It was quite surprising that only a few undergraduate upper-level students were using citation management software on their research paper. It was more surprising that they were not aware that a lack of proper citations or cutting and pasting from other sources could be considered plagiarism in academic writings. They showed a significant reliance on direct quotations to avoid plagiarism. Cumbersome of manually adding citations in-text could be one of the reasons why undergraduate students omit referencing appropriate sources in-text as well as in the bibliography. EndNote is one of the citation management tools available for free to all current University of Central Florida (UCF) faculty, staff, and students. The UCF library is offering EndNote Workshops multiple times each semester. This presentation will include the usages of the EndNote software among undergraduate students, improvement of the Turnitin similarity score, and students’ feedback about adapting software after introducing EndNote software in my research-intensive Epidemiology of Chronic Diseases.

The Showcase of Osprey Advancements in Research and Scholarship (SOARS) is the University of North Florida’s highly-anticipated research poster event, organized by the Office of Undergraduate Research and held each April during Research Week – that is, until the pandemic changed our plans last spring. The members of this panel will share why we decided not to cancel the event; how we transitioned from an in-person conference to a virtual conference; how we created the website, uploaded the content, and integrated a judging component; how we later archived the 2020 projects for posterity; how we reaped some unexpected benefits, not only for the students but for the university; and what we plan to repeat and do differently for SOARS 2021.

This presentation provides the student team interaction and mentorship experience at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s “National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site: Cybersecurity Research of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles” from the summer semester of 2020. The Site had been planned for a face-of-face research experience under several mentors for an eight-week period. However, due to Covid-19, the teams had to meet, discuss, present and work online, which was both a challenge and an opportunity. Both students and mentors had lessons from this online experience that they will remember and use in the upcoming years. In this presentation, we present this experience from the angle of a single team mentorship and the lessons learned for similar future operations.

As campuses quickly pivoted to remote teaching and engagement during COVID-19, faculty faced significant challenges in converting their research and mentorship with undergraduates. At Florida Atlantic University, we observed a decline in faculty engagement with undergraduate researchers during summer 2020. In an effort to better support faculty mentors, we established a collaboration between FAU’s Office of Undergraduate Research and Inquiry, the Division of Research, Center for E-Learning, University Libraries, and FAU High School. This team created a resource guide and hosted a panel session to assist faculty whose research and mentorship of undergraduates were impacted by going virtual. In this presentation, we will discuss survey data documenting the decline in undergraduate research engagement and challenges faculty faced, including creating a remote community of inquiry, remote access to university instruments/software, and consideration for alternative, remote projects. We will also share the resource document we created to assist faculty.