Accelerating Undergraduate QISE Education and Research by Economy of Scale: QuSTEAM Nonprofit*

An NSF Convergence Accelerator project QuSTEAM engaged an interdiscplinary team across 20 institutions led by Ohio State, including UChicago, Michigan, Michigan State, a dozen HBCUs led by NC A&T, and several community colleges. The team developed and piloted four courses toward a quantum information minor.  Materials used backward design (explicitly stated goals with well-aligned and frequent assessment of student understanding), culturally relevant pedagogy (using social prompts to draw on student expertise), flipped instruction, and project-based learning. A crowdsourcing platform was developed to provide staged reviews for pedagogy and subject matter. A classroom-driven variant of the qBraid platform was developed to access a variety of quantum devices. Industry and national lab input led to new project-based modules addressing topics such as cold matter, dyanmical decoupling, and pulse sequence optimization.

The effort revealed supports required at diverse insitutions to stand up novel quantum courses and programs. We describe a nonprofit model for collaboration to offer customized support, including course modules supporting evidence-based teaching.