Recent Federal Investments build on FLATE’s Foundation

The Florida Advanced Technological Education Center of Excellence, FLATE, uses its NSF-ATE resources to strengthen the advanced manufacturing technician education system in Florida. This effort exemplifies the creation of partnerships among the colleges, manufacturers, economic development organizations, Workforce Florida, and Florida Department of Education. Using this mutual effort among its partners, FLATE has brokered strong working relationships among faculty in the community and state colleges in Florida as well as with supporting industry and the Florida Department of Education initiatives.  Collectively, this effort has produced a first in the nation, a statewide-articulated A.S. Engineering Technology Degree program that also recognizes a national workforce credential as a substitute for 15 hours of program course credit.  FLATE has continued to strengthen the existing Engineering Technology college network as well as add others to the network.  A strong expanding college network happens because of mentoring activities, curriculum alignment, professional development opportunities, resource development, and interfacing between and among the colleges and the Florida Department of Education.  FLATE continues to weave the strong, thin, transparent thread that interlaces these activities. 

The FLATE designed and crafted A.S. engineering technology degree program is a model credential-based articulated pathway for manufacturing that was implemented by the Florida Department of Education in 2008.  The steady growth in the number of colleges adopting the degree as well as colleges partnering with FLATE to create an education system in Florida to meet industry needs is a key element in the growth in program offerings at each college. The end result has evolved into a strong community of practice amongst educators and industry professionals across the state.  With the national lens now strongly focused on manufacturing and innovation, this community of practice has become the seed for the genesis of several successful proposals with the U.S. Department of Labor. 

 The 2012 Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College Career Training (TAACCCT) grants have been announced.    These grants are intended to help ensure that the Nation’s institutions of higher education are helping adults succeed in acquiring the skills, degrees, and credentials needed for the high–wage, high skill occupations that satisfy the requirements of employers of this skilled labor force.  An excellent example of this emerging partnership among NSF-ATE supported A.S. programs in Florida and the Department of Labor is the TAACCCT grant to the Florida TRADE program administered through St. Petersburg College.  This award is among the largest TAACCCT second round awards in the Nation and the largest in Florida.  TRADE’s goal is “to improve upon Florida’s existing training and education system in advanced manufacturing by aligning its vast resources and partnerships and offering wide access to training that will help address the growing critical skilled workforce shortage faced by the state’s manufacturing industry and related industry clusters.” 

TRADE has assembled a cohort of workforce and academic partners to address this goal with the essence of both groups being the two year college programs that will address the skills, degrees, and credential elements of the grant.   Of the 12 colleges identified within the TRADE program, 75% of these colleges already offer the Engineering Technology A.S. degree program and FLATE is working with two of the remaining four to help them adopt the ET Degree.  The FLATE developed ET degree is a foundation piece for training and education in the Florida TRADE consortium.  FLATE will work with these colleges and the Florida Department of Education to academically align additional nationally recognized workforce credentials to college credit certificates and degree credit.

Outside the TRADE consortium, Northwest State College (NWSC), Chipola College (CC), and Pensacola State College (PSC), partnered with an Alabama consortium housed at George Wallace Community College in Dothan, AL that is also focused on the manufacturing sector.  Together the three Florida colleges have been awarded $5.2 million to educate and train industrial electricians, welders, machinists, automation technicians, and industrial maintenance technicians.   In anticipation of this award, Northwest State College adopted the ET degree this past summer and is offering its first courses this fall. PSC will expand its existing ET certificate offerings to meet its training and education requirements.  FLATE will also be working with Chipola to define the best ET degree specialization programs to meet its consortium goals.

St Petersburg College is also engaged with a Forsythe Technical Community College Consortium for TAACCCT funding focused on Biosciences. SPC will be awarded $700,000 to participate with the group funded to define specific training and credentials for medical device manufacturing.  The strong medical device manufacturing cluster in the SPC service area will be supporting this effort. The Biomedical Systems College Certificate and the Biomedical Systems Technology Specialization in the ET Degree are foundations of SPC’s participation in this primarily North Carolina consortium.

