Work in progress — Improving the dissemination of CCLI (TUES) educational innovations

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Course Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI) Program (now the TUES program - Transforming Undergraduate Education in STEM) has produced a vast number of products and processes since its inception. The CCLI Program has fostered innovation nationwide and has worked to improve “quality of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education for all undergraduate students.” More often than not these innovations `remain local,' in that they are only developed and used by the initiating investigator(s) and are tied to the funding, once the initial funding ends the investigators move on. In recent years the CCLI Program has instituted a multi-stage program to encourage scale up of these innovations - extending the reach from small test-beds to national dissemination. However, this process typically recognizes and disseminates fairly large-scale innovation; the result is that most innovations developed through the CCLI Program continue to `stop where they started.' Very few CCLI projects, or their results, are integrated into daily use by the larger set of teachers and learners who might benefit from these innovations, and who should take advantage of existing projects thereby eliminating the need to regularly re-invent these works. In the spring of 2010 a workshop was held in Washington, DC in an attempt to identify the best practices for dissemination of CCLI innovations. In preparation for the workshop, approximately 2,400 CCLI award winners were surveyed to determine their practices and what they thought were indicators of successful dissemination. NSF Program Directors were also surveyed. This paper reports on the preliminary findings from the survey of CCLI Principal Investigators (PIs) and NSF's Cognizant Program Directors (PDs), and the results of panel discussions held during the meeting of invited experts in the area of STEM education and dissemination. Results indicate that the most frequently used methods of dissemination do not lead to desired outcomes. Several methods are proposed to improve access to resources and the adoption of these resources by other faculty seeking to improve teaching and learning.