WiSCUR August 2015 Workshop on Establishing Research Networks

August 19-20, 2015

UW-La Crosse

There is increasing pressure on institutes of higher education to demonstrate how their students are being prepared for successful careers upon graduation. One high impact practice being used by an increasing number of disciplines is undergraduate research. By having students do research projects for external clients they get the benefits of an independent research project, while at the same time experiencing some of the benefits of an internship. This workshop will discuss the establishment of four research networks at UW-L (Public policy, Non-profits, Business, Biomedical/Health Care), and help participants work through the steps necessary to create similar networks on their own campus. The target audience for this workshop includes URSCA directors and potential campus think tank members to supervise the networks (Small Business Development, Political Science, Sociology, STEM faculty).

WiSCUR August 2015 Workshop on Course Embedded Undergraduate Research

August 20-21, 2015

UW-La Crosse

Involving students in an undergraduate research project is considered a high-impact practice. These projects let students experience what it is like to be a scholar in their discipline, design and troubleshoot experiments, analyze results, and make presentations. The faculty to student ratio in a department is often a limitation to the number of students who can be involved. One solution is to use course-embedded undergraduate research projects. These projects can be chosen by the student or instructor, or could be done for an external client. This workshop will demonstrate a course used to train 20 UW-L instructors on how to use backwards design to integrate an undergraduate research project into their class. The target audience for this workshop is an URSCA member who will run a similar workshop on their campus and one faculty member who will go through the backwards design process at this workshop. Before the workshop, the faculty members will be asked to watch a brief 15 minute video explaining the process and then create an outline of the course embedded activity in their course. This will then be discussed and edited in the workshop.

PLEASE CONTACT LISA THEO IF INTERESTED IN ATTENDING