Although Florida was not awarded significant funding in round 1 of the TAACCCT grants, Florida State College at Jacksonville (FSCJ) is a significant partner in the STEM Consortium housed at Ann Arundel Community College in Maryland.  This $20M consortium funded in 2011 is focused on a number of discipline areas with its college partners across the eastern US. One working team of this group is developing a 30 credit hour college certificate for Mechatronics. At FSCJ and in Florida, this certificate is an easy fit under the ET Degree Advanced Manufacturing Specialization.  FLATE and FSCJ will be submitting the required curriculum frameworks and justification to the FLDOE this month.  Embedded in this certificate will be an alignment to the MSSC CPT as well another to the Siemens mechatronics certification.

Adding to the investment in Florida manufacturing education and in support of FLATE’s ET community, a number of the 2012 NSF-ATE awards are projects that use the foundation of FLATE’s Engineering Technology Degree.  Polk State College was funded to evolve their ET Degree in to open entry/open exit format to address the needs of the working students in their service area.  This innovative idea allows the college to transition its ET Advanced Manufacturing Degree courses into one credit hour modules and offer an open lab with faculty coaches. Tallahassee Community College (TCC) was awarded funding to help adopt the A.S. ET degree, after having adopted a number of the ET college certificates two years ago.  TCC has partnered with three high school engineering programs to build a pipeline of students for the new degree.  Lastly, our home institution, HCC, was awarded $2.8 million that will allow FLATE to continue as a statewide NSF Center of Excellence for an additional 3 years.

Working together and leveraging our early NSF investments, we are building a strong infrastructure for manufacturing education.  When added up, the new investments are staggering. We must not only invest the incoming funds to meet the specific deliverables of all these grants, but continue to build our Florida manufacturing community.  Hopefully, we can be good stewards of the new funds, investing it wisely to create a sustainable and strong future for manufacturing education in Florida.  

sTEm-at-Work Puzzle 30 Answer

Voltage response of photovoltaic panels systems

This puzzles presents math and technology ideas. From the math perspective the slope of the two plots are the same so the graphs are correctly presented as parallel lines. However, the position of each line is determined by the intercept value on the Ordinate. In this case, the intercept of PP #2 is 3.5 and should cross the y axis above PP #1. In addition, the values on the y axis are not identified but can be deduced. This will allow a segway into a discussion about scaling an axis. (There is not enough information to do that exercise on the abscissa.) From a technology perspective, the negative sign on the photovoltaic data is as expected. This fact will allow an introduction into solar heating panel systems. The efficiency response of solar heating panels goes up with temperature while the efficiency of the photovoltaic goes down. Thus, the puzzle also allows a discussion of the science involved in both technologies.

Are the two plots correctly identified?               No

Defining Ethical Expectations

During our planning grant for our NSF ATE Center of Excellence back in 2002, the FLATE 

leadership team identified the Baldrige Quality System as the evaluation model we would use.  Grounded in industry expectations, based on organizational excellence, and a data driven format were qualities of an evaluation model, which appealed to us and we thought would help us become a successful organization, develop reporting data that was meaningful and reflective of our impact on our stakeholders, and provide a model that our industry partners would know and appreciate. We struggled for a couple of years and were eventually brought back on track by the guidance of Phil Centonze, who now serves as our external evaluator. Many of our Florida based stakeholders know Phil and the impact he has had on manufacturing in our state. However, he has also had a similar impact on our FLATE staff and leadership team, and on our educational partners. One of the pieces of our organizational profile that Phil brought to us is our Guiding Principles, which serve as a basis for reasoning, action and organizational decision-making. They help us decide if opportunities we encounter align with our own mission and goals.  These seven principles have been extremely useful to us over the years, helping us keep our eyes tightly focused on our defining and achieving our goals.  Today, I’d like to focus a bit on the first of FLATE’s Guiding Principles:

 Does this (activity/involvement/event) meet FLATE’s ethical expectations? FLATE expects professionalism in all FLATE related actions and activities; an honest commitment to FLATE’s principles; and declaration of apparent and avoidance of direct conflicts of interest.

Our Ethical Expectations (http://www.fl-ate.org/about_us/expectations.html) expects individuals directly or indirectly involved with FLATE to:

• Demonstrate professionalism in all FLATE related actions and activities.
• Demonstrate an honest commitment to FLATE’s principles. 
• Declare any apparent conflicts of interest and avoid direct conflicts of Interest as related to all FLATE related actions and activities.

