Broadening CS Research Opportunities for Online Graduate Students

Research opportunities offer students at the master's level a chance to apply their knowledge, create projects for their portfolio, and to gain an understanding of the research process in preparation for potential doctoral studies. The traditional structure of these opportunities, however, is not trivial to translate to online programs with asynchronous delivery. As online programs grow, it is important to examine ways that the traditional benefits of these opportunities can be extended to a broader range of students. In this poster, we discuss our experience building the infrastructure and running early efforts at reaching this goal. We discuss several dedicated courses and seminars developed to offer larger scale opportunities for students to pursue research. We also discuss efforts in active development to provide better infrastructure support to reduce the friction and complexity of pursuing research at scale.