Addressing Student Skills Gaps in Water Treatment Operator Education Utilizing Virtual Reality Enabled Curriculum Resources

Water operators are frontline environmental health and safety workers who perform the essential service of ensuring the nation's citizens have access to safe water sources. It is estimated that 30-50% of the nation's water operators will retire within five years and only 5% of operators are under age 25. This project will address the critical infrastructure need for licensed water technicians by expanding the quality and capacity of training available for this field.

In alignment with the mission of the Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program, this project will advance the delivery of technician education by creating high-quality, cost-effective, technology-based online resources for water operator technology. These new virtual resources will supplement the existing high-quality training offered by the South Carolina Environmental Training Center at Central Carolina Technical College (CCTC) with virtual reality (VR) modules developed collaboratively with Clemson University as a tool to enrich curriculum components identified as the greatest barriers to water operator licensure.

This project also benefits operators in rural environments who have less access to professional development and training. Availability of virtual labs will further enable women, veterans, persons from groups underrepresented in the field, and persons with disabilities to obtain certifications. Unlike immersive VR, these systems require no additional equipment as they are designed to run simulations on a standard laptop using a keyboard and mouse.

Project outcomes include increasing: 1) the number of water operators prepared for the transition from learning to workforce, 2) recruitment and mentoring material to attract people from underrepresented groups to water treatment technology; and 3) the assessment of the use of these technologies with diverse groups of students in different educational settings. This work will contribute to the NSF's Big Ideas, including "The Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier" and “Growing Convergent Research” by conducting fundamental research investigating the benefits and risks of integrating virtual labs in educational settings for water treatment education.

The goals of this project are to: 1) Design, integrate, and develop VR enabled curriculum resources for water treatment training to address workforce preparedness and close the skills gap based on current and future workplace needs. 2) Implement the developed resources for online and hybrid approach, conduct rigorous evidence-based assessment of these modules, and provide the content to the ATE community. 3) Recruit and retain students including women, veterans, and persons from groups historically underrepresented in advanced-technology fields. 4) Create professional development resources and conduct workshops for water technology educators. The project will provide alternatives for place-bound and capacity-constrained water treatment programs via technology resources.

Virtual labs will allow students access to realistic lab experiences in highly engaging VR environments that will address the most prevalent educational barriers to licensure. Key stakeholders from Association of Boards of Certification, community partners, NSF ATE centers, two-year partner institutions, and industry will guide the content development to ensure its relevancy.

Evaluation and assessment will be led by an external evaluator who will provide both formative and summative evaluation of the implementation of the virtual resources in CCTC's existing curriculum utilizing Kirkpatrick's four-level model. Both the pre- and post-surveys will utilize the following validated constructs: perceived learning outcomes, engagement, usability, and satisfaction and perception.

The community of educators in water treatment technology, along with the broader technician education community, will receive implementation information on the modules created. Conferences for dissemination include an annual symposium hosted by CCTC, water treatment conferences, Technology Education Conferences, the NSF ATE Principal Investigators conference, and other professional association conferences.

The findings will also be disseminated as journal papers, webinars, and presentations at professional development workshops. All materials developed will be distributed through ATE Central, CCTC's learning management system, and the EducateWorkforce portal hosted by Clemson University. This project is funded by the Advanced Technological Education program that focuses on the education of technicians for the advanced-technology fields that drive the nation's economy.

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.