CC* Team: Piloting a CI-Enabled Tribal College and University Research Collaboration

American Indian Higher Education Consortium, Alexandria VA

Investigators

Abstract

The American Indian Higher Education Consortium and institutional partners Sitting Bull College, Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College, United Tribes Technical College Turtle Mountain Community College, Cankdeska Cikana Community College, and North Dakota State University are partnering on this Cyber Team project that establishes the socio-technical foundations of a cyberinfrastructure (CI)-enabled collaboration that will both support current STEM research and education programs and provide the framework for aggressive research program development. The project involves faculty, students and IT staff at the six participating institutions collaborating on CI improvements, IT staff capacity-building, and distributed STEM programming focused on environmental science, eventually including engineering, digital manufacturing and other STEM disciplines. The project will provide professional development, support, mentoring and collaborative research opportunities for faculty and students at all North Dakota Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs). The project will enhance opportunities for economic development and enhance the design and delivery of health, education, and other services developed through CI-enabled basic and applied research. It will serve as a model for engaging TCUs nationally in the adoption of CI resources necessary to support implementation of a significantly broader range of research and education activities, particularly involving collaborations with the larger research community. The project’s collaborative capacity-building framework implements the connectivist learning model in which networked human and physical resources constitute a complex adaptive system that generates actionable knowledge (both technical and domain-specific) sustainably. The project tests the hypothesis that a connectivist framework can be transformative in building the research and education capacity of small resource challenged institutions and organizations. 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.