HSI Planning Project: Designing an Online and Integrative Interdisciplinary Data Science Community College Curriculum and Pathway

With support from the NSF 20-599 Improving Undergraduate STEM Education - HSI Track 1 Planning and Pilot Program grant, Western New Mexico University (WNMU) and Western Governors University (WGU) will collaborate on the design and development of an interdisciplinary, online, two-year Associate of Science Data Science curriculum, degree plan, and pathway for HSI community college and university learners and for incoming dual enrollment, high school, community college, and non-traditional learners. Community colleges play an outsized role in Hispanic student enrollments and yet most two-year colleges do not offer data science pathways with only 15 of circa 600 data science programs in 2017 offered by community colleges versus four-year colleges.

Even fewer data science degrees are offered at community colleges with the HSI designation. This collaborative planning project will address students’ needs for a spatially and institutionally contextualized data science two-year online curriculum and set of nested, discipline-specific certificates. Through a prototype set of online data science introductory learning modules targeting HSI community college learners, the project will analyze the cognitive and social needs of HSI community college learners in the critical learner domains of self-efficacy, sense of belonging, and identity.

WGU will offer the required instructional designers and learner support structures to design and test an integrated and engaging online learning experience, and effective support for diverse learners. WNMU will provide the local subject matter expertise in data science and education, and a framework for student and family participation in the development of the curriculum and support structures.

Applying a Design-Based Research (DBR) framework, this project will render a set of data points needed by HSI and community college researchers toward assessing the constellation of critical determinants of success for a typical community college STEM data science degree program designed specifically for early learners and non-working professionals. The participatory design process proposed will join WNMU and WGU faculty experts, students, and program staff together with industry partner reviewers toward creating a data science curriculum that can be implemented at WNMU.

The data science curriculum will offer colleges a set of shareable online and hybrid instructional resources that serve as a template to customize a data science curriculum within an authentic institutional expert domain and context, whether in healthcare, transportation, business, education, social sciences, or other disciplines. These outcomes will serve as a roadmap for other typical, disadvantaged two- and four-year colleges and HSIs everywhere that already offer standard math and statistics courses.

The HSI Program aims to enhance undergraduate STEM education, broaden participation in STEM, and build capacity at HSIs. Achieving these aims, given the diverse nature and context of the HSIs, requires innovative approaches that incentivize institutional and community transformation and promote fundamental research (i) on engaged student learning, (ii) about what it takes to diversify and increase participation in STEM effectively, and (iii) that improves our understanding of how to build institutional capacity at HSIs.

Projects supported by the HSI Program will also draw from these approaches to generate new knowledge on how to achieve these aims.

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.