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1. Board 313: Industry 4.0 Engineering Technology Skill Integration into Florida’s Technical Workforce Environment

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--46892  

   Barger, Marilyn; Eaglin, Ron; Ajlani, Sam; Toosi, Mori; Martin, Sidney; Gilbert, Richard; Frandsen, Susan (June 2024, ASEE Conferences)

   "Industry 4.0-based systems and subsystems are replacing current process and process control equipment in Florida’s manufacturing environment. The Florida State College System Engineering Technology (ET) degree pathway for developing engineering technology professionals is responding to this reality at the ET two-year associate degree, the 4-year ET B.S. degree, and post-graduate degrees as well as a statewide recognized path to the Professional Engineers license in Engineering Technology. The National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education program (NSF-ATE) supports this effort. NSF-ATE assets provided to FLATE and five partner colleges are directed to the formation of a statewide advisory board for the 20 colleges that offer ET degrees as well as supporting six overarching Florida ET education system target goals: (1) Adjust Florida Department of Education Standards and Benchmarks to include criteria that address Florida manufacturer-identified Industry 4.0 skills gap in its technical workforce. (2) Create a statewide streamlined seamless articulation environment from the Engineering Technology A.S. to B.S. degree programs. (3) Provide Professional Development that up-skills Engineering Technology Degree faculty as related to identified Industry 4.0 technician skill needs. (4) Create a short-term ET College Credit Certificate to prepare current and future technicians to apply these new skills in the manufacturing workspace. (5) Amplify the manufacturer's involvement with college engineering technology certificates and A.S.ET degree programs. (6) Create Post-A.S. Curriculum Advanced Technology Certificate (ATC) to facilitate skilled technician professional advancement. Statewide implementation of the curriculum changes is key to more robust programs and more work-ready technician graduates. This paper and presentation poster will share the strategies the project team is using to achieve its goals and objectives. It will also share the feedback received from the industry relative to industry 4.0 skills needed in their facilities." 

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2. Identifying Congruence Between Advanced Manufacturing Two-year Curricula and Employer Needs: Findings from Five Florida State Colleges

   Kowligi, Pallavi R.; Prajapati, Priyanka; Jones, Faye R.; Mardis, Marcia A. (January 2020, ASEE annual conference exposition)

   In this research paper, we report our assessment of the congruence between two-year advanced manufacturing (AM) program syllabi to employer needs expressed in the Department of Labor’s (DOL) AM Competency Model. The dynamic AM industry relies on two-year AM technician program graduates from state and community colleges. These program curricula are mandated to reflect state career and technology education (CTE) curriculum frameworks, but the frameworks are not designed to measure graduates' abilities to meet AM employers’ current needs. Because this technology-reliant industry changes so quickly, faculty are challenged to source, develop, and implement responsive educational experiences. Through consultation with industry leaders, the Department of Labor (DOL) developed an AM competency model to illustrate and promote workers’ necessary knowledge, skills, and dispositions. To determine whether the AM competency model can function as an exit assessment for AM program graduates, we compared AM program syllabi from five rural Northwest Florida state colleges to the DOL AM Competency Model. We text-mined competencies in both syllabi and the AM Competency Model and compared them to identify: 1) frequently addressed topics; 2) verbs guiding course learning outcomes versus the skill depth desired by employers; and 3) overall match between documents. Our findings indicate that despite being developed to reflect the same curriculum framework, the five AM programs’ topical and complexity emphases varied widely. Overall, AM Competency Model content reflected higher levels of the Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, highlighting industry commitments to fostering analysis, evaluation, and creation. We conclude with implications for educational institutions, AM policymakers, and industry, outline the need for an AM Body of Knowledge, and propose an ongoing assessment model to improve the congruence between what employers want and what is taught in two-year AM degree programs. 

