The Application-Based Curriculum in Advanced Manufacturing (IACAM) project prepares students with integrated-manufacturing skills and enables them to meet 21st century workplace competency requirements. The project is developing an Integrated Manufacturing Technician curriculum model, creating a 'real-world' manufacturing-environment learning-lab, to provide development opportunities for college faculty through mentoring opportunities with secondary school teachers and guidance counselors who are working together to gain a better understanding of manufacturing technician needs.
The curriculum model features a student-centered program, which recruits, retains, and facilitates program completion, and tracks and measures enrollment, completion, and placement data. Students are advancing through their educational pathways by finishing courses, completing certificates, earning associate degrees, and achieving a transfer option into a bachelor's degree program. Within the curriculum, students begin by studying specialized machines performing complex tasks; electricity's role as the single largest provider of power; and controlling, collecting, processing, distributing and storing critical information about machines and processes. The automation's role is taught through integrating of Programmable Logic Controllers, computer networking systems, and robots. Teaching these skills is facilitated through integrated, applied projects-based and real-life knowledge and experience of employers and faculty. Intellectual merits are rooted in the comprehensive and integrated nature of the curriculum that is to bring all stakeholders together.
Project materials and results, including student learning outcomes, are being disseminated through presentations at state and national conferences, through the College website, and through mainstream media advertising. Broader impacts are evidenced in the dissemination efforts and appropriate training of the workforce.
