In-person classes in Allan Hancock College’s greenhouse and farm in fall 2020 helped grow ag science enrollments.

Enrollment in the agricultural science certificate and three agricultural degree programs – agricultural science, plant science, and agricultural business  – created with an ATE grant at Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria, California, grew in the past year while community college enrollments in California and nationally decreased.

For example, the number of declared agricultural science majors increased from 109 students in 2018-2019 – the first year of the program – to 317 in 2019-2020. During 2019-2020, the headcount enrollment in agricultural science was 465, a 172% increase from the year before when the headcount, which includes non-majors, was 171.

During 2020-2021 – the year of COVID-19 restrictions – the headcount enrollment in agricultural science courses increased to 529 students. That was a 14% increase at a time when overall headcount at Allan Hancock College decreased by 8%. Enrollment at U.S. community colleges dropped 9.4% from fall 2019 to fall 2020, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

“Anything agriculture happened as a direct result of the NSF ATE grant,” said Erin Krier, principal investigator of Creating Precision Agriculture and Crop Protection Pathways via Industry Partnerships (Award #1800889). Prior to Allan Hancock College receiving a $225,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s Advanced Technological Education program, the Central Coast college had an established viticulture and enology degree program that focuses on wine-making. However, it had only a smattering of courses in other aspects of agriculture. And none of those courses led to agriculture-specific credentials. 

“That grant launched the whole program,” Krier said.

A man in a button-down shirt types on a laptop.

Many members of the ATE Community are aware of the importance of creating accessible content, but how can you put that knowledge to use when promoting your project or center's work? Here are some quick tips and tools to optimize your web presence, social media content, and presentation materials for accessibility:

Format materials with accessibility in mind from the start. 

Whether you are writing web content, making presentation slides, or creating an accessible PDF, consider the clarity and navigability of your outreach materials right from the start. To ensure that your written content is understandable to all, make sure text gets your point across in a concise way that is comprehensible to a general audience. Avoid using acronyms or jargon, unless you are writing for a particular audience who has familiarity with these terms.

Design elements can also aid in getting information across. When formatting text, avoid creating uneven spaces between letters. Be sure to choose fonts that are easily legible on screens, such as sans serif fonts, which are easier to read at both small and large sizes. When creating hyperlinks, use meaningful text that describes the content, rather than general phrasing like “click here.” Format web pages with a defined and consistent visual hierarchy, so that information is grouped in logical ways that visually cue your reader on the relationships between content and the order of importance. In addition to layout cues, add headings using standard HTML to make navigating your site easier for those using screen readers.

Many softwares and web platforms offer tools that aid in accessibility. For example, Microsoft PowerPoint offers existing presentation templates for creating navigable slides. Presenters can also set slide content order, so that audience members using screen readers can move through the slide in the intended progression. This video tutorial provides a helpful overview of how to design presentations with accessibility in mind.

Sian Proctor visits Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in advance of the Inspiration4 launch.

Sian Proctor, a geoscience professor for more than 20 years at South Mountain Community College in Phoenix, Arizona, and current Mentor-Connect mentee, has been selected for Inspiration4. The three-day mission aboard a SpaceX rocket this autumn will be the first by an all-civilian crew of four.  

Proctor’s extraordinary resume of professional development and scientific explorations includes participating in Integrated Geospatial Education and Technology Training (iGETT), an Advanced Technological Education project funded in 2007 and 2012 by the National Science Foundation that was led by Osa Brand. Brand is currently a Mentor-Connect mentor and senior member of Mentor-Connect’s leadership team. Mentor-Connect is an ATE project led by Florence-Darlington Technical College in partnership with the American Association of Community Colleges.

Brand remembers Proctor from iGETT as “extremely capable, [She] showed very strong leadership qualities and was the kind of person who would brighten up a room as soon as she walked in.”

Ann Johnson, who was a co-principal investigator of iGETT and is now mentoring South Mountain Community College’s Mentor-Connect team, said Proctor was vying to become a NASA astronaut around the time that she was participating in iGETT. Proctor made it to NASA’s finalist round in 2009. 

“It’s wonderful that it’s a lifelong dream come true,” of Proctor’s selection by Inspiration4.

