Collaborative Proposal (IEECI Exploratory): Identifying Practices and Tools to Promote Newcomer Participation in Cyberlearning Environments

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5) This engineering education research award to Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in collaboration with University of Tennessee Knoxville will study learning, knowledge sharing, and participation in open-source communities to better understand how to encourage newcomer participation in cyber-learning educational environments. The work will address important social and educational aspects related to acceptance and use of cyber-enabled learning environments. It will explore the relationship between participation and learning, and the results will significantly advance understanding of collaborative learning in engineering education. On-line learning, distributed working teams, and social networking in cyberspace are rapidly growing components of engineering education and professional practice, and successful students must be able to participate effectively. Understanding the aspects of tools, methods and practices which promote participation and learning are essential to increasing participation in engineering and to preparing engineering students for jobs the modern workplace.