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EdSurge
Students Dive Deep Into COVID-19 in Free Open Study Course
By Stephen Noonoo
Aug 11, 2020
Asama Mothana originally wanted to use the summer before her senior
year to get a job, possibly at a law firm. Instead, she’s taking an
open-study research course on a subject she was already thinking a lot
about: the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I feel like learning about it in the open study dives deeper into
what’s actually happening” with the pandemic, says Mosana, who attends
a local public school in Brooklyn, N.Y. “We tend to make it about the
prison that’s keeping us home but we’re not really learning about what
its real effects are.”
Mosana isn’t earning any money this summer, but at least she isn’t
spending any either. The open-study course is a free offering from
Pioneer Academics, a public benefit corporation better known for its
selective online research program, which pairs high school students
around the world with mentors. Students do inquiry-based research,
write a paper and can even earn college credit through a partnership
with Oberlin College.
While there’s a tuition for the research program, Pioneer often waives
it for students who demonstrate financial need. As jobs and other
summer opportunities evaporated as COVID-19 swept the globe, the
program saw a 300 percent spike in applications, with many requesting
financial aid, says Matthew Jaskol, Pioneer’s founder and program
director. “We decided that with the combination of this increased
demand, and for students who are seeing themselves stymied, we’d have
to create a program that would be extremely scalable and 100 percent
free.”
The new summer program groups teams of students into one of four tracks
based on interest: pandemics and globalization, epidemiology, the
history of pandemics, and socio-cultural evolution, which looks at what
happens to societies when big things change. Unlike the research
program, this offering doesn’t pair every student with mentors.
Instead, a handful of teams work directly with a professor who acts as
an expert mentor during regular Zoom calls.
But the vast majority of the 145 teams, composed of more than 900
students, are self-paced. They follow along with the synchronous, or
live, teams and set their own schedule, deciding for example how many
weeks to spend working. These self-paced teams watch recordings of the
professor and pair up with teaching assistants for about five live
sessions—a necessary alteration to make the program free, given that
mentor professors are paid by Pioneer for their time.
“This is not a research program,” Jaskol clarifies. “It’s free. It is
not accredited. But it’s designed on a structure where students can
pull together a team of five to 10 other students and dig into a
perspective on COVID-19.”
Specifically, Mosana’s team is on the pandemics and globalization
track, charting unemployment figures and studying how the issue impacts
groups of people differently. After losing out on her summer job, and
faced with an uncertain future, it’s an issue that hits close to home
for her.
“When you look at the unemployment rates, you get scared,” Mothana
says. “You spend almost your whole life in school, and then when you
come face-to-face with the real world, there isn’t really a world for
you to face anymore.”
Last month, Mosana spent about five hours a week on research and in
meetings with teammates, who are all classmates or friends of friends.
But her team is planning to double their workload to finish their final
research analysis by the end of August. (She is also working on a
separate project on ethnic conflict for Pioneer’s credit-bearing
research program.)
Even though the quarantine has curtailed most of their usual
engagements, it can be tough to get everyone together for group Zoom
calls outside the scheduled office hours with teaching assistants. Each
team decides when and how often to meet, and that kind of
self-organization can be a challenge.
“It’s hard to find a time that fits with all of us,” she says. “I feel
like if there were specific times given by the open study program,
maybe it would make the rest of my team more committed. You can’t
really get out of something that you have to do.”
Overall, the quality of work has been very high, says David Veselik, a
biology professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana who is
working with students in the pandemic epidemiology track. The five
teams he’s working with are studying the structure of the novel
coronavirus and each is tracking its spread in a different country—the
U.S., Sweden, China, Brazil.
Instead of lectures, he hosts spirited discussions with teams as they
prepare their finals analyses and presentations. “I told them from day
one, I wanted this to be an active, engaged discussion about these
topics,” Veselik says. “As you know, the models and the impacts are
changing by the week, by the day. So just to have that kind of
discussion and see the type of work the students are doing has been
really impressive.”
That’s not to say students don’t need a bit of guidance—they are still
in high school, after all. Jon Sky, a teaching assistant and veteran of
the Pioneer research program, says he’s spending about 10 hours a week
talking to students, helping them format their papers and creating
outlines and summaries from the live classes led by professors, which
are recorded and shared with teams working through the material at
their own pace.
During office hours, students spend most of their time asking questions
about the material covered in these recorded classes, which can last up
to 90 minutes. They also look for help in formatting their papers and
organizing their work. “Considering a lot of them are communicating
only online, I could imagine it’s a little difficult to coordinate
everything if you have to divide up work,” Sky says.
At the end of the program, students turn in a research paper
summarizing their findings. The assignment isn’t held to the same
rigorous standards that those in the research program are held to but
there are a few baseline requirements. Each paper has to have an
introduction, a conclusion and at least three pages of research.
But that’s just the minimum, and some students may go above and beyond
because of their interest in the topic, says Jaskol. “There’s going to
be a certain number of students that don’t necessarily finish,” he
acknowledges. “If you’re going to do something, it should be to
whatever level you want to bring it to. Our goal is to do something
that harnesses your interest and curiosity, not because I told you to
do it.”
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