Empowering Rural Communities: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education and Workforce Development

This project aims to serve the national interest by preparing technicians skilled in artificial intelligence to meet the growing needs of the industry. Through collaborations with education and industry partners, the project intends to develop a 30-credit hour certificate and a micro-certificate in artificial intelligence, a training program for educators to prepare them to teach the courses, and curriculum to upskill incumbent workers. The project's broader impact lies in building a pipeline of artificial intelligence talent and fostering economic growth. The intellectual merit is grounded in alignment with workforce needs and its contribution to artificial intelligence education. Important goals of the project are to provide early exposure to artificial intelligence for students, increase community engagement, and develop a replicable model for rural community colleges. Outcomes include fostering an understanding of artificial intelligence and its potential applications to improve workforce readiness and educational opportunities. To accomplish these, project activities feature building a learning community of secondary teachers, faculty from four-year institutions, community college faculty, local industry partners, and community organizations. The project's dissemination plan includes employing the train-the-trainer model to provide professional development for potential adopters and incorporating open educational resources to supplement instruction. The project's logic model and theory of change are expected to guide the formative and summative evaluation to determine the effectiveness of the program and capture the project's contributions to the knowledge base. 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.