Introducing the Epicenter for Action Research
Originally published in Medium January 19, 2021
Lee G. Cooper, Jessica Chase, and Regina Lee
The Epicenter for Action Research brings together students with ideas, people who will benefit from those ideas, partners to complete the team, and the enabling tools and knowledge bases to scale action research as never before.
The Imperatives of Our Time
In mid-2017, our issues were merely urgent.
The world faces many complex problems, and great universities should be part of the solution. In the long-term, universities accrue enormous demonstrated societal benefits. But what about today? If we want universities to have an immediate impact, we need to engage today’s students in hands-on projects that confront real problems. That’s the premise of action research. The generic mission of a university action research center is to transform research and education into service to the world. The goal is to organize, prepare, and support students as they attack real-world problems — and to do so on a large scale.
“Building Centers for Action Research,” Lee G. Cooper, July 2017
Facing 2021, we must confront multiple, full-blown crises requiring immediate action on pandemics, economic disruptions, systemic racial injustices, and the perils of climate change. These are interdependent crises that have resisted top-down solutions for decades.
We believe that progress comes from bottom-up projects. Work gets done by broad coalitions of sometimes small organizations that are specialized around their core competencies. Coalitions morph over the project life cycle as needs change in a changing world. The breadth of competency of today’s students enables them to tackle many complex problems in partnerships that bridge across the university’s boundaries.
Organizing for Action
Beyond its seismological origins, the word epicenter often describes a central point. But a seismic event doesn’t start at its epicenter. Shockwaves radiate from the hypocenter, a point miles beneath the earth’s surface.
Geologists think about earthquakes from the hypocenter, but the rest of us focus on what we can see: a dot on a map, surrounded by concentric circles. That’s how we visualize the center of activity and range of impact.
The Epicenter for Action Research is the dot. The untapped power lies beneath the surface. Our hypocenter is in the minds of students, change makers ready to step up if given the right tools. Their impact radiates like shockwaves in all directions.
We bring together students with ideas, people who will benefit from those ideas, and the resources and knowledge base to scale action research like never before. Our goals are to make each project easier to do, to grow, or to replicate, while learning from each project. Our founding partners so far are:
- The Semel Healthy Campus Initiative Center at UCLA
- Institute for Carbon Management at UCLA
- University of California Institute for Prediction Technology
- monday.com
- The SmartNations Foundation
- Congo Basin Institute
- Conservation International
- UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation
- Sustainable LA Grand Challenge
- UCLA Center for Community Engagement
- EcoAdvisors
- UCLA Sustainability
- Impact@Anderson
- Helena
- Rare
We’ll discuss this in three sections: Capstone experiences, student-initiatives, and community health-sciences prototypes.
Capstone experiences
“One of the most profound experiences during my tenure at UCLA Anderson was working with Conservation International on a consulting project in the country of Suriname.”
Jody Menerey, UCLA Anderson Class of 2011
Anderson MBA students partnered with Conservation International to design sustainable ecotourism solutions in Suriname, pictured above traveling to the country as part of their capstone.
The seminal project which first demonstrated to us the power of action research came out of a partnership we formed between Conservation International (CI) with teams in the MBA capstone course at Anderson, when CI had pivoted its mission to designing and implementing sustainable solutions for people and nature. The MBA teams supplied the business skill sets where conservation biologists were weak, while CI staff formed strong links to understanding the science, the local issues, and available resources to make things happen. We were pleasantly stunned by how well the combination worked. Broad coalitions win. The potential of generalizing and scaling this engagement model became obviously important. At UCLA alone, ~1,000,000 student-hours per year are spent on capstone projects. If replicated on other campuses, there are no insurmountable barriers to running 100,000 projects or more annually world-wide using this framework for engaging transorganizational efforts and learning from each effort.
In the standard arrangement for an MBA capstone effort, teams form before deciding on projects of interest and a matching process occurs usually mediated by the head of the capstone effort. The team negotiates more specific goals with the client or outside partners and proceeds to set milestones, assign tasks, check on progress, and assess results.
Yet the times call for greater flexibility to respond to crises and advance valued goals. Rather than the standard handful of MBA students doing a two-quarter capstone, the scope of the problem should dictate the scope of the efforts. The strategy is to:
- Help communicate project opportunities to interested centers and students.
- Form multidisciplinary student teams custom fit to the needs of each project.
- Use course credit and teaching credit as the internal coins of the realm and include all other variable costs in the project budget.
- Fundraise jointly if the projects that students and faculty demand do not have sufficient support.
- Use information technology to help form teams and coalitions, streamline operations, ensure projects can be carried across time and teams, and facilitate access to and utility of the growing knowledge base. Build and adapt knowledge management, project management, and communications management tools to enable this.
- Bring to scale so as to minimize infrastructure costs relative to the value delivered.
