The Inclusive Engineering Consortium Stakeholders' Workshop

North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University, Greensboro NC

Investigators

Abstract

The Inclusive Engineering Consortium (IEC) is planning a workshop for its stakeholders from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) to be held at the Oregon Intel Campus in July 2019. IEC represents a collection of 20+ Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) programs whose overall vision is to be a collaboration of Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) Working as One to Advance the ECE Enterprise. It is organized as a virtual super department with broadly based strengths in education, scholarship and service. Collectively, IEC can function as the equal of any ECE program, accomplish more and have a greater impact on its students, faculty and staff through access to resources and opportunities not available individually. It is the earliest of days for IEC and essential that all stakeholders fully participate in creating the organizational support structure and initial activities necessary to realize IEC's grand vision. This workshop will begin IEC's efforts to more fully engage MSIs in the US education and research enterprise; graduate more and better prepared minority engineers; increase efficiency and productivity at MSIs; and develop a sustainable and effective infrastructure to support minority students, faculty and staff at all universities. In time, the IEC group will grow and the model being developed can be replicated and implemented for other disciplines. Over the last 6 years, a collaboration of 13 HBCU ECE programs has been working together to implement Experiment Centric Pedagogy (ECP) to improve the student learning experience at all partner institutions. The lessons learned and best practices of this effort encouraged the 13 partners to expand the scope of their collaboration to address the full learning and working experience of students, faculty and staff and to expand the group to include other minority serving institutions with ECE and similar programs. Recently, the group has expanded to include two additional HBCUs and two HSIs and is in discussions to add several more. Key to the success of this collaboration is the development of a solid virtual working community of practice through regular meetings including weekly video conferencing and workshops usually held at one of the partner institutions; online resource sharing, and highly collaborative publication/dissemination of results, notably at ASEE conferences. While the original 13 partners continue to solidify and sustain the impact of ECP on improving the learning experiences of their students and the newly augmented group is developing new technical research collaborations, a leadership working group is exploring how to realize the most effective working infrastructure for the evolving consortium. By identifying the primary barriers to future success, it has become clear that a new support organization is necessary if MSI collaborations, like ECP, are to work together as one. With the assistance of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association (ECEDHA), the group has created a new Inclusive Engineering Consortium, consisting of a core group of collaborators and a much larger group of affiliated members from other universities, industry and professional societies. The first face-to-face meeting of the IEC in July 2019 will be organized in coordination with the Intel (IEC's first founding partner) HBCU Consortium Meeting. Planned sessions include Broad Appeal Programs; Investment in Leaders/Future Leaders; Strategic Connections; Infrastructure; and Building IEC. 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.