With the end of the semester just a few short weeks away, some in the ATE community may already be looking toward summer. Traditionally a time for camps, bridge programs, summer internships, faculty training opportunities, and an assortment of other curricular activities, this year’s programming may still be somewhat different from summers past. Nonetheless, programs are moving forward, whether online or in person, and many aspects - from planning to outreach, registration to evaluation - may well be much the same. 

In this From the Archive blog post we highlight some of the materials ATE grantees have created and shared with their peers and colleagues in planning, implementing, and evaluating successful summer camp programs. Our first resource looks at best practices for summer STEM camps and offers templates for others to adapt and adopt. Next up we have a paper discussing a youth summer camp at San Jacinto College with tips on creating one’s own camp. Finally, we present a collection of administrative documents that might be of interest to those planning a summer program.

xPonum is a puzzle game that teaches algebraic concepts.

Borough of Manhattan Community College Mathematics Professor Kathleen Offenholley is a math games maven. She sees art and playfulness in math and has long used hands-on games of her own creation in her courses as a vehicle to raise students’ interest in math.

“I find that especially for anxious students, games can take students out of their anxiety,” she said.

Educators can now access the three open-source digital games at Math Games for STEM, which she worked with professional game developers to create for the gatekeeper algebra course that STEM majors take at the Borough of Manhattan Community College.

The games are xPonum – a puzzle game; Algebots – an equation-solving game; and The Project Sampson – an adventure and resource management game.  “In all three, the math is intrinsic to the puzzle,” Offenholley said. Download the free games and educator guides at https://mathgamesforstem.wordpress.com/

Offenholley said the games were extremely effective when tested in a summer immersion program for in-coming geographic information systems (GIS) majors, who were the focus of her ATE project: Simulation-Based Curriculum to Accelerate Math Remediation and Improve Degree Completion for STEM Majors (Award # 1501499). The free algebra textbook that she and colleagues also developed for this project is at math56oer.wordpress.com.

Image of Nancy Maron

For those of us in the ATE community sustainability is a topic woven into our projects and centers from the start. Anyone who writes an ATE proposal has to include a section about how they hope to sustain at least some portion of their activities and resources. As work progresses, the PI and team considers how best to sustain project or center deliverables—a summer institute, industry tours, a faculty professional development series—beyond NSF funding. Particularly for those new to ATE, the concept of sustainability can be a bit confusing and feel like a daunting task. Thankfully there are ATE peers and outside experts who can help all of us think through strategies and lean on practices that have been successful for others. 

Nancy Maron, founder of BlueSky to BluePrint, has been working with ATE Central and the ATE community for almost a decade, providing guidance and support in this critical area. Nancy always has great advice and thoughtful examples of sustainability from those in, and beyond, ATE. Recently Nancy was kind enough to answer a few questions about her own background and provide some thoughts on sustainability.

ATE Central: Can you tell us a bit about your own background and work and how you came to launch your business BlueSky to BluePrint?

Maron: The idea for my company evolved over time, as my professional interests drew me into fields that to an outsider might not seem related! I started off in trade publishing, as a marketing and salesperson back when the national chains were just taking hold, so I got to learn the nuts and bolts of how sales and distribution channels work. I continued studying “cultural diffusion” in graduate school, by exploring the early years of mass media culture in France. When I returned to publishing, I wanted to be somewhere where I could see and understand the big picture of the digital transformations taking hold, and the not-for-profit think-tank Ithaka S+R (parent organization of JSTOR) was the perfect place to pursue those interests. While there, I led several research projects focused specifically on understanding how innovative digital initiatives in the academic and cultural sectors have found creative ways develop and grow beyond their initial grant funding.

The Hidden Innovation Infrastructure conceptual model maps how ATE initiatives flow into economic development.

Rutgers University researchers are examining the economic impact of the Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program in a multi-year study that eschews the usual metrics of return-on-investment calculations and student completion data. 

Instead, as Michelle Van Noy, the principal investigator of The Hidden Innovation Infrastructure project explained in a recent interview, researchers are scanning the entire ATE program for economic development activities and taking a close look at community colleges’ ATE initiatives, the “innovation ecosystem or infrastructure” that ATE grants influence, and the interactions of ATE centers and projects with regional labor markets.

Van Noy, an assistant research professor and associate director of Education and Employment Research Center (EERC) at Rutgers in New Jersey, said the research project was planned before COVID, but that she hopes the findings will assist colleges deal with imperatives triggered by the pandemic. “I think the role for community colleges—in terms of economic development—is even more important now and being that anchor in the community that can spur job development, and create resilience and create innovation,” she said.