Where possible make the knowledge base publicly available to foster broad adoption and growth of the engagement model by other universities and colleges. We need to learn from history.We’ve had a decade of successes with the constrained model for action research, while failing on the use of information technology. For coalition formation, project communications, and project management efforts to date have been ad hoc with no attempt at systematic learning. Re-inventing the wheel for each project is one of the biggest barriers to scale. And that’s where monday.com steps in as our technology partner.
monday.com is a Work Operating System that powers teams to run projects and workflows with confidence. This platform allows teams to shape workflows, adjust to shifting needs, create transparency, connect collaboratively, and automate manual tasks. Automate routine work with this user-friendly, intuitive project management platform.
monday.com believes that enabling action research is an ideal use of their platform, and as part of their contribution to the common good, they have offered a very large number of pro-level licenses to the Epicenter for Action Research to distribute free to those students, faculty, staff, and outside partners doing action research at UCLA and affiliates. We thank Liron Shilo, manager of academic partnerships at monday.com, for being our ally in this. To learn more about using monday.com for action research, go to epicenterforaction.org/tools.
Student initiative
“You can’t be what you can’t see.” — Marian Wright Edelman
Key to the success of student-led action research is student protagonists, taking action to further their own ideas, build their own multidisciplinary teams, and connect that energy to the faculty and outside partners ready to collaborate with them. The mission of action research is to transform research and education into service to the world, and student-led action research solves problems through investigation, real-world testing and inquiry, and analysis that leads to solutions ready to implement.
We’ve described the untapped power beneath the surface — the ideas already live in the minds of students, change makers ready to step up if given the right tools. But we can’t expect students to pick up the initiative without the resources to connect with the partners they need to succeed, the tools to scale their project, and the knowledge base to innovate without reinventing the wheel.
By creating the space for student-led action research to get results and moving towards developing a common knowledge base so that success can be replicated and expanded, the Epicenter for Action Research is the nexus from which the impact of students can radiate out to the world.
Community health sciences prototypes
This sample board at monday.com allows all board subscribers to be notified of updates in real time.
Master’s in Public Health (MPH) students at UCLA are required to participate in 400 hours of fieldwork. Using this monday.com template, students can organize the entire process—this is especially important when COVID-19 has impacted fieldwork in 2020.
“Usually, students intern a minimum of 32 hours per week during fieldwork, and weekly logs would be due every Sunday by midnight. This past summer, fieldwork policies were modified to adapt to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic… I know there were some students whose weekly internship hours were so sporadic that it was challenging for them to keep track of when their logs were due.”
— Desa Yadegarians, 2nd year MPH student
Students can use hour tracking to visualize when a 40-hour period has passed. Since each weekly log is due at the end of a 40-hour period, utilizing the template below demonstrates that the first weekly log is due at the end of week 3.
With monday.com, students will be able to save time, have a more comprehensive view of due dates, workloads, and timelines, and organize their fieldwork process from start to finish.
In another example, MS students at UCLA are required to complete a research project leading to a master’s thesis. monday.com can be used to track deadlines and easily receive feedback from the thesis committee through the ability to attach associated files, directly email the thesis committee, and receive notifications when a thesis section has been completed. Automations for the status column also allow thesis committee members subscribed to the board to be notified when a deliverable has been completed or if there is an issue that needs to be addressed. Timelines can be easily adjusted based on the actual roll-out of engaging in the thesis process.
The template above allows students to track each section of their thesis and provides a more holistic perspective of upcoming deadlines. Subitems can be added for each deliverable if there are multiple elements required to complete a thesis section. Gmail and Online Docs integrations provide students with the ability to directly send emails and for thesis committee members to view changes to documents in real-time.
Developing Common Knowledge
Capstone projects are long-remembered, impactful experiences for students, as well as for faculty, staff, outside partners, and the targeted populations and problems — but what about the knowledge for the rest of us that weren’t involved? Where do best practices come from if not connection between processes and results across many projects? The tools that make running projects easier leave behind a rich record of goals, milestones, achievement, and results. We should be able to learn systematically from the shared and public records of all these projects. Student teams move in and out of projects so regularly, and each new iteration should add to the project achievements and learning.
Help with this knotty problem comes from Anand Bodapati of the Anderson School, who has joined the Epicenter as Director of Technology, and partnerships with the UC Institute of Prediction Technology, Helena, and the Smart Nations Foundation. Datamining, deep learning, and other knowledge discovery and management expertise are needed if we are to learn systematically from these student-driven efforts.
Each project provides opportunities for the team to hack smarter ways to get things done. We seed each workspace with basic templates shared to provide ease entry and hope the improvements each team makes will be shared with future projects. We intend to sponsor hackathons for students interested in developing useful macros, templates, and integrations, and the full resources of monday.com help system are available to us as well.
“We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.” — Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Now is the time for action. How do you want to change the world? The Epicenter is here to make it easier to seek opportunities, create coalitions within and across the university boundaries, manage projects to successful milestones, and turn them over to the next teams moving forward. The project teams just keep doing good and the Epicenter is here to help make your contributions a growing part of our permanent knowledge.