Collaborative Research: OLC/SDSU/SDSMT Pre-Engineering Education Collaborative

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Oglala Lakota College (OLC) proposes to extend and enhance its capability to deliver the first two years of a Bachelor of Science degree program in engineering. This capability will be developed through a Pre-Engineering Education Collaborative (PEEC) established with the College of Engineering at the South Dakota State University (SDSU) and the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology (SDSMT), and is referred to as the OLC/SDSU/SDSMT PEEC (OSSPEEC). The project will establish collaborative offerings of gateway and bottleneck courses that occur in the first two years of engineering curricula coupled with on-reservation hands-on laboratory and service learning experiences on the PRR that will increase Native American student retention in pre-engineering and engineering programs across South Dakota. A major result of this project will be the establishment of a complete two-year pre- engineering curriculum at OLC, which will enable our students to enter any four-year undergraduate engineering program at the junior level. Further, this project will make an additional unique or radical step in the transformation of classical engineering education at the state colleges participating in the collaboration. We propose to collaborate to develop and offer the courses required for an integrated two-year pre-engineering program at OLC and to increase the success of OLC transfer and other Native American students at SDSU and SDSMT through shared research, internship experiences, and community building in the third and fourth years of an engineering program. The project will be unique in the United States in that during the collaborative process of building OLCs pre- engineering capacity, OLCs faculty and students will be helping to transform the concept of the first two years of the engineering curriculum at SDSU and SDSMT. This will occur through the integration of project based service learning and undergraduate research projects on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which will involve professors and cohorts of students from SDSU and SDSMT. Also, these projects will cultivate closer ties among our institutions and OST Tribal Agencies through collaborative summer research and internship opportunities on the Pine Ridge Reservation that will lead to the development of future collaborative NSF research proposals.