Malayil Leena, Negahban-Azar Masoud, Goldstein Rachel Rosenberg, Sharma Manan, Gleason Jeanne, Muise Amy, Murray Rianna, Sapkota Amy R
Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health, University of Maryland School of Public Health, College Park, MD 20742.
Department of Environmental Science and Technology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20740.
J Microbiol Biol Educ. 2021 Mar 31;22(1). doi: 10.1128/jmbe.v22i1.2625. eCollection 2021.
The COVID-19 pandemic has had an enormous impact on education globally, forcing the teaching community to think outside the box and create innovative educational plans to benefit students at home. Here, we narrate how the undergraduate, laboratory-based Summer Internship Program of our CONSERVE Center of Excellence, which focuses heavily on engaging women and underrepresented minorities in STEM programming, took a turn from an in-person research experience to a fully virtual one. We share our challenges and how we overcame them. Additionally, we provide a description of our virtual internship professional development curriculum, as well as the creative research projects that our seven interns were able to achieve in an 8-week virtual internship, including projects focused on the microbiological water quality of recycled irrigation water; social media promotion, enhancement and marketing of online educational resources focused on water, microbial contamination, and food crop irrigation; decision support systems for using recycled water in agricultural settings; and the effectiveness of zero-valent iron sand filtration in improving agricultural water quality, to name a few. Upon evaluating our internship program, we observed that more than 80% of our interns were either very satisfied or satisfied with the overall virtual internship experience. Through this experience, both the educators and the interns learned that although a virtual laboratory internship cannot completely replace in-person learning, it can still result in a very meaningful educational experience.
新冠疫情对全球教育产生了巨大影响，迫使教育界打破常规，制定创新教育计划，以使居家学生受益。在此，我们讲述了我校卓越保护中心以实验室为基础的本科暑期实习项目的转变过程，该项目重点是让女性和在科学、技术、工程和数学（STEM）领域代表性不足的少数族裔参与项目，从线下研究体验转变为完全线上的体验。我们分享了所面临的挑战以及如何克服这些挑战。此外，我们还介绍了虚拟实习专业发展课程，以及我们的七名实习生在为期8周的虚拟实习中能够完成的创新性研究项目，包括关注再生灌溉水微生物水质的项目；聚焦水、微生物污染和粮食作物灌溉的在线教育资源的社交媒体推广、强化和营销项目；农业环境中使用再生水的决策支持系统项目；以及零价铁砂过滤改善农业水质效果的项目等等。在评估我们的实习项目时，我们发现超过80%的实习生对整体虚拟实习体验非常满意或满意。通过这次经历，教育工作者和实习生都认识到，虽然虚拟实验室实习不能完全取代线下学习，但仍能带来非常有意义的教育体验。
