Casey Kraus hopes to become a mechanical maintenance journeyman at a commercial nuclear power facility.

Casey Kraus, a third-year apprentice at Florida Power & Light’s St. Lucie Nuclear Power Plant, “loves” her work.

“I’ve always wanted to work with my hands, not have a desk job. I wanted to have a job where I could continually learn new things,” Kraus said. The $30 per hour starting wage was “absolutely” part of the appeal of a nuclear technician career, as well.

Kraus’ apprenticeship is part of the curriculum of the Power Plant Technology Institute that Indian River State College (IRSC), Florida Power & Light, and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers created together. In 2013, the American Association of Community Colleges recognized this collaboration as one of the Top Five College and Corporate Training Partnerships in the U.S.

"The IRSC and FPL's Power Plant Technology Program greatly prepared me for my career at the St. Lucie Nuclear Power Plant. Although there are some things in the field that can never be completely recreated in a classroom, I believe that IRSC and the FPL Subject Matter Experts made the program as close to real life at the plant as possible. Everything I've learned in the program I apply in some way to almost every job I go on each and every day. With the training I have received, I have to ability to take my degree and my INPO [Institute of Nuclear Power Operations] certificate, and work at any nuclear plant in the country. The possibilities are absolutely endless," she said.

Thirteen California community college students between the ages of 19 and 49 spent two weeks in China at the end of the capstone course that was taught simultaneously to them and to Chinese students from SIP Institute of Services Outsourcing in Suzhou, China, using remote and translation technologies.

The Mid-Pacific Information and Communication Technologies (MPICT) Center's three international pilot projects have yielded positive results for students and faculty. While study-abroad programs are common for liberal arts students, MPICT's multiple international experiences are rare for technology students.

Each of MPICT's pilot projects utilized Cisco's Network Academy curriculum because it is an industry standard taught uniformly around the world. For the two most recent experiments, with a school in France in 2011 and a school in China in 2012, MPICT's faculty partners developed a problem-based scenario that gave students roles in a fictitious company that was merging international units with incompatible network systems. The mixed teams of American and international students had to integrate the systems.

"We wanted them to get the experience of doing the project, doing an international project using the tools they were learning, modern tools to collaborate across the ocean. A lot of work in our field is performed this way," said Pierre Thiry, MPICT principal investigator.

The Center for Advanced and Emerging Technologies is on the left and the Construction Education Center is on the right in this preliminary drawing of the facilities where Metropolitan Community College plans to utilize innovative instructional models developed by ATE programs.

Multiple Advanced Technological Education programs are influencing Metropolitan Community College's (MCC) concept for construction of a Center for Advanced and Emerging Technologies (CAET).

Architects created the concept for the CAET after listening to the leaders of the Midwest Center for Information Technology talk about the competency-based curriculum they have piloted with ATE support and the virtual center by the same name that MCIT now operates to teach information technology (IT) as an enabling technology for various industries.

"We're trying to design a space that is going to be more relevant to what the work will look like," said Tom Pensabene, dean of Information Technology and e-Learning at MCC and principal investigator of MCIT. MCIT is a regional ATE center hosted by AIM, a nonprofit organization created more than a decade ago by the Chamber of Commerce to facilitate the development of IT in Omaha and throughout Nebraska.

Pensabene said the new facility will make it possible to scale innovative programs that MCIT currently offers among the 10 colleges in its consortium, and to attempt new, "more radical approaches" to hands-on learning.

Dorothy Najeebah Mateen, a recent Lansing Community College graduate, was one of 60 ATE students and alumni who participated in the 2013 ATE Principal Investigators Conference.

For Dorothy Najeebah Mateen, a capstone project designing sustainable energy systems for a new housing development was a chance to be creative with the technical skills she acquired at Lansing Community College.

Mateen described the solar hot water system she designed with electric and gas backup during the October 24 showcase session at the 2013 Advanced Technological Education Principal Investigators Conference. The showcase sessions at the annual ATE-PI meeting in Washington, D.C., are always lively as the educators who lead ATE initiatives and their students enthusiastically explain the innovative projects they have developed with ATE grants from the National Science Foundation.

At the conference opening plenary, Celeste Carter extended as special welcome to the 60 student presenters and reminded the 800 other conference attendees—educators, employers, federal officials, and nonprofit organization representatives—that students are "the reason the ATE program is around." Carter is the lead program director of ATE in the National Science Foundation's Division of Undergraduate Education.

In 2012 alone, 96,460 students at 2,240 institutions were directly affected by the grants that provide seed money for educators to develop innovative programs. Since 1993, the ATE program has disbursed $890 million to support a wide variety of programs to improve technician education; prepare science, technology, engineer, and math educators; and conduct research on technician education.

