During the last 25 years, the academic research environment has become increasingly competitive, with those seeking grants contending for over $83.7 billion, available from primarily six federal agencies. Notably, this increased competition occurred at the same time states have cut support for public universities. To deal with decreases in state support, university leaders and administrators have adopted “new managerialist” approaches that capitalized on three elements obliging early-career engineering faculty members to ‘win’ more federal funding. These three components include (a) leveraging the probationary period during promotion and tenure to stimulate grant production, (b) seeking revenue beyond tuition and operations to support the institution, and (c) augmenting faculty resources by including professional grant writers/support personnel who collaborate with early-career faculty members to mitigate challenges of increased competition for grants by providing domain and implicit knowledge to aid the engineers in grant development. The promotion and tenure process has become particularly challenging for early-career engineers because of the highly competitive federal research landscape.This mixed-methods action research (MMAR) study was conducted to examine the effects of an intervention designed to provide on-demand, online grant writing professional development using a set of five modules. The modules focused on providing information about five constructs related to grant development or grant writing, including requirements, processes, skills, attitudes, and self-efficacy. For three of the five modules, participants demonstrated modest or moderate increases in quantitative scores for the constructs based on survey data. During semi-structured interviews, early-career engineering faculty members revealed candid thoughts about the modules, grant writing, and the “need” to obtain grants as part of their professional lives. Four themes emerged from the qualitative data, including Knowledge, Online Learning, Grant Writing Process, and Winning the Next Grant. The discussion focused on connections between the quantitative and qualitative data, explaining the findings based on the theoretical frameworks, limitations, implications for practice and research, and included a summary.

The action research was inspired by the current trend of international student enrollment in the U.S. Through a mixed-methods approach, the action research explored the effective ways for a higher education institution in the U.S. to utilize WeChat service account as a marketing and communication tool to influence the behavioral intentions of prospective international students from China to apply for admissions to the institution. Through the four data sources of qualitative interview, document analysis, focus group interview, and quantitative survey, both quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analyzed for findings to answer the research questions. Specifically, content provided on an institution’s WeChat service account should be relevant to the Chinese student population and up-to-date, and incorporate diverse modalities and creative digital assets. In addition, an institution’s WeChat service account should engage followers through interactive approach, and establish a landing page that is easy for followers to navigate. In terms of the impact of WeChat service account, it has been found that an institution’s WeChat service account may impact students’ behavioral intentions to apply for admissions to the institution both directly, and indirectly through influencing the students’ impressions of the institution and the opinions of their important others.