The Inclusive Engineering Consortium (IEC) is a novel collaboration among fifteen Electrical and Computer Engineering programs at Historically Black Colleges and Universities and two at Hispanic Serving Institutions. Participating institutions include Alabama A&M University, Ana G. Mendez University at Gurabo, Florida A&M University, Hampton University, Howard University, Jackson State University, Morgan State University, Norfolk State University, North Carolina A&T State University, Prairie View A&M University, Southern University, Tennessee State University, Tuskegee University, University of Maryland Eastern Shore, University of Texas at El Paso, University of the District of Columbia, and Virginia State University. Member schools are among the top producers of African American and Hispanic engineering graduates. These schools have been working to build a support organization to enable the participating faculty, students and staff to engage fully in the national education and research enterprise through multi-institutional collaboration. The unprecedented stress as campus operations moved online due to the COVID-19 pandemic creates the need to capture the experiences of the member communities. Lessons will be learned and applied in the summer and fall as universities work to improve the learning experiences of their students and continue to respond to the extraordinary disruptions caused by the pandemic. In addition to enhancing distance education efforts, nearly every tool used and every idea applied will be a potential candidate to further build the support infrastructure, programs and processes that can make it possible for the nascent IEC to realize its vision of enabling its partners to act in concert as a virtual super department.
The current project builds on two successful IEC collaborations funded by the National Science Foundation: the Experimental Centric Pedagogy (ECP) project and the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU)/Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) Mega Site. The ECP project prioritized hands-on experimentation in the circuits and/or electronics courses of thirteen collaborating institutions. With the transition to online learning, the treatment is now distance delivery and learning and the enabling technologies include tools for online meetings, forums, homework and quizzes and other distance delivery compatible tools. The data collection protocols and instruments developed for the ECP will be deployed to study and improve student learning under virtual conditions. The Mega Site serves as a national model for how to broaden participation in engineering by successfully implementing multi-institution undergraduate research programs, which others can adopt/adapt and build upon. Now in its second year, the Mega Site will be offered as a scaled back, online program in summer 2020 and faculty, teachers and students are well positioned to participate in data collection activities to better understand the impact on critical workforce development programs that take place outside of the classroom.
The great distance learning experiment is sweeping the nation’s colleges and universities. The Minority Serving Institutions who make up the Inclusive Engineering Consortium are uniquely positioned to rapidly capture the experiences of minority engineering students and their instructors. Leveraging the existing network of collaborators from seventeen universities significantly increases the potential to successfully develop and test a model for online learning environments in electrical and computer engineering courses that can be used in times of crisis.
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.
