RAPID: Archiving and Contextualizing Data around Academic Program Delivery during the Covid-19 Pandemic

Like many other public and private enterprises, academic institutions have struggled to continue operation during the COVID-19 pandemic while protecting students, faculty and staff. Almost all universities faced considerable service disruptions as they made decisions such as transitioning from in-class teaching to remote teaching and keeping dorms open or sending students home. This Grant for Rapid Response Research (RAPID) project will collect, clean, link, de-identify, curate, archive, and contextualize data related to and informing decisions made about academic program delivery during the pandemic at a large public university. Clemson University provides a rich case study in university decision-making and will allow the research community to review the decisions made, availability data on which the decisions relied, and outcomes of those decisions. It is expected that further studies using this dataset will inform the decision making, particularly with respect to data needs, to improve planning for similar large scale disturbances. A novel feature of this project is the pairing of numerical and textual data, allowing researchers to discover the interplay between policy and collected data. Researchers will be able to utilize the collected quantitative and textual data to pose and answer research questions that reflect the rapidly changing environment during the beginning and first 12-18 months of the pandemic.

The project will consolidate a variety of data from many sources across the university, including housing and dining hall data, class configuration data, cross-campus testing data, wastewater testing data, vaccine uptake data, and qualitative data from multiple campus decision-makers. All data will be deidentified and appropriately aggregated and the project will not involve human subjects. These data will be preserved in a central location, mapped in a manner consistent with information extraction and queries, and contextualized in terms of decisions made by university administration, and their outcomes. Numerical research data, stored appropriately in spreadsheets or databases will be archived with support of the Clemson Computing and Information Technology staff and facilities. Access to the data will be provided for individual researchers and research groups through Clemson University. Digital data, such as emails, website archiving, meeting minutes, and other textual data, appropriately redacted to hide sensitive information, will be archived for the use of social science researchers and to contextualize the numerical research data. The data files will be deposited into TigerPrints (Digital Commons), which is Clemson University Libraries' open access institutional repository and publishing/dissemination platform.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.