Date: August 26, 2008                               Time: 10:30 p.m. - 12:00 p.m.

Location: Michigan State University, East Lansing MI

Participants listed by group:

• Michigan State University (MSU): Mark Urban-Lurain, Neeraj Buch, Jon Sticklen, Daina Briedis, Tom Wolf, Claudia Vergara.
• Corporation for a Skilled Workforce (CSW): Cindee Dresen, Taryn MacFarlane, Tammy, Kysha
• LCC: Louise Paquette

 1) Review minutes

Discussion about contacting employer list of 25 for interviews. Letters have been drafted and mailing labels are ready Jamie is going to send those.

Cindee: Trying three different contacts from firms recommended from Gary Woodwork. Wait until we have complete information

Mark: Jamie confirming some names. I will follow up with her. I will drop Demmer until we have complete info

Daina: what is the target date for completing all the surveys?

Cindee: initial date was fall.  We want to get the employees from those employers that  we are interviewing to complete the survey, so I would say we will complete employee surveys by end October early Nov.

Neeraj: Did MDOT sent the demographic info?

Tammy: yes is up on the wiki

Daina: general question, if we are going to disseminate this method and we want this approach to be generalizable to other institutions what  would they do without a CSW?

Cindee: we need to talk about the dissemination approach one idea was to hold a forum with other colleges and universities. What are the different ways that they can apply this model and without a resource like csw what are the other options. This could be something also that we can touch in the AB meeting the might have innovative thoughts

2) AB meeting schedule

 Went through the schedule.  Decide that Thursday October 30 is the final date time 10 am til noon

Jon: we need to have Satish there

Tom: we will figure something out.

3) AB meeting planning

Mark: We will tell them the Status of the project and it is important to be sure about what is the call for action

Cindee: we need to figure that out. The sharing of preliminary results; what we want them to do with that information of what we are learning from the interviews and surveys and then what do they think in terms of dissemination strategy we need to figure out what is the purpose of their role in terms of guiding us. Engage them in more activities f ex the use of the wiki and the technology

Mark: disinclined to spend a lot of time around the wiki. We can provide the support for individuals. We want to pick their brains. By 30 oct we could have several employer interviews and we can ask them what do they think about it

Cindee: we can also see what comes out in terms of what we are doing with SAMPI

Mark: that could be a component of here is what we have and what is their reaction the responses that we will get from them in terms of the data that we are going to show them. On oct 30 we will have several interviews and some surveys and the beginning of the reviews of the faculty and we can start the faculty- employers stakeholders conversation.

Cindee: there could be some engagement around the future issue.

Taryn: I like the idea of talking about the future

Mark : We need to have the conversation about impact on the curriculum we want them to talk more. We could get some summary to them before the meeting targeting mid October to have material distributed to the AB people.  Things like summaries of the data, a preliminary report of what we are learning from the interviews, themes that we are getting from the interviews.

Cindee: we want to keep the summary short because it is easier for them to get to it

Mark: we will ask them to please review these materials in this context

Jon: what is the purpose of this?

Mark: A place where we can start the conversation between employers and faculty and this is part of our goal, getting on the same page.

Jon: When are we recruiting the other faculty to look at our data?

Mark: An update of the project to the other faculty could be in October faculty meeting brief information about the project.

Tom: The venue could be the undergraduate committee they meet about every 2-4 weeks.

Jon: we need a plan on how is this going to happen.

Neeraj: We need to start to talk about this when we have results.

Jon: Not in summer. We need to get a time table for the project that is consistent with submitting that next grant.

Mark: we are funded thruogh aug 31/09 one year more is in aug 31/10 we will get our transformation grant at the end of 2010  

Jon: one year no clause extension is what we are doing.

Daina: we have some publications based on the math lab so we could do some preliminary integration

Mark: two points: one is the proposal to revise the curriculum in MSU and LCC and the other is the process that other people can use.

Mark: Tom please take a look at the NSF report so that we can send it

Tom: I will look at it. You all mentioned the CAD discussion could you summarize that?

Mark: Have surfaced in the interviews and I used it as an example about the type of conversations that we need to have with the industry people.

Daina: have them to give them something to do to remain active that will become clearer as we have the results coming in.

Cindee: we could take some of the things that we have talked here and start creating a sort of agenda for the next meeting. CSW will start the draft.

Jon: I have trouble finding things on the WIKI

Mark: can do by link or click on the browse by pages and can look at recently updated. Mark explained how to...on the wiki

4) Interview update

Cindee: we talked about Claudia doing some of the interviews.

