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The Continuing and Distance Education programs were created to enable full time working professionals the opportunity to earn a Master of Engineering in Acoustics or to enhance individual knowledge while continuing to work full time. The Distance Education Program utilizes video streaming and is comprised of graduate level courses during the spring and fall semesters, in conjunction with the in-residence June Summer Program. Distance Education degree students usually begin course work as nondegree students and apply for degree status before completing 15 credits of nondegree work.

Student Classification

Degree Students are applicants who have applied and been admitted to graduate degree status by the Graduate School. Students in this category must satisfy all Graduate School and Acoustics Program requirements for the degree they are seeking.

NonDegree Students are those who have applied to and been accepted by the Graduate School into this category. They are permitted to take courses but are not considered to be pursuing a degree at Penn State. Nondegree students with a 3.0 or higher grade point average in courses taken as a nondegree student may apply at any time for admission to degree student status and, if accepted, may transfer to the degree program a maximum of 15 credits earned as a nondegree student.

Continuing Education Students are individuals who register for continuing education courses without credit and are not required to be admitted as either a degree or nondegree student. However, individuals who do not apply for degree or nondegree status will not have a transcript record at Penn State.

 

Scholarship and Research Integrity (SARI)

The SARI program at Penn State is designed to offer graduate students comprehensive, multilevel training in the responsible conduct of research (RCR), in a way that is tailored to address the issues faced by students in individual programs.

Beginning with the incoming class of 2009, all graduate students at Penn State are required to complete SARI requirements during their graduate program of study. The SARI Program has two parts:

1) During the first year of enrollment, Acoustics graduate students at University Park will complete an online RCR training program provided by the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI). The Office for Research Protections (ORP) provides the conduit to this training via the SARI Resource Portal in the ORP web site (www.research.psu.edu/orp/sari).

2) All Acoustics graduate students are required to engage in an additional five hours of discussion-based RCR education prior to degree completion. These discussions will encompass both universal and discipline-specific material. The Program has developed a unique plan for our graduate students to meet the requirement for discussion-based RCR education.

 

SARI Program Plan
Graduate Program in Acoustics Distance Education M. Eng. Program

Part 1: CITI online RCR training Program:

As our distance education M. Eng. students are not typically required to collect data and the data sets that they may use are usually provided for them or found on the web, the CITI online (RCR) training program requirement has been waived   In those rare cases where distance education student’s elect to use primary data, instructors and advisors will work one-on-one with the individual student to assure data is collected in a manner consistent with responsible and ethical practices or require the student to complete the CITI training. However, any distance education student wishes to complete the CITI on-line may do so. A copy of the CITI training certificate should be provided to the Acoustics Program coordinator.

 Part 2: Five hours of discussion-based RCR education:

The discussion requirement will be offered through a combined format of 2 hours of live participation in a mandatory orientation session, participation in two 1 hour live seminars in the Program’s Colloquium Class, and an individual student effort anticipated to require a minimum of 1 hour.  Orientation for distance education students will be in the first fall semester of or following their first enrollment as a degree student.  Participation in orientation and the Colloquium classes is made possible by the use of the Acoustics Program’s distance education delivery system, which video-streams classes live to the student’s computer.  However, because of such things as time conflicts (e.g. work schedules, various time zones, etc.), and possible employer prohibitions for using work computers or working hours for class attendance, students may not be available for the live session.  Considering these possible limitations, each live session will be archived and made available for students.  Access to the archives will be provided to each student and will be maintained for the semester in which the live session is delivered.  If a student must meet the requirement through archived sessions or classes, the student will be required to review the archive of each session/class missed and then provide to the appropriate instructor a reflective one-page summary of the issues covered.  

The fifth hour of discussion will be provided by individual student effort. Individual effort means each student will be required to identify a research oriented topic (such as authorship, fair use, copyright, plagiarism, human subjects, animal subjects, etc.), relevant to the entering student’s work/personal experience, locate and read an article covering that topic or write about a specific work/personal experience, and then submit to the Acoustics Programs SARI coordinator an article summary or work/personal experience write-up that includes a personally reflective brief of not more than one page.  All write-ups will be prepared in such a way as to protect the identity of the student, work place, and all participants.

            RCR topics for discussion will include:

By the middle of the first summer semester following enrollment, reflective summaries will be submitted to a faculty or staff member identified by the Program Head. The remaining fifth hour of discussion will be provided by individual student effort. Each student must identify a topic oriented to his or her work/personal experience, select and read a relevant article or provide a write-up of an ethical issue relevant to that work/personal experience, and then submit a reflective summary. All write-ups will be required to be written in such a way as to protect the identity of the student, the work site, and all participants in the situation.

Submitted reflective summaries will be uploaded, without the name of the student, to an on-line chat group including resident and distance education students. Students will be asked to read at least one other summary and submit a reflective comment on that summary. 

 

 

 

 

 

Graduate Program in Acoustics, The Pennsylvania State University