2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

According to the National Science Foundation website, the Directorates for Engineering (ENG) and STEM Education (EDU) fund projects through the Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED program in order to support:

"revolutionary new approaches to engineering education, ranging from changing the canon of engineering to fundamentally altering the way courses are structured to creating new departmental structures and educational collaborations with industry. A common thread across these projects is a focus on organizational and cultural change within the departments, involving students, faculty, staff, and industry in rethinking what it means to provide an engineering program." (nsf.gov)

Included among the three tracks for funding, the Two-Year Colleges track is intended to “develop radically new approaches among multiple two-year institutions to expand the path to engineering and engineering technology.” Clearly the NSF holds high aspirations for community college systems in the US, and the level of funding offered through the RED program could help faculty and administrators in those systems make significant changes. Over the two years when the RED Two-Year Colleges funding track has been offered, however, only one proposal was funded, from a consortium including Truckee Meadows Community College, the University of Nevada, Reno, Great Basin College, and Western Nevada College, all in Northern Nevada. As the team that collaborated on that proposal, we believe we can help faculty and administrators interested in applying for RED Two-Year Colleges funding to learn more about the program and understand how a RED proposal differs from other NSF proposals.

In this paper, we will document the various challenges that we encountered when preparing a RED proposal. Specifically, we focus on three aspects of the RED solicitation that may at first mystify proposal writing teams. First, the solicitation states “RED Two-Year projects must work with their education researcher and organizational change expert to develop a research plan…” (nsf23553.pdf). Our writing team struggled with identifying an “organizational change expert” who understood the two-year college context and thus had a change model appropriate to our setting. Second, we were challenged by the requirement that we as project participants focus on educational research, rather than the practical concerns of improving the “student professional formation experience.” Third, we needed to create a vision for our “revolution,” an activity that we knew was important but was something we had not attempted before.

In addition to sharing our experiences in proposing and winning a Two-Year Colleges RED, we will share the results of our proposed virtual workshop in which we plan to share the lessons learned and practical suggestions for two-year college administrators, faculty, and staff who are contemplating a RED proposal. We anticipate that our virtual workshop will be delivered in the spring of 2024. Based on the RED Webinar series that was delivered in 2017 (https://academicchange.org/nsf-red-webinar/) and adapted specifically for the two-year college context, we plan to expand access to the RED funding mechanism through online resources. Because two-year colleges represent a key component in the engineering education ecosystem, we hope to support and encourage others to join the RED community.

Note: this proposal is not endorsed by the National Science Foundation but instead reflects the insights and knowledge gained by the proposal team as they prepared and then were awarded the first Two-Year RED project funding.