The project is supporting the organization of a series of interactive web-based faculty development workshops to improve the participants' proposal writing skills for educational development projects that are submitted to the Transforming Undergraduate Education in STEM (TUES) Program and other NSF programs. The workshops, which are based on successful earlier efforts, are being presented by the engineering program directors of the Division of Undergraduate Education using webinar software. The principal investigator is organizing ten interactive-web-based proposal writing workshops with each involving 15-30 institutions and a 150-300 participants. He is scheduling the workshops, inviting all institutions with accredited engineering degree programs to participate, handling all questions and registration details, providing operational guidelines to local facilitators, and collecting and reviewing participant demographics and assessment data collected to improve the workshops. Working collaboratively, the investigator, the engineering program directors, and a panel of specially selected consultants are developing a TUES community of scholars program to raise engineering faculty awareness of the TUES Program, increase the number of TUES proposals, and aid engineering faculty to strengthen their TUES proposal writing skills. The broader impacts of this project include outreach to a large and diverse set of faculty who may not have access to proposal writing workshop in any other way. This enables a diverse group of faculty to become better prepared for writing more competitive proposals.
During the 2010-2011 Academic Year, the project presented a series of 17 web-based, interactive workshops to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), principally Engineering, faculty nationally to improve the number and quality of proposals submitted to the Transforming Undergraduate Education in STEM (TUES) Program (formerly the Course, Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement- CCLI Program). With noted exceptions, the workshops were presented by the Engineering Program Directors of the Division of Undergraduate Education, National Science Foundation facilitated by Louisiana State University and its Engineering Communication Studio. Invitations for institutions to participate in the workshop series were emailed to Deans and Associate Deans of Engineering at over 300 institutions nationally. Web pages were developed for workshop facilitators and participants to provide links to relevant documents and presentations. In fall 2010, a total of 4 workshops, two in each topic area, focused on strategies to prepare better quality proposals to the TUES Program and improve the project evaluation and broader impacts components of proposals. A fifth workshop gave participants the opportunity to participate in a virtual mock panel review. In spring 2011, a total of 10 NSF-led workshop sessions were presented, two each in the following topics: introduction to the TUES program; proposal writing strategies; project evaluation; and mock panel review. An additional 4 workshops were led by selected faculty in the areas of the scholarship of teaching and learning and the TUES 2 program. The workshops were presented in two 75 minute segments with an intermediate 15 minute break. The principal investigator coordinated the web-based workshops via GoToWebinar Internet conferencing software. Local facilitators at each of the participating institutional sites aided the Engineering Program Directors with moderating the Think-Pair-Share-Report exercises and the Question and Answer opportunities. On-line assessment surveys of the workshop participants and facilitators were conducted subsequent to each of the workshops. It is estimated that as many as 1500 faculty members participated in the workshops.