Mark: Claudia is doing the analysis and she needs time to do it.

Cindee: we will need someone from MSU to help with some of the interviews.

Mark: TARDEC interview is today and Tammy is doing it by phone

Tammy: if someone else wants to sit on the phone we could do that

Mark: Would you emailed the call number and the relevant info I might be able to join at 1

Taryn: we have five of the six from the AB. Steve Richie at Kellogg we still don't have a response. We are email telephone tagging he was out of the office.

Daina: Try one more time contacting him and if that does not work I will contact him.

Mark : we have the merged mail letters of 22 out of 25 Jamie will do the mailing I will get that to her this afternoon. We have enough brochures here. The mail should go out today or tomorrow. I will not send the Demmer until we have a name.

Daina: McDonald's interview he talks about an interview with Shell the contact info that Mike gave is old and in my notes I have a new one. They are involved with MSU. They test the students as part of the hiring process. In my notes I have another name

Taryn: E-mail me with the new name.

Jon: Jamie is mailing to whom?

Mark: non-AB members recommended by AB members

Jon: When will we notify the AB about the new meeting?

Louise: You will tell me if I need to listen to the interviews. I need to know if there are specific ones I need to listen

5) Evaluation meeting update

Mark: Mark will send me something for planning I still do not have it. I will e-mail him again.

6) Pilot Survey update

Cindee: we did our first pilot with Cascade 5 individuals were ided to take the survey, 4 completed the survey

Kysha: the next person will probably come thru today

Mark: is there a link where we can go to look at the raw responses

Tanmmy: let me connect to the window.

Mark: have you looked at these, is there any sense about it?

Cindee: I scaned them and in terms of the section at the end about improvements on average they said is taking them 20 to 30 min.

Tammy: can you see the results page?

 Mark: I am looking at individual responses and I will send the link. Will we use the same link to see all the pilots?

Tammy: Yes and when we are done with the pilots we will have a new link

Mark: If we could start to look at these pilots that would be great so than we can use them to make changes if necessary

Tammy: In terms of big changes I got confused on answers to questions 32, 33, 34 we asked people about future software directions specific examples...and then on 32 we asked where do you expect to get these skills and we have not talked about skills before in 29, 30 or 31 and the wording is past tense not future tense I think we need to clean that. Question 33 we need to reverse and 33 and 32.

Cindee: makes sense

Tammy: In 34 at least one of the people answers about non-computational training. So we might want to specify that this is specific to computational skills.

Mark: I think that if we leave it open then they will talk about what are their short comings.

Daina: We could put computational or other wise

Tammy: The analysis will be really tricky because we give people the opportunity to identify software A, B and C and then we ask them questions about A, B and C and they might all be different we will have to do a lot of manual coding.

Mark: we could have a research subgroup meeting send around some possibilities

Summary

AB meeting schedule

• Decided that the date for the next AB meeting is October 30, 2008 10 am to 12

AB meeting planning

CSW will draft a tentative agenda for the AB meeting. Important considerations to draft the agenda:

•  Status of the project. By Oct 30 we will have several interviews and some surveys and the reviews of the faculty in our group, we can summarize what we are learning from the interviews and surveys and get their responses from the data we will show.
• Get a summary to the AB before the meeting targeting mid October to have material distributed to the AB people.  Things like summaries of the data, a preliminary report of what we are learning from the interviews, themes that we are getting from the interviews.
• We need to have the conversation about impact on the curriculum. It is important to start the conversation between employers and faculty.
• Engage AB in talks about the dissemination approach. An important point to emphasize is that a final model that can be used by other institutions needs to consider options in terms of organizations that might fulfill the role of CSW
•  Specific calls for action
• Keep AB engaged

Interview update

• Five of the six AB companies have been approached for interviews
• The invitation letters for 22 of the 25 companies recommended by AB members will be sent in the next two days.

Pilot Survey Update

• Cascade has participated and some minor changes have nbeen made
• We will have a subgrouop meeting to look at the survey results in more detail.

Discussion about engaging more fcayulty members from EGR

•  We need to have results to talk about this.
• A preliminary step is to give a brief update about the project in the October faculty meeting
• We need to get a time table for the project that is consistent with submitting that next grant.

Action Items:

CSW:

• Draft AB meeting agenda
• Pilot surveys
• Changes to survey

MSU:

Mark: Contact M Jeness regarding evaluation meeting. Contact Jamie about invitation letters for employer interviews.