Conference: Creating a Year-Round Peer-Learning Model for Emerging Technology Workforce Programs

Award ID: 2628938

The National Science Foundations Experiential Learning for Emerging and Novel Technologies (ExLENT) program supports hands-on learning and skill-building experiences in partnership with industry. The program projects help prepare people for careers in fields central to national competitiveness, including artificial intelligence, biotechnology, semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, clean energy, quantum technologies, and related areas. Awardees operate across varied regions, learner pathways, institutional settings, and partner environments. As a result, they face common implementation questions but often have limited opportunities to learn from one another. This project will create a sustained national practice network for principal investigators and project teams so they can exchange practical knowledge, share effective approaches, surface barriers, and adapt promising practices to their own local contexts. The project will advance the national interest by strengthening workforce development programs in emerging technology areas, improving the return on federal investments, and generating lessons that may inform future NSF workforce initiatives. The project will provide a three-year learning and evaluation infrastructure for the NSF ExLENT portfolio. Core activities will include annual principal investigator engagement workshops, monthly calls for program awardees, quarterly newsletters, a moderated, invitation-only online forum, a mechanism for NSF program officers to respond to awardees' questions, case example development, annual activity summaries, and a final synthesis. An external evaluator will conduct a practical mixed-method evaluation using baseline and annual surveys, workshop surveys, selected interviews or focus groups, attendance records, forum and newsletter analytics, call digests, and case examples. The evaluation will examine which engagement mechanisms are most useful, how peer learning supports implementation, what recurring challenges appear across the portfolio, how practices vary across program tracks and institutional contexts, and which elements of the model are sustainable or transferable. Findings will be used formatively to refine workshop design, call topics, forum prompts, newsletter content, and case example development. Expected products will include annual workshop reports, evaluation memos, a case example library, annual community activity summaries, a final evaluation report, and recommendations for sustaining or adapting the model for this and other workforce-development portfolios. 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.

NSF Program Director: Tyrslai Williams