The College of Engineering & Applied Science at the University of Colorado Boulder proposes a low-cost, online, accredited Bachelor of Science in Engineering (BSE) degree. The BSE will provide a pathway for community college (CC) students, or students with similar transfer credits, to complete a degree in engineering at a cost similar to attending CC. The educationally underserved communities across Colorado are often low-income, racially and ethnically diverse, and rural; the BSE's primary goal is to provide access to an engineering education for these students and, thus, open pathways to high-demand, high-wage careers. The BSE will reach an underserved population of learners who can stay in their local community while simultaneously pursuing an engineering education. A fully online, ABET-accredited engineering degree is surprisingly novel-only nine other online engineering degrees in the nation are accredited-but an R1-level university degree at a near-community-college cost is unprecedented. The BSE will invite the institution's best instructors to innovate in online education-virtual labs, team-based projects, flipped asynchronous discussions, and hybrid-learning activities. Student success support will include wrap-around advising to foster the development of the academic, affective, financial, and career support that students need to succeed in engineering. The BSE will utilize five administrative affordances: 1) success coaches to provide wrap-around support and guidance to students; 2) course facilitators who provide personalized support; 3) stackable credentials; 4) eight-week semesters, allowing students to quickly complete portions of their education; and 5) mentorship programming to foster community and to help students develop their (inter)disciplinary identity. The online BSE creates a new pathway for underserved students to matriculate to a flagship public research university for a degree in engineering. This work-in-progress outlines the proposed structure and characteristics of a pilot program for the BSE, and the authors invite feedback and discussion about the value and framework of such a program.

Fostering an effective learning environment in large classes is a challenge: instructors and teaching assistants are stretched thin across many students, students often lack opportunities for personal interaction with course staff, and the size of the classes makes them seem impersonal. Furthermore, students in large classes can often find solutions to their labs and assignments online or copy them from other students, diminishing their impetus to learn and raising plagiarism concerns.

Plants can have positive effects on each other in numerous ways, including protection from harsh environmental conditions. This phenomenon, known as facilitation, occurs in water-stressed environments when shade from larger shrubs protects smaller annuals from harsh sun, enabling them to exist on scarce water. The topic of this paper is a model of this phenomenon that allows search algorithms to find residential landscape designs that incorporate facilitation to conserve water. This model is based in botany; it captures the growth requirements of real plant species in a fitness function, but also includes a penalty term in that function that encourages facilitative interactions with other plants on the landscape. To evaluate the effectiveness of this approach, two search strategies--simulated annealing and agent-based search--were applied to models of different collections of simulated plant types and landscapes with different light distributions. These two search strategies produced landscape designs with different spatial distributions of the larger plants. All designs exhibited facilitation and lower water use than designs where facilitation was not included.