2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Board 428: Utilization of Social Management Theoretical Framework and Program Management Tool to Successfully Manage Large Multi-Department STEM Projects

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session

The Adapting an Experiment-centric Teaching Approach to Increase Student Achievement in Multiple STEM Disciplines (ETA-STEM) NSF program is an experiment-focused hands-teaching teaching pedagogy developed to promote motivation and academic achievement across seven STEM disciplines. The program is a large educational program with multi-Department STEM projects comprising about 200 tasks and 40 personnel. To facilitate the successful implementation of the ETA-STEM program, an efficient project management tool called Smartsheet was adopted to manage all the tasks to be carried out and the activities involved. The Smartsheet software has helped to efficiently facilitate project coordination, scheduling deliverables, communicating with and assigning tasks to project team members, monitoring tasks performance, and evaluation. The Smartsheet is a project management tool developed for coordinating and monitoring project activities, promoting productive guidance, efficient communication, appropriate supervision of the project team, optimization of the allocated necessary inputs, and their application to meeting the program’s objectives. The paper describes the functions and the operations of this tool utilized in managing the ETA-STEM project for the past three years. Additionally, the paper elaborates on the social management theoretical framework on which the project management principles are hinged. The impactful outcomes of the ETA-STEM program in increasing academic performance as well as improving key constructs associated with student success such as motivation, epistemic and perceptual curiosity, engineering identity, and self-efficacy presented in the paper reveal an efficient management strategy anchored on the the social management theoretical framework and facilitated by the project management tool.

Authors

Dr. Oludare Adegbola Owolabi Morgan State University [biography]

Dr. Oludare Owolabi, a professional engineer in Maryland, joined the Morgan State University faculty in 2010. He is the director of the Sustainable Infrastructure Development, Smart Innovation and Resilient Engineering Research Lab at Morgan State University.
Mr. Pelumi Olaitan Abiodun http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4969-9591 Morgan State University [biography]

Pelumi Abiodun is a current doctoral student and research assistant at the Department of Civil Engineering, Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland. Pelumi got his BSc and MSc degree in Physics from Obafemi Awolowo University, where he also served as a research assistant at the Environmental Pollution Research unit, in Ile-Ife, Nigeria. As part of his contribution to science and engineering, Pelumi has taught as a teaching assistant both at Morgan State University and Obafemi Awolowo University. With a passion to communicate research findings gleaned from experts in the field as he advances his career, Olaitan has attended several in-person and virtual conferences and workshops, and at some of them, made presentations on findings on air pollution, wastewater reuse, and heavy metal contamination.
Adekemisola Olufunmilayo Asahiah Morgan State University
Hannah Abedoh Morgan State University
Dr. Mehdi Shokouhian http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9823-0661 Morgan State University [biography]

Dr. Shokouhian is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Civil Engineering, Morgan State University. His research focuses on performance-based design of structures made of high performance steel and concrete using theoretical, numerical and experimen
Neda Bazyar Shourabi Pennsylvania State University, Berks
Dr. Krishna Bista [biography]

Krishna Bista is an Associate Professor at Morgan State University, Maryland (USA).
Dr. Uttam Gaulee http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3010-2812
Dr. Md Mahmudur Rahman Morgan State University [biography]

Dr. Mahmudur Rahman received his PhD in Computer Science in 2008 from Concordia University, Montreal, Canada with an emphasis on Medical informatics and Image Retrieval. Prior to joining as an Assistant Professor at Morgan State University in 2014, Dr. Rahman extensively conducted research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), USA for almost six years as a Research Scientist. He significantly contributed to research and development of the image processing, classification, and retrieval methods extensively used in the NLM’s Open-i Search Engine for biomedical literature.
Dr. Rahman has good expertise in the fields of Computer Vision, Image Processing, Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, and Data Mining and their application to retrieval of biomedical images from large collections. Since joining Morgan, Dr. Rahman also has been actively involved in basic educational and instructional research by infusing several interactive and active learning techniques in classroom to teach introductory programming courses with a goal to improve the retention rate in the CS department.
Dr. Rahman has published a book, two book chapters and around seventy articles in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, such as IEEE Transaction on Information Technology in Biomedicine, Computerized Medical Imaging and Graphics, etc. and presented his works in numerous conferences and workshops, such as ICPR, CBMS, CLEF, CIVR, HISB, SPIE, BIBE, IEEE FIE, etc. His current research is focusing on Crowdsourcing and Deep learning techniques and their application in medical fields, especially for retrieval and diagnostic purposes.

Pursuing continuous financial support is an integral part of Dr. Rahman’s research agenda
Over the years, Dr. Rahman ¬received (as both PI and Co-PI) several competitive grants for both Imaging Informatics and Applied Machine Learning based research and also Instructional (CS Education) research, such as NSF HBCU-UP and NSF HBCU IUSE grants, and also several internal grants form MSU, such as ASCEND, I-Gap, etc.
Dr. Jumoke 'Kemi' Ladeji-Osias http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8645-696X National Science Foundation [biography]

Dr. J. 'Kemi Ladeji-Osias is the Deputy Division Director in the US National Science Foundation Division of Engineering Education.
Dr. Olushola V. Emiola-Owolabi Morgan State University

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