ABSTRACT
Over the past few years, education at all levels has been greatly disrupted by the COVID pandemic. For many schools, face-to-face interactions were reduced or restricted to only those activities that have been determined to be essential for student instruction. The pandemic has also had a great impact on teacher professional development programming, which traditionally has been delivered largely in face-to-face settings. This paper examines the implementation of a series of energy technology teacher professional development workshops that were delivered virtually using online meeting apps. The results of the workshops are presented including participant measures of learning gains, and feedback describing how faculty participants used the information gained to modify their curriculum and instruction. The discussion includes observations and recommended practices to promote the effective incorporation of tools and equipment for remotely delivered workshops. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.
ABSTRACT
The evaluator states that all measures show increased confidence among all the participants in their knowledge and skills to prepare and submit a grant proposal. The leadership team had a quality structure thought through but was willing to adapt to participants' needs. The last two years of the NSF grant writing model has proven successful in assisting both experienced and inexperienced colleges with achieving a larger or first NSF ATE grant. NSF feedback indicates that mentored projects (both from Mentor Connect and ATE2YC/Mentor Up) are achieving better success in receiving funding than non-mentored projects. The project team remains committed to continuous project evaluation and quality control and the model evolves with feedback. Upcoming innovations expected in 2020 include a revised agenda with more small group activities at the workshop and less seat time and a second summer workshop focused on mentoring cybersecurity and IT proposals. Also, as noted, due to the COVID19 outbreak, the June 15-17, 2020 workshop has been changed to a virtual workshop using zoom and other online tools. Mentors will still be assigned and work with college teams each week. This will also give the leadership team and the evaluator comparison data on two very different delivery modes which will enhance the revision of the model in the future. © American Society for Engineering Education 2020.