Mentor-Connect Mentor Peggie Weeks (center) listens to the grant proposal ideas of her mentees from Grayson College (Denison, Texas) and Albany Technical College (Albany, Georgia). Pictured from left to right, are Djuna Forrester, Alan McAdams, and Steven Davis from Grayson College, Weeks, and Joseph Ford, Chase Mumford, and Angela Davis from Albany Technical College. (Photo by David Hata)

Mentor-Connect's utilization of Advanced Technological Education (ATE) principal investigators as mentors and an array of technical resources has achieved some initial, promising results.

The 81 college teams in the first four Mentor-Connect cohorts increased the geographic diversity of colleges submitting proposals to the National Science Foundation's ATE program: the selected colleges are in regions within 27 different states where an ATE grant has either never been funded, or has not been funded in the past 10 years. Since NSF started the ATE program in 1993 its competitive review process has awarded ATE grants in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. However, many of these grants have gone to colleges in metropolitan areas, and often these institutions have received multiple ATE grants.

Evidence that Mentor-Connect is adding geographic diversity to NSF-ATE proposals comes from the fact that 55 of the 61 colleges in the first three Mentor-Connect cohorts submitted proposals to NSF.

Evidence that Mentor-Connect is improving the quality of NSF-ATE proposals is indicated by the following: 22 of the 36 colleges in the first two Mentor-Connect cohorts that submitted proposals in either October 2013 or 2014 have been awarded grants of approximately $200,000 each in the program track Small Grants for Institutions New to ATE. This 61% success rate exceeds the ATE's program-wide funding rate of 22%.

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For all of us in the ATE community some portion of our time is spent figuring out how to tell our project or center story – connecting with audiences and stakeholders about our work and the impact it’s having on students, faculty, institutions, and industry.  Let's face it, most of us already have a pretty full plate. Between activities related to the work outlined in our grants and responsibilities at our home institutions as well, (and little or no background in marketing) it can be difficult to add outreach into the mix.  It’s a situation most of us in the ATE community are familiar with – we are tasked with broadening the impact of our work by NSF through outreach and dissemination to appropriate audiences, but we don’t always have a concrete plan in place for how to go about it. That’s when it’s great to have access to best practice from a group like Hershey Cause Communications who have created an array of wonderful toolkits, guides, and other materials specifically designed with non-profits in mind.

Tara Willis obtained her "dream job" of working with deep sea explorer Robert Ballard through participation in the MATE Center's ROV competition and At-Sea Internship programs.

Tara Willis was "that giddy little kid" who thought Robert Ballard's deep sea exploration of the RMS Titanic in 1985 "was so amazing" and something she would like to do.

She didn't act on that idea until she was in her 30s and taking an elective robotics course at Long Beach City College. It led to her participation in the international competition for underwater robots, also known as remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), sponsored by the Marine Advanced Technology Education (MATE) Center. MATE obtained support from the National Science Foundation's Advanced Technological Education program, the Marine Technology Society, and several marine companies to start the competitions in 2001. The competition continues to grow with support from dozens of organizations and participation by students from schools and colleges around the world.

The competition experience was so positive that Willis applied for an At-Sea Internship through MATE. None other than Ballard's E/V Nautilus team selected her.

"Out of that internship, I've actually been hired as one of their mainstay contract pilots," Willis said. In the summer of 2015 she helped pilot the research vessel’s ROV Hercules and ROV Argus when they explored the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean. In the past she was part of the Nautilus team when it sailed to the Mediterranean Sea, the Caribbean Sea, the Black Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico.

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The National Science Foundation (NSF) requires grantees to demonstrate broader impacts in an effort to ensure the NSF's mission: "To promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense; and for other purposes." This means that outreach and dissemination efforts are critical for fulfilling the requirements and goals of our Advanced Technological Education (ATE) grants. But, how do we ethically use the works of others to develop and share the curriculum components and other educational materials produced by our projects or centers? And how do we make sure that our own works are protected?

Here are eight resources related to intellectual property (IP) and copyright that may help address these issues: 

Copyright in Education Flowchart

"Can I use material I found online for teaching or school work?" This illuminating infographic answers the question in a step-by-step guide, identifying what material can - and cannot - be used for teaching or school purposes. There are also sections on licensing one's own media, how to think about whether it might be feasible to claim fair use, and instructions for how to ethically and legally claim fair use in certain circumstances.

While leading a tour of Irvine Valley College's labs on February 10, Microbiology Professor Emalee Mackenzie tells c3bc Project Director Russ H. Read about her plans to add medical device manufacturing courses to the biotech offerings in Orange County, California.