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3. It Depends on Your Perspective: Comparing Advanced Manufacturing Employers Expectations to Advanced Manufacturing Curriculum Frameworks

   Mardis, Marcia A.; Jones, Faye R.; Pahuja, Divya (August 2019, Frontiers in Education)

   To meet the rising skill demands of the dynamic advanced manufacturing (AM) industry, two-year AM programs must produce well-trained graduates. This need is especially marked in Florida because the state is an AM leader, producing intermediate and finished products ranging from plastics to tortillas to motor vehicles. In total, Florida is home to over 20,000 AM companies employing over 320,000 workers. Florida is also geographically diverse, being simultaneously one of the most urban and one of the most rural highly populous states in the country. To characterize Florida's AM employment needs, we sought to determine how AM jobs were distributed across the state. We analyzed 108 job postings from Florida employers who were seeking manufacturing and engineering technicians through publicly available job postings. We used text mining to extract the knowledge areas and verbs in the documents that AM employers identified in job postings and desired from their entry-level employees. We compared those topics and verbs to the ones found in the Florida Department of Education's (FLDoE) AM curriculum framework for two-year programs. We found varying levels of alignment, and, in some instances, misalignment, between employers' desired topics and competency levels and those found in FLDoE Frameworks. Our findings not only highlight the importance of industry-education partnerships to tailor preparation to employer needs, but also suggest that a deeper exploration and analysis of AM jobs is needed to further determine alignment to FLDoE frameworks. We conclude that the FLDoE framework may be used as a foundation, but not the sole source, for important AM knowledge areas. 

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4. Facilitating Advanced Manufacturing Technicians' Readiness in the Rural Economy: A Competency-based Deductive Approach

   Jones, Faye R.; Mardis, Marcia A.; Prajapati, Priyanka; Kowligi, Pallavi R. (July 2021, 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference)

   null (Ed.)

   While rural manufacturing job availability is growing throughout the country, rural communities often lack skilled workers. Thus, it is imperative for employers to validate needed new professional competencies by understanding which skills can be taught on-the-job as well as the knowledge and abilities best gained through classroom learning and experiential learning opportunities. This enhanced understanding not only benefits employers’ hiring practices, but also it can help Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs improve curricula and expand learning opportunities to best meet students’ and employers’ needs. In this study, we triangulated industry competency model content with rural employer perspectives on new advanced manufacturing (AM) professionals’ desired competencies (i.e., the level of skill sophistication in a particular AM work area). To extract competencies for entry-level AM rural jobs, we used a deductive approach with multiple methods. First, we used Natural Language Processing (NLP) to extract, analyze, and compare the U.S. Department of Labor’s AM 2010 and 2020 Competency Models because they reflect the levels and topics AM industry professionals nationally reported as technician needs. Then, we interviewed 10 rural AM employers in North Florida to capture their perceptions of the most important competencies for new middle-skill technicians. Interview transcripts were also processed using NLP to extract competency levels and topics; we compared this output to the AM Competency Model analysis results. We deduced that the most critical competencies identified by rural AM employers required direct classroom instruction, but there was a subset of skills obtainable through on-the-job training or other experiential learning. This study, with the goal of addressing employee shortages and increasing the number of technicians ready for the workforce, has implications for rural community colleges’ AM programs curricula and the role of experiential learning. 

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5. Reimagining Standards for Computer Science Education for Primary and Secondary Schools

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3677619.3678121  

   Koressel, Jacob; Twarek, Bryan; Smith, Julie; McGill, Monica (September 2024, ACM)

   The Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) K-12 Standards were last updated in 2017, when only six states in the United States had adopted learning standards for primary and secondary education (K-12) computer science. Fast forward to 2024, and 41 states now have K-12 CS standards (and one has high school CS standards only). In preparation for writing an updated set of standards, CSTA is engaging in three stages of work: reimagining CS for high school students, conducting a crosswalk of K-12 CS standards across all 50 states compared to the CSTA standards (2017), and engaging in the technical process of defining final standards content via research and revision. All three stages draw significantly from the community of practitioners, researchers, curriculum designers, postsecondary faculty, and other interested parties. They also draw significantly from research published since the last revision to take into account the current evidence on learning computer science. In this poster, we describe our process for building the groundwork of knowledge for revising the standards, share highlights of the results to date, and describe how this data will be used to inform the upcoming revision of the CSTA standards. 

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