A woman works on a laptop at home.

The ATE community has risen to the challenge of remote and multimodal instruction during the last two semesters. An important aspect of teaching in general, and remote teaching in particular, is creating and providing learning materials that are accessible to all students. As many educators begin preparing for spring instruction, the following resources may be helpful for making remote instruction more widely accessible. Do you have additional resources focused on online instruction or accessible education that you’d like to share with the ATE community? We’d love to hear from you – email us at info@atecentral.net – and we can share them out through ATE Central as well as our sister site AccessATE, which focuses on providing a host of accessibility resources and solutions for the ATE community.

Make the most of Open Educational Resources (OER) with CCCOER’s OER Tutorials.

As the world adapted to increased online learning during spring 2020, the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) was at the forefront of the transition with their five-week webinar program for open educational resources beginners. Designed for instructors and support staff, the program tackles best practices "for student-centered instruction in fully online courses or face-to-face courses, augmented with online components," creative commons basics, and how to select trustworthy and accessible classroom resources, among other key topics. The CCCOER website hosts recordings, slides, and resources from each installment of the OER Tutorials series. In particular, the OER: Vetting tutorial provides information on vetting digital resources for accessibility and the principles of Universal Design for Learning. A plethora of additional open educational resources can be found on other sections of the CCCOER's website. For more OER materials, check out our blog on OER resources for STEM education.

John Schwarzmeier leads SunPeak’s Systems Integration Group. (Photo courtesy of SunPeak.)

Two alumni of the renewable energy technology program at Madison Area Technical College (Madison College) credit the industry connections and experiential learning opportunities that Professor Kenneth Walz makes available to students as essential for positive turns in their career paths.

For John Schwarzmeier, leader of the Systems Integration Group at SunPeak, the critical experience was presenting his honors project—a gravitational potential energy storage device he created—to the renewable energy program’s industry advisory committee in 2018. Afterward several employers chatted with him about his design, and a few weeks later he “was carrying panels on a roof” for SunPeak. His troubleshooting acumen and other skills helped Schwarzmeier advance quickly from an entry-level solar installer position to leading commissioning and maintenance operations for the company’s large solar energy projects.

Alex Thomas attributes his 2020 internship working alongside Schwarzmeier at SunPeak, where he too is now employed fulltime, to a sequence of events that began when he showed up to help with a research project. The optional field activity, which Walz made available to his renewable energy students, was to help him install a small solar array. It tested whether aluminum sheets underneath bifacial photovoltaic (PV) panels would increase their energy production and compared the snow melting performance of bifacial panels with traditional, single-sided PV modules. Thomas was subsequently invited to volunteer at RENEW Wisconsin’s Renewable Energy Summit in January 2020. There he met employers and leaders of the Midwest Renewable Energy Association (MREA). During conversations he learned about a paid internship program funded by the Department of Energy that MREA administers with Wisconsin Technical Colleges. By late August Thomas had secured an internship at SunPeak.

During separate interviews via Zoom both Schwarzmeier and Thomas encouraged ATE educators to offer students authentic research experiences and opportunities to meet employers as part of their technician education programs.

A young woman writes in a notebook while reading on her computer.

ATE community members are likely already connected with open education resource (OER) hubs (for example, the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources). Whether you are a novice or knowledgeable OER user, it is always nice to add new tools to your toolkit. Particularly in the textbook realm, OER tools can increase accessibility, equity, and efficacy in classrooms. As COVID-19 continues to impact learning environments, open textbooks are more important than ever. This blog post connects ATE community members with several great platforms. Do you have a favorite OER textbook tool beyond our list?  We’d love to hear from you – email us at info@atecentral.net!

Find course texts for a variety of disciplines with LibreTexts.

This resource offers libraries for such fields as mathematics, physics, medicine, chemistry, engineering, and biology. The site also has a hub of materials in Spanish and a Workforce Library focused on tech and trade skills. Within all these libraries, readers can find bookshelves of digital textbooks, campus courses of customized LibreTexts, homework exercises, and ancillary materials such as visualizations and simulations. LibreTexts is directed by its founder Delmar Larsen, Associate Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Davis, and these materials are developed collaboratively between faculty, students, and outside experts and scholars.