IndianaUniversity proposes a planning project for the creation of the Indiana Stars (IN-STARS) Alliance, which will leverage the already existing STARS Alliance model. The alliance will include research intensive universities, Indiana's community college system, residential campuses, commuter campuses, urban locations, as well as more rural locations. The alliance includes Techpoint, Indiana's statewide information technology consortium. Each educational member of the alliance brings different strengths and student populations, with a wide range of degrees, including computer science, computer information systems, information technology, and informatics. IN-STARS will provide enhanced opportunities for traditionally under-represented students in computing by creating strong local networks of students within each of the alliance institutions, and strengthening the support mechanism for this critical population of students by creating online social networks, and statewide conferences to bridge the local networks.
The focus of alliance planning activities will be to design programs that will create increased awareness of opportunities to be gained by majoring in computing. Over the course of the planning project, the PIs will design specific outreach programs for the IN-Stars Leadership Corps students and design a combination of approaches aimed at taking advantage of each alliance members? strengths. Outreach activities envisioned in this alliance include precollegiate summer programs, a statewide conference for the students participating as Stars leaders, a statewide conference for high school students, programs specifically geared for exploratory students already attending a particular college or university, all supported by development of social networks to link students, and co-curricular programs. A major component of the planning process is to establish detailed assessment programs, which will be designed to be coordinated with the existing STARS Alliance data collection efforts to provide enhanced understanding of the impacts of this approach locally and nationally. The PIs will disseminate the detailed plan to the computing community, to support and enhance other organizations and programs seeking to broaden participation in computing via the BPC-LSA approach.
