The National Information and Communications Technologies (NICT) Resource Center has developed an ICT Community of Practice (CoP) that impacts four distinct, yet intertwined, audiences: community college faculty and administration, community college students, industry representatives, and ICT-focused ATE centers and projects. The Center differs from other ATE centers in that it focuses on institutional processes of ATE centers and projects that result in sustainability of programs and long-term impacts on technician education. Past work has emphasized three major types of activities: 1) building community by working with other centers and projects; 2) empowering others by using social media and emerging technologies to generate discussion and share resources; and 3) connecting centers and industry to leverage knowledge within the community and beyond. In this extension, the Center continues these activities, but also focuses on collecting evidence that developing CoPs and working with other centers and projects positively impacts the quality of technician education.
The evaluation plan details questions that directly track how process-oriented resource-sharing "the essence of CoPs" improves organizational efficiencies and leads to lasting changes in: 1) the management of the centers and projects; 2) the way that centers and projects interact with each other, with other community colleges and industry to sustain the objectives of the ATE program; and 3) the way that they interact with their students. The evaluation of this transitional year also focuses on: 1) identifying the changes that occurred in the behavior and operations of ATE centers and projects after seeking guidance from the ICT Center and the CoP; 2) tracking how these changes lead to improvements in technician education; and 3) identifying how the improvements impacted students.
The strength of the ATE program is that it is a community and not just a series of projects. The community is established and nurtured by having a few projects and centers that mainly work with other projects and centers. This proposal studies the extent to which communities of practice can lead to outcomes that improve scientific and technical education at associate degree-granting institutions.
For 17 years the ICT Center/ICT Community of Practice (CoP) was a unique entity within the NSF ATE Program because it served as a resource center not only to ICT faculty, staff, and administrators, but it provided guidance and mentoring to other ATE centers and projects seeking to strengthen their infrastructure as well as their information sharing capabilities. Within that second "tier" of resource sharing with other centers and projects, the ICT Center/ICT CoP functioned as an ATE resource metacenter: it conducted work that was of value to the ATE community and strengthened the ability of other ATE centers and projects to better, more efficiently produce demonstrable positive outcomes. Its existence has strengthened the ATE community by promoting an open environment that encourages an interdisciplinary approach to utilizing a community of practice to grow operations and increase impact on technician education. If new centers and projects have solid foundations in their startup, management, and operation practices, they will have increased capacity to educate more technicians. If existing centers and projects are able to scale up their efforts in education and improve how they are able to communicate and disseminate their findings with other projects and centers, the entire ATE community’s knowledge base is strengthened. And if centers and projects build alliances and collaborations with industry representatives and subject matter experts, students associated with those centers and projects will have improved understanding of their chosen occupation as well as improved connections with potential employers. The ICT Center as a resource center has influenced the ATE community at all levels, from project/center design to classroom impact. The ICT CoP National Resource Center: Built a national network of colleges, subject matter experts, and business and industry with the goal of improving the national K14 ICT educational pipeline, providing professional development for community college faculty, partnering with subject matter experts to incorporate the latest research and technology into technician education programs, and disseminating best practices in pedagogical approaches to community colleges. Assisted ATE centers and projects seeking organizational technical assistance in reaching NSF expectations by providing resources and expertise. The Center’s core mission of supporting ICT technician education efforts remained central. In addition, the ICT Center explored new ways of transcending disciplinary limitations to assist ICT enabled and non ICT specific centers and projects with guidance in other areas of proven expertise, including organizational management, CoP development and implementation, evaluation, and the incorporation of emerging technologies into various facets of center operations and outreach. As a recognized thought and practice leader in ICT technician education, the ICT Center brought together academia and industry to project what skill sets will be needed by ICT technicians in the coming years (as opposed to what is needed right now). By bringing together key players, the Center was able to address a critical need: making technician education relevant to the workplace. As part of the ICT CoP, faculty, administrators, and members of the business and industry community leveraged each other’s expertise, connections, and experience to accelerate development and change processes. Increased academic and business and industry involvement in the CoP grew the pool of subject matter expertise available to all participants, and increased the diversity of thought within the CoP. An importance distinction in the role the ICT Center served within the ATE community is its evolution from an output oriented (producing curriculum, dissemination, etc.) perspective to one that was process oriented, that is, one that focused on institutional processes of ATE centers and projects that result in sustainability of programming and long term impacts on technician education. As stated in the 2003 CCRC report Institutionalization and Sustainability of the National Science Foundation’s Advance Technological Education Program, "It may be that innovations in teaching and program design can take root only through changes in the organization and culture of educational institutions, the nature of the interactions within those institutions, and the relationships among educational institutions and among colleges, businesses, and other community stakeholders." It is through this lens of resource sharing that the ICT Center defined its role as an ATE Resource Center: one that assisted other ATE projects and centers in their process oriented activities that ultimately improved their long term sustainability and value to the ATE community. As the report recommended nearly a decade ago, "bringing about organizational and cultural change is much more difficult than producing curricula and programs, but if change is successful, then sustainability would be more likely to take care of itself." The ICT Center built a successful, efficient infrastructure to assist other centers and projects to bring about their own organizational and cultural changes through its ICT community of practice.
