NSF Award
2019308
The Inclusive Engineering Consortium is a novel collaboration among the 15 accredited Electrical and Computer Engineering programs at the nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities and 2 Hispanic Serving Institutions. The overall Consortium vision is to be a collaboration of Minority Serving Institutions working as one to advance the Electrical and Computer Engineering enterprise. It is organized as a virtual multi-university super department with broadly based strengths in education, scholarship and service. Collectively, the Consortium can function as the equal of any Electrical and Computer Engineering program, accomplish more and have a greater impact on its students, faculty and staff through access to resources and opportunities not available to its members individually. Thus, the Consortium enables research and educational collaboration of teams from its partners working as peers with faculty, staff and students from the largest research-intensive universities in the United States. A full-day workshop at the 2020 annual meeting of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association in Orlando, Florida, brings Consortium members together with academic leaders in Electrical and Computer Engineering throughout the country. This workshop is a major step in testing strategies developed within the Consortium to more fully and productively engage joint cross-institutional teams in the US education and research enterprise. <br/><br/>The majority of Inclusive Engineering Consortium members participated in the National Science Foundation-funded Experimental Centric Pedagogy project. Through this experience, Consortium member institutions have developed a culture of collaboration with effective methods of implementation. This initial collaboration is being leveraged and extended. The hypothesis is that there are windows of opportunity open through the establishment of research and educational collaborations between Consortium members with research-intensive institutions. This is especially true since its member institutions serve a unique population of minority students. The Consortium is developing the infrastructure and programs to facilitate collaborations between faculty, students and staff among its member departments based on lessons learned from the successful Experiment Centric Pedagogy educational program and, more generally, the science of team science. It is also addressing how best to build a different type of team structure with research-intensive universities, industry, and other external constituencies. Preparation for the workshop includes defining and refining a process and set of tools for successful collaboration with each type of partner, especially research-intensive universities. The workshop activities are structured to test the collaboration process and tools for research-intensive universities by actively engaging Consortium partner faculty with department heads from research-intensive universities and other faculty attending the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association meeting. This is an important step in creating the organizational support structure and activities necessary to realize the Consortium’s grand vision of graduating more and better prepared minority engineers, increasing efficiency and productivity at Minority Serving Institutions, and developing a sustainable and effective infrastructure to support minority students, faculty and staff at all universities. In time, as the Consortium grows beyond the disciplines of Electrical and Computer Engineering, this model can be replicated and implemented for other areas of engineering education.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