As Microbiology Professor Emalee Mackenzie took in the scene of 36 medical device industry representatives and bioscience academicians in Irvine Valley College's conference space, she could not help smiling. She was happy that the professional connections she made through MentorLinks led to her hosting the Fifth Medical Device Skill Standards Meeting on February 10.

"It's all those connections, and meeting them at ATE ... that have been tremendous. Vivian opened doors and made all this possible," Mackenzie said, referring to the introductions Vivian Ngan-Winward, her MentorLinks mentor, provided at the 2015 ATE Principal Investigators Conference.

MentorLinks is a technician education program improvement initiative that the American Association of Community College offers with support from the National Science Foundation's Advanced Technological Education program. MentorLinks pairs a college team that is working on a new or revamped STEM program with a community college educator who has expertise in the target discipline for a two-year period.

All of us at ATE Central are avid readers of the reports, surveys, and publications created by the Pew Research Center; not only is the research timely and varied, but the reports are a pleasure to read and chock full of graphics and tables that highlight research results in smart and applicable ways. We’ve showcased other Pew reports here in the ATE@20 blog and today we’re pointing you to two reports that came out last year. Not only do we hope they will be of interest and useful to the whole ATE community, but we hope they’ll be of interest to your colleagues, administrators, friends and students, too. Please feel free to share this blog post with others who you think might find them useful!

Students at the 2015 Sustainable Energy Practicum with the devices they made with readily available materials.

The Sustainable Energy Technology Program Enhancement at Missoula College offers a unique opportunity to learn about renewable energy technologies in Montana.

The two-week practicum combines high-level technical instruction with practical approaches to energy challenges. For instance, one of the class activities last summer used soda cans to build photovoltaic cells for residential solar energy systems.

Several $1,500 stipends are available for two-year college faculty and high school teachers to attend the program. Applications will be accepted from February 15 to May 15. The program will be offered from June 13 to 24 at Missoula College in Missoula, Montana, and from June 27 to July 8 at Blackfeet Community College in Browning, Montana. The Blackfeet Nation, which the college serves, is located at the gateway to Glacier National Park.

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At ATE Central, part of our goal is to help community members stay current with educational news, facts, and figures. Below are brief overviews of nine such resources, ranging from national research centers, such as the Brookings Institute, to ATE specific news and information resources, like the Evalu-ATE Annual Survey. Whether you are looking for material to help as you write up a report, create an informative presentation, or if you just want to stay up-to-date about news, events, and opportunities central to community and technical college education, we hope you find this list helpful. 

The Brookings Institute and the Pew Research Center are perhaps the most well-known and visited sites covered on this list. Nevertheless, they are worth mentioning and future exploration. The Brookings Institute is a nonprofit organization devoted to independent research and innovative policy solutions; the Pew Research Center identifies as a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about important issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world. Together, they are both engaged in social science research that is informative and helpful for members of the ATE community. Readers need look no further to find everything from articles on the economic situation across the nation to infographics on changing student demographics.

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As a student in the Advancing Inclusive Manufacturing program, Joshua Kimmel helped create a truly revolutionary device.

He and a staff machinist at the Human Engineering Research Laboratories (HERL) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,  worked together to design a bicycle-style hand brake that is level with Kimmel's lap as he sits in his wheelchair. With this innovation Kimmel and other manufacturing technicians with limited mobility do not have to stretch from their wheelchair seats past moving spindles and blades to shut off the milling equipment. Dalton Relich, the machinist and technical assistant at HERL, said brakes on mills have been above the shoulders of standing operators for hundreds of years.

"That is actually why I jumped into the program so wholeheartedly—is because the difficulties I encountered while I was going through the program, working in the machine shop, I was able to sit down behind the computer and draw up and design different technologies to assist myself and maybe even future participants," Kimmel said.

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ATE project and center PIs and staff understand first hand the reach and impact of community colleges and a recent report from the American Association of Community Colleges helps provide compelling evidence of the breadth and depth of community college’s positive effects on both the US economy and individual students.  

The eighty-eight page report (Where Value Meets Values) is chock full of useful data and analysis and provides an overview of public community colleges’ impact on the national economy and the return on investment for students, society at large, and individual taxpayers.

Community colleges contributed $809 billion to the United States economy in 2012. This number is equal to 5.4 percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Or the entire GDP of the Netherlands. Or more than twice the net worth of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The authors also estimate that for every dollar community college students spend on tuition, they stand to gain $4.80 in increased future wages. This translates into a rate of return of 17.8% - a far cry from bank account interest rates.