CC* CRIA: Building CI Strategies and Capacity at the Tribal Colleges

American Indian Higher Education Consortium, Alexandria VA

Investigators

Abstract

The AIHEC CC* CRIA project: Building CI Strategies and Capacity at the Tribal Colleges, addresses the issue of bringing the nation’s 37 Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) into the national cyberinfrastructure-enabled STEM research and education community. This comprehensive CI strategy focuses on CI training, planning and community-building involving both STEM faculty and TCU IT organizations, advancing the capacity of TCU faculty and students to participate in the national STEM research and education infrastructure. CI research and education stakeholders participating in the project include Internet 2, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), the Center for Computationally Assisted Science and Technology (CCAST), the University of Colorado Boulder Research Computing Center, and the Oklahoma University Supercomputing Center or Education and Research (OSCER). The project implements a cost-effective model for broadening participation of an important historically underrepresented population in STEM. The project implements a connectivist model of knowledge management in which interactions among members of a network adaptively distribute resources needed to support individual and group activities to achieve common goals of the network membership. In this project, TCU STEM faculty and IT professionals and national CI STEM domain-specific researchers comprise this extended adaptive network. Project-related activities involve interactions within the network (e.g. training events, work with data analytic tools) that generate new knowledge and skills, build the collective capacity of the TCU members of the network to develop, implement and support research and education programming. Capacity-building interactions among members of this extended network include knowledge-sharing, mentoring and collaborative problem-solving. 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.