Abstract
The proposed research paper shares the team’s initial findings on the project to create a national community of practice in computer science education. The programme has been designed to:
• provide a programme of continued professional development (CPD) for computer science specific requirements in higher education;
• offer a community of practice and support network for new computer science academics (in addition to their PG Cert in academic practice activities); and
• generate a forum for sharing good practice and offers a mentoring framework for new computer science academics.
The project has grown from work undertaken in the Institute of Coding and the BCS Academy Board for Computing and literature such as Murphy (2016) and Davenport et al (2017) has been aimed at computer science academics who are new to teaching in UK HEIs i.e. early career academics.
There were a number of reasons for creating this programme specifically for computer science academics, including:
• changes in the national computer science curricula;
• high attrition and failure rates of students;
• student satisfaction commonly reported to be lower than that of other disciplines;, and
• specific pedagogic challenges in teaching subjects such as programming.
In the first phase of the project the team have established a project steering group, a project operations group and an initial cohort of participants. An initial CPD programme has been created and a series of workshops and pilot sessions have taken place to enable the project team to gather data and identify a set of requirements to take forward into phase 2 of the project.
This presentation shares our initial findings from data gathered from workshops and through feedback from pilot CPD sessions (Crick et al 2020; Crick et al 2021). In addition to obtaining data from participants and potential participants, we have gathered feedback from the broader computer science community on the creation of the programme. We will also explore the arguments against creating subject specific CPD.
• provide a programme of continued professional development (CPD) for computer science specific requirements in higher education;
• offer a community of practice and support network for new computer science academics (in addition to their PG Cert in academic practice activities); and
• generate a forum for sharing good practice and offers a mentoring framework for new computer science academics.
The project has grown from work undertaken in the Institute of Coding and the BCS Academy Board for Computing and literature such as Murphy (2016) and Davenport et al (2017) has been aimed at computer science academics who are new to teaching in UK HEIs i.e. early career academics.
There were a number of reasons for creating this programme specifically for computer science academics, including:
• changes in the national computer science curricula;
• high attrition and failure rates of students;
• student satisfaction commonly reported to be lower than that of other disciplines;, and
• specific pedagogic challenges in teaching subjects such as programming.
In the first phase of the project the team have established a project steering group, a project operations group and an initial cohort of participants. An initial CPD programme has been created and a series of workshops and pilot sessions have taken place to enable the project team to gather data and identify a set of requirements to take forward into phase 2 of the project.
This presentation shares our initial findings from data gathered from workshops and through feedback from pilot CPD sessions (Crick et al 2020; Crick et al 2021). In addition to obtaining data from participants and potential participants, we have gathered feedback from the broader computer science community on the creation of the programme. We will also explore the arguments against creating subject specific CPD.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Publication status | Published - 27 Jun 2021 |
| Event | Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA) Annual Conference - virtual on-line Duration: 28 Jun 2021 → 29 Jun 2021 |
Conference
| Conference | Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA) Annual Conference |
|---|---|
| Period | 28/06/21 → 29/06/21 |