Certainly, the past year will be remembered as the year that assessment became a major part of our Gateway Partners� activities. During my recent visits, I was struck by the degree that assessment had become an integral part of each and every activity. Our engineering departments have integrated assessment as a major part of their planning and preparation for ABET EC2000. Every Partner has worked hard to implement a longitudinal tracking system, and the efforts are really beginning to pay off. Finally, many of the pilot tests of assessment instruments have proven to be well worth the effort, yielding important and useful feedback to the participating institutions.

This year, we have tied the majority of our professional development efforts with assessment, using a concerted and systematic development effort. During the past 12 months, we have offered a series of "hands-on" workshops to support faculty understanding and use of assessment processes. Over 200 staff, faculty, and students have attended our assessment offerings. Many of our Partner institutions have inaugurated a continuous series of development offerings, thus collectively enhancing our ability to develop faculty and student participation alike.

As a Coalition, we want to maximize the participation of women and minorities in engineering and enhance that participation at all of the Gateway Partner institutions. This year, we advanced several specific strategies to support this objective. These strategies include the creation of linkages with minority institutions, identification and sharing of existing programs and resources across our Partner institutions, and the establishment of new programs to serve the needs of students with different backgrounds and learning styles. We established a working relationship with Dr. Robert Dixon, from Morehouse College, to help each of our Partners establish linkages with minority colleges. Over the past year, we have supported a number of innovative programs, including the Women�s Leadership Series, Getting Plugged In, and ELA Program. In addition, we have bolstered our web site to include many resources to support women and minority students across all our Partner institutions.

On the technology front, the broad goal has been to exploit new and emerging electronic information tools and technologies to enable and support systemic changes in educational philosophy, content, and manner of delivery. In

There are several key strategies we have implemented to continuously improve the dissemination of what we learn to institutions, both within and outside of the Coalition. This year, we have increased interaction with publishers/distributors, produced this newsletter, reconstituted our National Visiting Committee to solicit industrial input, and initiated selected relationships with external institutions, called Academic Associates.

Finally, the process of implementation and institutionalization of curricular components developed among Gateway and other institutions has progressed well. The participant numbers of students and faculty are increasing. More modules or models from among the prior developments have been integrated into existing courses, and we have moved the number of existing pilot projects into the mainstream curriculum. One of our greatest accomplishments is that every one of our schools now has a strong "hands-on" design experience in the freshman year. This truly brings engineering to the forefront of each Partner institution. And just as exciting is the fact that the successes of these freshman programs have fostered innovations throughout the curriculum. In some instances, these efforts have catalyzed departments outside of engineering to follow aspects of our model, a model that spreads beyond courses alone to the breadth of the educational enterprise. We are making a difference, and I hope you are as proud of this as I am.

As you can see, we have achieved a great deal in the past year, more than can be covered in this brief column. In future issues, I will elaborate on many of these achievements as we continue to make great progress. In the meantime, make sure you visit our web site (http://www.gatewaycoalition.org) which is under revision. Follow the progress for yourself, and don�t hesitate to give us some feedback and additional linkages or content where appropriate.