Collaborative Research: IGE: Graduate Education in Cyber-Physical Systems Engineering

The future engineering workforce calls for a skill set that requires disciplinary knowledge and technology to be adapted and applied in solving complex problems with experts from diverse fields. This need also opens opportunities for women and students of color, traditionally underrepresented in engineering, to explore a broader range of research and career pathways that better identify with their interests and values. To support students in acquiring these skills, graduate curricula can benefit from a framework and process for designing educational modules that are accessible to students in different disciplines, that identifies how they contribute to their field, and integrates emerging business needs. This National Science Foundation Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) award to the University of Massachusetts Lowell (UML) and the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (UMD) will pilot a model for co-creation of cross-disciplinary educational content by teams of graduate students, research advisors, instructors, and practitioners from industry. The educational model is prototyped using a case study of cyber-physical systems applicable across a wide range of industries spanning the service, manufacturing, health-care, transportation, automation, and smart-system based environmental monitoring sectors. The project is innovative in its application of evidence-based practices from education research on how the curriculum can be inclusive in engaging and educating a diverse student body by involving graduate students in co-creating technical content.

The project involves two phases. The first phase addresses how graduate students learn by co-creating educational material with faculty and experts from industry. The second phase integrates the modules developed in phase one into courses offered at four different institutions (UML, UMD, University of the District of Columbia, and North Carolina A&T State University) and assesses how students learn and acquire transferable skills from co-created material. Both phases prioritize students' voices in an iterative design and evaluation process through focus groups conducted in the framework of participatory action research. Through the co-creation in phase one, graduate students learn about: (a) Models and methods for integrating disciplinary approaches and avoiding common pitfalls; (b) Social science concepts (viz. intersectionality, microaggressions, and institutionalized racism) connected with underrepresentation of females and minorities in STEM fields, and (c) ways to address these issues through effective communication and practice. The educational modules support experiential learning on a testbed that emulates the stages of product life-cycle management (PLM) undertaken in industry and support the development of skills for transferring of discipline-specific information to stakeholders across the PLM stages ranging from ideation to product verification, validation, and usage. A tool kit will provide the templates and rubrics for participatory educational design and collection of common datasets to assess the projected learning outcomes from implementations by a broader graduate education community.

The Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) program is focused on research in graduate education. The goals of IGE are to pilot, test and validate innovative approaches to graduate education and to generate the knowledge required to move these approaches into the broader community.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.