Supporting NASA's Goals through Asynchronous Energy Education

UAF Bristol Bay Campus has been offering a Sustainable Energy Occupational Endorsement program. One of the main classes in the program is PHYS 102X Energy and Society. It is a distance‐delivered 4‐credit STEM course related to NASA’s Greenspace program. One of the components of the course is a project in which some students deal with real‐life energy‐related issues in their communities. These projects include hands‐on activities as well as theoretical analysis. Similar to NASA’s challenges, these projects deal with remote locations and extreme environments.

A 2017‐2018 grant from the Alaska Space Grant Program (ASGP) allowed to revise the PHYS 102X course to make the content current and establish NASA presence in the course. As described in detail in the 2017-2018 grant report, the course has been very successful and has been meaningfully impacting Alaska Native and rural students. However, so far the PHYS 102X class has only been delivered in a synchronous format, which means students have to log in at specific times and participate in real‐time sessions. This can create difficulties to some students, especially non‐traditional students with families and jobs, which is a large portion of students served by the UAF Bristol Bay Campus and other rural campuses.

In the current round of funding for year 2018‐2019, the project team seeks to develop an asynchronous version of the PHYS 102X Energy and Society course, and deliver the class throughout Alaska in Spring 2019. The class will continue to maintain NASA presence, but students will be able to complete it in their own time, via recordings, discussions on discussion boards, and other asynchronous means. This will make the class accessible to students with non‐traditional schedules and help avoid schedule conflicts. The ultimate goal of this project is to increase access to education and contribute to the development of STEM workforce in sustainable energy, which is an interdisciplinary field relevant to NASA.