Karl Smith (University of Minnesota) Ann McKenna (Arizona State University) Christopher Swan (Tufts University)
PROJECT DESCRIPTION This project is addressing the longstanding challenge of enacting educational transformation. It is taking an entrepreneurial approach to help NSF PI teams develop strategies to propagate and scale their funded educational innovations. This pilot project builds on the National Science Foundation (NSF) I-Corps program, which was launched in 2011, and refocuses the efforts on educational activities. The team is creating an I-Corps for Learning (I-Corps-L) model to provide a program for NSF-funded researchers and their teams to evaluate the sustainable scalability potential of their educational activities. The I-Corps-L team is developing and delivering an eight-week course of study designed to teach teams the business model design and customer development process, based on the Lean Launchpad approach developed by Steve Blank (who, along with Jerry Engel, will also serve as a consultant to the project).
NSF is supporting 10 grantees drawn from the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), Education and Human Resources (EHR), and Engineering (ENG) directorates in the fall of 2013. The ten exemplary projects have been selected by program officers and focus on key STEM concepts/courses/practices that address potential roadblocks to STEM undergraduate student success.
The I-Corps-L program goals are to work with these teams to accomplish the following: 1) Give the team an experiential learning opportunity to help determine the readiness of their innovation for sustainable scalability. Sustainable scalability involves a self-supported entity that is sustainable and systematically promotes the adoption of the educational innovation and enables and facilitates its use. 2) Enable the team to develop a clear go/no-go decision regarding sustainable scalability of the innovation. 3) Develop a transition plan and actionable tasks to move the innovation forward to sustainable scalability.
This project has the potential for achieving the elusive goal of educational transformation through propagation and scale of educational innovations. The team participants leave the program with an expanded set of skills and knowledge that provide them with the tools necessary to evaluate and translate their research into applications that can benefit society. This effort has a strong potential for having a transformative impact on STEM education.
BROADER SIGNIFICANCE The principal objective of the project is to foster an entrepreneurial mindset within the education community, so the community has the potential to impact the way education innovations are designed and implemented. The project is encouraging other educational enthusiasts to leverage the outcomes of this pilot to create a broad scale impact. The results of the project can be implemented at many institutions, having the potential to significantly improve the retention and graduation of STEM students nationwide.
The project is conducting an evaluation that will study the program's delivery, impact, and the effectiveness. A group of thirteen research questions concerning the program are being studied, with the results presented at the 2014 ASEE Annual Conference and published in the Journal of Engineering Education. The evaluation effort is being led by Dr. Gary Lichtenstein, who is an expert in mixed-methods research and has participated in research and evaluation studies in STEM education for over a decade. Ultimately, this pilot project is developing a model for conducting training workshops that result in widespread use of educational innovations to improve STEM learning.
