CVP Scholars Present at AAC&U

CVP Research Collective member, Riley McKinzie from UT Austin, joined by the CVP Curriculum & Research Manager, Kassie Phebillo, and the Senior Director for Student Success in the College of Education at North Carolina State University presented "Digital Democracy: How the Forced Move Online Changed Students' Political Experiences and What we Can Learn From It" at the AAC&U Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. on January 21, 2022.

This presentation will connected three projects that found how transitioning to online learning in 2020 impacted the political experiences of college students during the 2020 US election. From Campus Vote Project Democracy Fellows, faculty members, and students, researchers learned that online learning posed a challenge to discussing political topics in classroom spaces, but social media helped mitigate some of the information gap. Students and faculty reported missing the informal spaces where they frequently held political conversations. Ultimately, the move to online learning points to an already-existing systemic failure for online civic education, a failure we hope to work together to start improving.