE: Desktop Videoconferencing | Real-time visual and auditory interaction, operate from your desktop, uses standard tools - Mbone or CU-SeeMe |
| CORE: EMSL TeleViewer | Synchronously shared full screens, windows, or screen regions, view (portions of) others' screens, make annotations, remotely control shared application program, capture screen (region) for archiving |
| EMSL Electronic Laboratory Notebook | Asynchronously shared, dynamic version of traditional paper laboratory notebook, organize collaboration by notebook and chapter, each page: data file - an image or a live Java-based graphical summary of data in the file, on-line instruments can automatically update, users add text, picture, and file annotations |
| CORE Adjunct: EMSL On-line | Real-time, remote access to laboratory instruments, operate with visual computer control panel, monitor critical instrument functions and support systems, visually monitor lab environment |
The Day 2 seminar considered various possible design goals for functionality in a telecomputed work environment. Among ideas for accommodating wide ranges of institutions, application types, student levels, and ways of interacting is the notion of enabling the ELN to offer "multiple views" of the same data. There are several versions of such viewing flexibility. Starting with the assumption that an ELN will contain a complete record of all work on a give experiment, problem, etc. placed there by anyone of a number of collaborators working on the primary experiment, one view might replace the detailed primary data on experiments with suitable reduced data and/or data summaries for those outside of a given expertise or level. Different views could be used by specialized consultants, or by beginning science students, or by non-science students reviewing the experimental results as part of a case study. Another view might afford a faculty "mentor" an account of how research work had proceeded from a given previous point to the present in the form of a "threaded" set of ELN entries. S/he could use this view to intervene efficiently with "just in time" help when called for. It would provide a context which would be needed to offer educationally appropriate support for any impasse.
The issue of scaleability arose along with other sobering thoughts on Day 3 of the workshop. In our final synthetic plenary, after seeing the individual application suggestions and the "syntheses" of them produced by each of the three target area groups, the laboratory director expressed his concern that the propositions seemed predominantly "one-to-one". He offered his hope that these would become more cooperative and multi-faculty/institutional as the educational collaboratory planning matured. All of us now realize that laboratory resources must be leveraged with those of the educational institutions, not be a substitute for them. In barest terms this means that the laboratory does not wish to add to - albeit, now remotely - partnerships they already have with individual faculty and students. Instead, its notion of scaleability centers on growing new learning communities - built around collaboratories - into robust, collaborative networks of many faculty and institutions cooperating with one another, exploiting the laboratory resources more efficiently and richly together than they could individually. This implies developing coordinated curricula across courses and institutions.
Other thoughts emerged from the activities database and pointed to challenges ahead. Just one third of those activities posed involvement with all laboratory programs, compared with another third which targeted single instruments, disciplines, or problems. Although the cross-disciplinary character of each EMSL program will mitigate disciplinary isolation even if a research collaboration is relatively narrow, there is basic academic bias toward single disciplines that must be addressed to make lab/school marriages effective. Many suggested activities were "conventional", e.g. remote "lectures" for curricular innovations and "individual" efforts for student research participation. While these time-tested approaches are not inherently flawed, we have not begun to stretch our imaginations. If we intend to engage all students with inquiry-based encounters with laboratory science, we need to look beyond these existing paradigms.
After two years of planning, experimentation, and reflection we can ask ourselves: "What next?". Here are some considered but tentative speculations.
The results of this workshop make it amply clear that an educational collaboratory, built upon a partnership such as we have fashioned, has good prospects for reforming science education by reducing the distance between science education and science practice. But equally clear is that a great deal of work needs to be done to modify the way we think about teaching in the light of new telecomputing possibilities, whose educational implications can now only be dimly seen. Students must learn how to handle new responsibilities that come with empowerment and faculty must learn how to relinquish some controls while securing the ideals of liberal education so that the process does not gravitate to vocational training. The reform effort should engage in "growing" faculty, researchers, and students incrementally in an iterative process of developing new paradigms for learning practice. To achieve scaleability curricula need to be "coordinated" so that many programs (re)use the same data in different ways, and so that the burdens of supporting more sophisticated learning methods can be spread over institutions by division of labor. We need new forms of learning/research communities to embody these new learning practices based in science research.
Clearly the laboratories can use additional help at doing their critically important research. But researchers typically are not "process" people by disposition or responsibility. Their stake in the connecting to a wider network of students and faculty is in achieving a net gain of research capability not another distraction from their mission. A high priority should be establishing a new kind of "process triad" - working relationships among student-professor-researcher that serve everyone's needs. For example, the ELN gives both faculty and researcher power to continually monitor a student's work, with views of the record customized to each individual's needs and role, and with responsibilities distributed across the group. This greater sharing will cement stronger faculty/researcher bonds than do traditional student internships. We can now think about systems to manage collaborations so that different faculty and researchers can pass seamlessly into and out of relationships with a given student on a given project, and so that individual schools can specialize in the training and managing specific instruments or programs. Such a system would include not only cataloging and managing work, data, and responsibilities, but also would define "protocols" for interactions among the constituents.
Within the academic sphere there are powerful institutional obstacles to collaborative work and coordinated curricula. These have been well documented. The implication to reform is that the institutional apparatus must be involved as well. To mention just a few items, there needs to be support for faculty to work across departmental boundaries as well as institutional boundaries. The reward system needs to be modified for risks and time taken in educational innovation. Institutions must see inter-institutional cooperation not as a risk to their identity but as an opportunity for diverse institutions to complement one another. As such they should seek such diversity in their partnerships.
This workshop was the high point in a process of two years of planning, experimentation, and critical reflection involving two dozens of faculty and researchers. It reinforced our convictions that undergraduate students can and should learn through research. By "learning through research" we refer to all learning in undergraduate science education, not just the last year or last semester of a specialized science curriculum for science majors. Given the symmetry between learning and research, the reform of one implies reform of the other. Science education reform will not come by simply grafting some current scientific research model into the curriculum. Researchers driven by the problems they need to address are learning to think and, gradually, to work across disciplines - a practice that has yet to take substantial root in undergraduate institutions. And educators driven by the challenge of preparing students with diverse perspectives, backgrounds, and learning styles are learning to recognize these differences and to reframe their own conceptions and processes accordingly - a reflective and abstractive capability that relatively few researchers currently master.
This paper was an attempt to give sufficient detail for the reader to understand the character of the workshop and to illustrate the lines of discovery of some significant results. However it tells but a part of the developmental story of the educational collaboratory concept. The sequel awaits the continuation of hard work and experience.
We thank the National Science Foundation for the grant to support the development of and academic participation in this workshop: DUE-9653277; and the Department of Energy for the contract to support the EMSL's participation in this workshop: DE-AC06-76RLO 1830.