ASEE Safe Zone Workshops and Virtual Community of Practice to Promote LGBTQ Equality in Engineering AbstractEven though recent years have seen significant advances in LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) equality in the U.S. through legislation and social acceptance, research shows that LGBTQ students and faculty on college campuses still experience exclusion and discrimination. This paper describes a transformative project that links diversity research with a faculty development initiative to promote LGBTQ equality in engineering. The aims of the project are to (1) identify aspects of engineering culture that present barriers to LGBTQ equality, (2) build knowledge and skills to disrupt discrimination and promote LGBTQ equality in engineering departments on college campuses and (3) to identify best practices for promoting LGBTQ equality in engineering.Safe Zone Workshops create a visible network of LGBTQ-affirming faculty who contribute to creating a positive and inclusive climate in engineering departments. A Virtual Community of Practice (VCP) works together to support individual members to take action to advance LGBTQ equality in their departments. Over 270 engineering educators have attended the 20 Safe Zone Workshops offered at the ASEE Annual Conference in the last two years. Evaluation results indicate that the content of the Safe Zone Workshops has been appropriately tailored to an audience of engineering educators, and that there is a clear call to expand the workshops and nurture the conversation about LGBTQ inclusion in engineering. Online technology is being used to create a scalable and sustainable model for sharing knowledge, tools and resources to promote LGBTQ inclusion in environments that are traditionally difficult to penetrate. Using a twotiered, train-the-trainer structure, two experts trained a cohort of twenty leaders to facilitate online and face-to-face Safe Zone Workshops and lead a Virtual Community of Practice for engineering faculty. The workshops and VCP are being launched in early 2016.This project uses a transformative, cyclical mixed-method research model to provide a basis for social change. The transformative research generates new knowledge of engineering culture through surveys of engineering deans, faculty and students as well as ethnographic participant observations during Safe Zone training sessions with engineering faculty. The cyclical aspect of the project plan integrates this new knowledge into another level of Safe Zone training sessions that address engineering culture more specifically.

Alexandra (Alex) Longo currently serves as Program Manager of Education and Career Development at ASEE, where she leads the Online Learning initiative, manages externally funded programs and projects, and assists with stakeholder workshop development and implementation. Alex works closely with the ASEE Diversity Committee and the NSF-funded project NSF-funded project Promoting LGBTQ Equality in STEM. Prior to working at ASEE, Alex held positions related to education and events at the Solar Electric Power Association (SEPA) and the Society for Neuroscience (SfN), both in Washington, DC. Alex has a passion for instructional design, informal education, and hands-on learning, and received her MA in Museum Education from Seton Hall University in 2013. Dr. Brian Yoder, American Society for Engineering EducationDr. Yoder is the department director, guiding the overall direction of research and evaluation activities. Prior to working at ASEE, Brian worked at NASA Education, overseeing the development of an on-line performance management system to assess NASA's educational investments nationally. He also serves as President of the Washington Evaluators, a local affiliate of the American Evaluation Association. Dr. Rocio C. Chavela Guerra, American Society for Engineering EducationRocio Chavela is Director of Education and Career Development at the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE). She holds a Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Purdue University, a B.S. and a M.S. in Chemical Engineering from Universidad de las Americas, Puebla in Mexico. Rocio's current efforts focus on engineering faculty and graduate student development, with particular emphasis on the adoption of evidence-based instructional practices. Rossen Tsanov, AmericanSociety for Engineering Education c American Society for Engineering Education, 2017 University Makerspaces: Characteristics and Impact on Student Success in Engineering and Engineering Technology Education AbstractWith the growth and increased visibility of the Maker Movement, a large number of makerspaces have been established in different venues, including community spaces, museums, and libraries. In the world of academia, makerspaces have multiplied on university and college campuses over the past decade, as spaces for students to enhance their education with creative and experiential learning. Makerspaces, as a supplement to traditional classroom learning, have the capacity to offer educational value to both engineering and engineering technology students. This paper explores how a respondent group of engineering deans and engineering technology deans and department chairs view, implement, and value Making and makerspaces within their academic institutions.In spring 2016, the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) distributed a survey to learn how and to what extent makerspaces are implemented in engineering and engineering technology schools and programs and to assess the perceived value of makerspaces and Making in these settings. The ultimate goal of this surve...

is the executive director of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), an international society of individual, institutional, and corporate members founded in 1893. ASEE is committed to furthering education in engineering and engineering technology by promoting global excellence in engineering and engineering technology instruction, research, public service, professional practice, and societal awareness. Previously, Fortenberry served as the founding director of the Center for the Advancement of Scholarship on Engineering Education (CASEE) at the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). He served in various executive roles at the National Science Foundation (NSF) including as senior advisor to the NSF assistant director for Education and Human Resources and as director of the divisions of undergraduate education and human resource development. Fortenberry has also served as executive director of the National Consortium for Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering and Science, Inc.

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The Innovation Corps for Learning (I-Corps™ L) is an initiative of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) in cooperation with the University of Minnesota, Arizona State University, Colorado State University, and Tufts University to apply the highly successful principles of NSF I-Corps™ towards a culture that will sustain and scale educational innovations. The NSF I-Corps™ program, on which I-Corps™ L is based, uses established strategies for start-ups to build entrepreneurial skills in the engineering and scientific communities that encourage mainstream application of emerging technologies. The overriding purposes of the 8 week I-Corps™ L course are to (1) provide a framework for each of the participating teams (typically 20 to 24 in a cohort) to assess the potential of their educational innovation for sustainability and scalability, and (2) foster an entrepreneurial mindset within the education community so that education products, programs, and services are designed and implemented in ways that promote widespread adoption.In this paper and poster we summarize the essential features of I-Corps™ L, the changes made in the three iterations of the program thus far, and key evaluation results. We also present our assessment of the potential of the I-Corps™ L to contribute to the transformation of STEM education through the sustaining and scaling of NSF-funded research-based ideas.