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Session 2592

MAKING CROSS-INSTITUTIONAL COALITIONS WORK: A View into the Workings of a Successful Seven Institution Collaboration

Barbara Bogue, Rose Marra The Pennsylvania State University, University of Missouri, Columbia

Cross institutional coalitions are encouraged by funders such as the National Science Foundation and offer many substantial advantages. They also offer significant challenges. With disparate institutions often operating at significant geographical distances and with differing levels of institutional support, successful coalitions take careful management and planning to succeed.

The development of the AWE Project coalition, an NSF funded (HRD 01 20642) project designed to develop effective assessment tools and models for WIE and similar programs (11, 12). AWE comprises seven very different institutions, programs in varying states of development, and a range of staffing and funding resources. AWE Partner Institutions are the University of Missouri (Marra), Penn State (Bogue), Georgia Tech (Mimi Philobos), the University of Arizona (Marie Reyes), the University of Louisville (Brenda Hart), the University of Texas – Austin (Tricia Berry) and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Barbara Ruel). The three year project required that each institution and WIE director or research associate participate fully in developing and testing assessment instruments with large numbers of students, documentation and career development tools.

This paper will look at the rewards and challenges of coalitions in general and, using initial assessment of the AWE experience as a example, identify ways that PIs and grant sub- contractors can be engaged successfully in a productive and mutually rewarding process; how full participation of collaborators can be realized; what organizational tools and processes help to achieve collaborator ownership of the overall project; and how to document process.

Coalitions—Benefits and Drawbacks Coalitions became a familiar feature of engineering education in the late 80’s when the NSF launched the Engineering Education Coalitions, an initiative that responded to the 1989 Belmont Conference on Imperatives in Undergraduate Engineering Education that identified the need to synthesize knowledge, push interdisciplinarity, emphasize practice and the participation of underrepresented groups and so on, presaging the ABET 2000 criteria. (5) Each coalition required the participation of a group of diverse engineering education institutions that would work together to re-design how engineering education was delivered, with an emphasis on developing a diverse student population. Six coalitions were funded. (The authors first collaborated themselves through the ECSEL Coalition.) An underlying idea was that coalitions would solve the problem of effective initiatives being developed at one institution, but never going any farther; the coalitions would have built in dissemination, as each institution in the coalition exported the ideas of the others. “Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education and Annual Conference & Exposition” Copyright , American Society for Engineering Education

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Marra, R., & Bogue, B. (2005, June), Making Cross Institutional Coalitions Work: A View Into The Workings Of A Successful Seven Institution Collaboration Paper presented at 2005 Annual Conference, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--14314