Many organizations have defined Ethical Expectations as they are considered a vital part of any business environment.  These guidelines about what is right and wrong from an organizational perspective provide clear articulation of the organization’s values.  Organizational personnel acting ethically when dealing with stakeholders endorses the organization’s social contributions which can secure public and stakeholder trust.  In addition to our own FLATE Ethical Expectations, FLATE’s staff and leadership are all bound by those of our host institutions, HCC, SPC and USF.  All three institutions have published platforms for conduct and behavior that focus on personal and profession integrity, academic honesty, and equity. 

Operationally, FLATE expects individuals directly or indirectly involved with FLATE to follow best accounting practices, exhibit ethical behavior, and demonstrate the highest respect for and support of a diverse workforce.  (http://fl-ate.org/about_us/guiding-principles.html). The start of a new school year is a good time to review the foundations our organizations are built on. Values and principles for organizational behavior evolve over time and organizations must change with them. We welcome your comments on this topic and indeed hope that our performance meets your ethical expectations.

I would also like to welcome Sasha Cameron to our FLATE team.  Sasha is USF Public Relations and International Studies senior who is working with us while Janice Mukhia is on an extended leave visiting family in India. You can expect to hear from Janice in the next two months in her foreign correspondent role.  She will be researching and reporting on technical education in India. And, welcome back to school to all educators and students. We hope every one of you had a wonderful and restful summer and are charged up for the challenges of the new academic year.  I am positive there will be many challenges for all of us.

Please take a moment to read our September edition of the FLATE Focus. This edition highlights STEM challenges in the educational system, and congratulating St. Petersburg College on their opening of the area’s first collaborative Center for Emerging Technologies.  You can also read more on where FLATE took 67 George S. Middleton High School students on their multi-facility tour. Don’t miss out on this month’s FLATE Focus.

2012 Florida Energy Summit – FLATE highlights Education and Outreach Efforts

The 2012 Florida Energy Summit combined with this year’s annual Florida Energy Systems Consortium (FESC) Summit and took place in Orlando on August 15 – 17. The Summit provided opportunities for the 500 participants (homeowners, businesses, local governments and energy producers) to explore how Florida can secure a stable, reliable and diverse supply of energy, as well as on realistic steps Floridians can take now to cut their energy costs and increase their comfort. 

At the summit, FLATE highlighted curriculum development and educational outreach efforts in partnership with FESC during the last year. In 2008, Florida’s legislature commissioned FLATE to partner with FESC to prepare and execute a technician workforce plan that will put an energy workforce into place on time. FLATE’s poster presentation, “Energy Education for Florida’s Future Technician Workforce”, described the past work of the FLATE – FESC partnership as well as outlining the new Industrial Energy Efficiency specialization for the Associate of Science (ET) degree and associated College Credit Certificate, designed to match training directly to industry needs. FLATE materials were also displayed on the FESC table in the Energy Summit Exhibit Hall.

Presentations by Florida's state-level policymakers focused on what’s next for Florida. During the 2012 legislative session, the Florida Legislature passed its first, statewide energy policy in four years. This policy reinstates tax incentives for production of renewable energy and reduces burdens on businesses, as well as promoting energy efficiency. It also repeals the renewable portfolio standard mandate. During the summit, State policy advisors discussed how to implement this recently-passed Florida Energy Bill and what the bill means to Florida’s economy.

Many energy-related innovative research efforts at universities and colleges throughout the state were spotlighted during the summit. The Florida Energy Systems Consortium revealed the latest emerging technologies, impacting future energy production and local communities reported on what they are doing to lay the foundation for alternative transportation fuels and technologies. Florida’s investment in FESC 4 years ago has brought in hundreds of millions of dollars of investment and grants into the state’s alternative energy technology sector, helping to bring many new technology innovations into the marketplace.

As the nation’s third largest consumer of energy, it is imperative that Florida’s energy policy creates an environment that fosters the development of affordable, clean energy supplies to meet our state’s long term needs. This summit provided a valuable forum for discussions and dissemination of information about Florida’s energy future as work continues to expand energy sources and production, increase energy efficiency and move forward with energy policy.