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Factors Associated with Collaboration Networks in ASEE Conference Papers

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Conference

2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Location

Virtual Conference

Publication Date

July 26, 2021

Start Date

July 26, 2021

End Date

July 19, 2022

Conference Session

Computers in Education 6: Best of CoED

Tagged Division

Computers in Education

Page Count

13

DOI

10.18260/1-2--37173

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/37173

Download Count

265

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Paper Authors

biography

Sherif Abdelhamid Virginia Military Institute

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Sherif E. Abdelhamid serves as an Assistant Professor at the Computer and Information Sciences Department, Virginia Military Institute (VMI). Before joining VMI, he was an Assistant Professor at the College of Computing and Information Technology (AAST - Smart Village Campus, Egypt). He was also an Infrastructure Software Engineer at the Center for Open Science, Virginia, USA.

He obtained his Ph.D. and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Science from Virginia Tech and M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees in Computer Science from AAST - Alexandria Campus, Egypt.

Dr. Abdelhamid’s research work spans three main fields, Computer Science, STEM Education, and Public Health. His research interests are in high-performance services-based computing solutions, novel digital educational technologies, and tools for the social network analysis of complex systems. More specifically, his research focuses on designing and building software systems and services (science-as-service) that enable students and domain experts from various fields to access and interact with various learning resources easily and perform data analyses and simulations to study large-scale biological information socio-technical (BIST) complex systems.

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Yousef Jalali Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

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Yousef Jalali is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech. He received a B.S. and M.S. in Chemical Engineering and M.Eng. in Energy Systems Engineering. His research interests include interaction between critical thinking, imagination, and ethical reasoning, interpersonal and interinstitutional collaboration, diversity, equity, and inclusion, systems thinking, and chemical engineering learning systems. Yousef taught chemical engineering courses for a few years in his home country, Iran, and first-year engineering courses for several semesters at Virginia Tech. He has provided service and leadership in different capacities at Lehigh University and Virginia Tech.

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Andrew Katz Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

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Andrew Katz is an assistant professor in the Department of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech. He leads the Improving Decisions in Engineering Education Agents and Systems (IDEEAS) Lab, a group that uses multi-modal data to characterize, understand, and improve decisions made throughout engineering education ecosystems.

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Abstract

Research collaborations are essential to advance rigorous scholarship, perform transformative science, and accelerate engineering education innovation. With this in mind, the engineering education community should continue investigating and evaluating the key factors that hinder or promote collaborative research within and across institutions, especially amidst efforts to continue to grow the field. Over the last few decades, research collaborations across institutions have grown significantly—however, few studies have examined the relationship between such collaborations and the institutional characteristics such as ranking, geographic location, or classifications (e.g., the Carnegie Classification of Higher Education Institutions) when studying collaboration networks. Our paper uses social network analysis (SNA) to help fill this gap by examining how some of these institutional characteristics are related to the institutions' collaborations and network positions. Social network analysis has emerged as a useful approach to measure research collaboration by evaluating several types of collaboration networks, including co-authorship networks. In this paper, we consider the institution network. Nodes in this type of network represent institutions, while links represent the pairwise collaboration between two institutions. Each link also has a weight that represents the collaboration frequency. The links form a social space that we can map and analyze to reveal systematic patterns in the broader engineering education community that might otherwise pass unobserved. For this study, we collected information about all papers published between 1996 and 2019 in the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) annual conference proceedings. From this dataset, we built the inter-institutional collaboration network and identified structural network properties, connected components, and modularity classes. The network data were then linked to data regarding each institution's (i) Carnegie classification, (ii) rankings based on the 2020 QS World University Rankings, and (iii) geographic location. With this augmented dataset, we were able to answer research questions about factors associated with inter-institutional collaborations through statistical analysis. In doing so, we identify the key patterns, trends, and associations from our networked data. Among the results, we found that a research institution's classification is significantly related to its network positions in the collaboration network, specifically its modularity class. Additionally, we found correlations between the institutions' centrality measures in the network, including the degree centrality, betweenness centrality, and structural holes. Our findings also indicate an association between the institutions' geographical proximity and their research collaborations. Overall, this study provides a lens through which engineering education researchers, faculty members, and administrators can understand the current state of research collaborations within and across institutions. The results can help researchers answer (and raise more) important research questions, support administrators in making decisions on funding and institutional partnerships, and help faculty members design and develop more effective programs that facilitate research collaborations.

Abdelhamid, S., & Jalali, Y., & Katz, A. (2021, July), Factors Associated with Collaboration Networks in ASEE Conference Papers Paper presented at 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual Conference. 10.18260/1-2--37173

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2021 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015