49,648 research outputs found
Brave New World: Can We Engineer a Better Start for Freshers?
Abstract - The crucial importance of first experiences in shaping future success has been widely acknowledged. Creating the best foundations in large cohorts of students from diverse backgrounds presents special problems of its own. But a secure foundation can enhance student achievement and improve retention – and the students may even have fun too. Research has suggested that building learning communities can enhance student engagement and achievement. This paper examines how introducing non-technical activities can establish sound foundations for a university career by a) addressing objectives in the wider curriculum and b) promoting non-technical skills and experience of group working. A set of changes introduced to five degree cohorts in our academic school were designed to complement enhancements to our technical curriculum introduced during many years of debate and consideration. The changes have impacted upon generic and technical educational experiences. The paper presents an evaluation of the programme of changes through two iterations from the perspective of both faculty and student
Using theory to inform capacity-building: Bootstrapping communities of practice in computer science education research
In this paper, we describe our efforts in the deliberate creation of a
community of practice of researchers in computer science education
(CSEd). We understand community of practice in the sense in
which Wenger describes it, whereby the community is characterized
by mutual engagement in a joint enterprise that gives rise to a
shared repertoire of knowledge, artefacts, and practices.
We first identify CSEd as a research field in which no shared
paradigm exists, and then we describe the Bootstrapping project,
its metaphor, structure, rationale, and delivery, as designed to create
a community of practice of CSEd researchers. Features of
other projects are also outlined that have similar aims of capacity
building in disciplinary-specific pedagogic enquiry. A theoretically
derived framework for evaluating the success of endeavours of
this type is then presented, and we report the results from an
empirical study. We conclude with four open questions for our
project and others like it: Where is the locus of a community of
practice? Who are the core members? Do capacity-building models
transfer to other disciplines? Can our theoretically motivated
measures of success apply to other projects of the same nature
A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities
Examines the state of the foundation's efforts to improve educational opportunities worldwide through universal access to and use of high-quality academic content
Report on the Third Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE3)
This report records and discusses the Third Workshop on Sustainable Software
for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE3). The report includes a
description of the keynote presentation of the workshop, which served as an
overview of sustainable scientific software. It also summarizes a set of
lightning talks in which speakers highlighted to-the-point lessons and
challenges pertaining to sustaining scientific software. The final and main
contribution of the report is a summary of the discussions, future steps, and
future organization for a set of self-organized working groups on topics
including developing pathways to funding scientific software; constructing
useful common metrics for crediting software stakeholders; identifying
principles for sustainable software engineering design; reaching out to
research software organizations around the world; and building communities for
software sustainability. For each group, we include a point of contact and a
landing page that can be used by those who want to join that group's future
activities. The main challenge left by the workshop is to see if the groups
will execute these activities that they have scheduled, and how the WSSSPE
community can encourage this to happen
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