For the 20-year anniversary, ATE Central and Pellet Productions teamed up to create a video about the ATE program and its accomplishments. The American Association of Community Colleges will post videos of the conference plenary sessions, slides from the workshops, and photos from the entire conference on the conference website by November 8.

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Identifying the right time to ramp up courses for new technologies is one of the key challenges of science, technology, engineering, and math educators. Picking the wrong technology leaves students without jobs; waiting too long to add skills for a new, essential technology could mean that a college loses students to competitors. To help it sort out information about emerging technologies, the National Science Foundation has historically found it useful to support meetings where the best and the brightest people working in fields related to the one on the horizon discuss what they think is ahead.

On May 23 and 24, the Northeast Biomanufacturing Center and Collaborative (NBC2) based at Montgomery County Community College gathered 83 individuals involved in either the biofuels industry or biofuels education to share their thoughts about trends in the development of biofuels. During the meeting at Kapi’olani Community College in Honolulu, Hawai’i, the summit participants shared their ideas about the best ways to educate technicians for careers in the emerging biofuels industry. The educators and biofuels industry leaders, who included several biodiesel and microalgae pioneers, worked in small groups on the skill standards. Vicki Glaser, executive editor of Industrial Biotechnology, led the group in the photo that opted to discuss the skill standards outside on the beautiful campus.

Summaries of the participants' presentations and the complete draft skill standards are contained in Educating Biofuels Production and Analysis Technicians for Future Industry Needs: The Report from the Biofuels Workforce Summit. The report was released at the 20th ATE Principal Investigators Conference (October 23 to 25, 2013) in Washington, D.C. For copies of the report contact Jennifer Imbesi at jimbesi@mc3.edu.

ATE Grant Subject Area Breakdown

ATE@20: Two Decades of Advancing Technological Education will be released this week at the 20th ATE Principal Investigators Conference in Washington, D.C.

The book and the blog of the same name highlight the accomplishments of the National Science Foundation's Advanced Technological Education program via the stories of individual students and educators who have benefited from ATE-supported initiatives.

Copies of the book can be obtained by emailing requests to ATE Central at ate20@atecentral.net.

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The research mentoring program that Del Mar College biotechnology faculty developed with the Revising Science Education with Vision (REVISION) Advanced Technological Education grant was recently recognized by Excelencia in Education for its outstanding efforts to accelerate Latino student success in higher education.

As the leader of one of the seven associate-degree-level programs profiled in the 2013 edition of Examples of Excelencia, ATE Principal Investigator J. Robert Hatherill was invited to attend the Seventh Annual Celebraci?n de Excelencia on October 1 in Washington, D.C. Examples of Excelencia systematically identifies and honors higher education programs that have evidence of boosting Latino students' enrollment, performance, and graduation rates.

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Biotechnology graduates contend with a Catch-22 as they begin biomanufacturing careers.

Medical device manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and other employers in highly-regulated biomanufacturing industries want technicians who have experience following Food and Drug Administration regulations. Internships that would provide students with real-world work experiences in these fields are rare, however, because government regulations limit what inexperienced people are permitted to do in biomanufacturing workplaces.

To address this challenge, Vivian Ngan-Winward, obtained an Advanced Technological Education project grant to create STUDENTfacturED, a company that provides a simulated, regulated environment at Salt Lake Community College (SLCC) where she directs the biomanufacturing program.

STUDENTfacturED is the second entrepreneurial program SLCC's Biotechnology Department has launched with ATE support. InnovaBio, a contract research organization at SLCC, was the first.

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If you are a community college faculty member who has hesitated to apply for an Advanced Technological Education (ATE) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) because you are not sure how to proceed, a Mentor-Connect application would be a great place to start. But you've got to get going.

Applications for Mentor-Connect are due at 5 p.m. on October 15. The application and instructions are at http://teachingtechnicians.org/

Twenty community colleges will be selected by November 8 to receive mentoring and technical support from Mentor-Connect to help prepare full proposals for the Small Grants for Institutions New to the ATE program track.

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Judith Ramaley was new in her position as assistant director of the Education and Human Resources Directorate at the National Science Foundation when she attended her first Advanced Technological Education Principal Investigators Conference in the fall of 2001.

For some time before the meeting she had been thinking about SMET. Not only did she dislike the sound of the acronym then used to refer to science, math, engineering and technology, it was not logical to her either. Switching the order of the letters to make science and math cradle engineering and technology made more sense to her.

Ramaley had not planned to share her opinion about SMET with the ATE principal investigators; however, something at the meeting prompted her seemingly spontaneous comment that she did not like the acronym and thought it should be changed to STEM. It was the first public meeting where she or anyone else is known to have suggested STEM as the acronym of science, technology, engineering and math.