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

未来的工程劳动力需要一套技能，要求学科知识和技术适应并应用于与不同领域的专家解决复杂问题。这种需求也为女性和有色人种学生（传统上在工程领域的代表性不足）提供了机会，让她们能够探索更广泛的研究和职业道路，更好地认同她们的兴趣和价值观。为了支持学生获得这些技能，研究生课程可以从设计教育模块的框架和过程中受益，这些模块适用于不同学科的学生，确定他们如何为自己的领域做出贡献，并整合新兴的业务需求。这项授予麻省大学洛厄尔分校（UML）和马萨诸塞大学达特茅斯分校（UMD）的国家科学基金会研究生教育创新（IGE）奖将试点一个由研究生、研究顾问、教师和行业从业者组成的团队共同创建跨学科教育内容的模式。教育模型的原型是使用网络物理系统的案例研究，该系统适用于服务、制造、医疗保健、运输、自动化和基于智能系统的环境监测部门等广泛的行业。该项目在应用教育研究的循证实践方面具有创新意义，即如何通过让研究生参与共同创造技术内容，使课程在吸引和教育多样化的学生群体方面具有包容性。该项目包括两个阶段。第一阶段解决研究生如何通过与教师和行业专家共同创建教育材料来学习。第二阶段将第一阶段开发的模块整合到四个不同机构提供的课程中（UML、UMD、哥伦比亚特区大学和北卡罗来纳a&t州立大学），并评估学生如何从共同创建的材料中学习和获得可转移的技能。这两个阶段通过在参与式行动研究框架下进行的焦点小组，在迭代设计和评估过程中优先考虑学生的声音。通过第一阶段的共同创造，研究生学习到：(a)整合学科方法和避免常见陷阱的模型和方法；(b)与STEM领域中女性和少数民族代表性不足相关的社会科学概念（即交叉性、微侵犯和制度化的种族主义），以及(c)通过有效的沟通和实践解决这些问题的方法。教育模块支持在模拟工业中进行的产品生命周期管理（PLM）阶段的测试平台上的体验式学习，并支持将特定学科的信息传递给跨PLM阶段的利益相关者的技能开发，从构思到产品验证，验证和使用。一个工具包将为参与式教育设计和公共数据集的收集提供模板和规则，以评估更广泛的研究生教育界实施的预计学习成果。研究生教育创新（IGE）项目专注于研究生教育的研究。IGE的目标是试点、测试和验证研究生教育的创新方法，并产生将这些方法推广到更广泛的社区所需的知识。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.