159 research outputs found
Promotion and Dissemination of Good Practice: Discipline Networks
This paper discovers the models adopted by the initial 24 Discipline Networks (DNs) and places them within a preliminary taxonomy
Computing Graduate Employability: Sharing Practice
Computing is one of the largest subject areas in Higher Education, and is taught in almost every institution, graduating around 9,000 students each year. However Computing graduates are recorded as having the highest unemployment rates for all subjects (11% for Computing compared with an overall rate of 7% for graduates of all subjects). This new report, jointly published by the Council of Professors and Heads of Computing (CPHC) and Higher Education Academy (HEA) highlights the depth, complexity and richness of employability practices in the sector, and aims to share those practices more widely. The report places practice in a comparative context so that departments may learn what works from each other. It draws on research gathered from over fifty Higher Education institutions in a series of workshops, focus groups and interviews. Throughout, participantsâ voices are given priority, with the report structured around the common employability challenges faced by academics. Within that structure, clusters of similar practice (those which appear in several institutions) are presented, together with a series of showcases providing rich detail of specific interventions.
Challenges discussed within the reportâs three themes of âAddressing Employabilityâ, âCurriculum Issuesâ and âPlacementsâ include âthe employability agendaâ, âstudent engagementâ, âcurriculum designâ, âreaching âtipping pointââ and âfinding alternatives to the âsandwich yearââ and are balanced throughout with a âView from Employersâ.
Clusters identify good practice from âhackathonsâ, competitions, mentoring, âcompulsionâ, an employer-led curriculum, industry-focused projects and placement preparation, application, monitoring, return, assessment and alternatives. Showcases highlight practice in âauditing employabilityâ, âdedicated placement supportâ, âmultiplicity of opportunitiesâ, âshort placement modulesâ, âthink futureâ, âsummer internshipsâ and âtransition weekâ from the universities of York, Kent, London South Bank, West of Scotland, Edinburgh Napier, Southampton and Brunel London, amongst other
ACM Curriculum Reports: A Pedagogic Perspective
In this paper, we illuminate themes that emerged in interviews with participants in the major curriculum recommendation efforts: we characterize the way the computing community interacts with and influences these reports and introduce the term âpedagogic projectionâ to describe implicit assumptions of how these reports will be used in practice. We then illuminate how this perceived use has changed over time and may affect future reports
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
Project-based Learning Practices in Computer Science Education
The EPCoS project (Effective Projectwork in Computer Science) is working to map the range of project-based learning practices in UK higher education and to generate insights into what characterizes the contexts in which particular techniques are effective. In assembling a body of authentic examples, EPCoS aims to provide a resource that enables extrapolation and synthesis of new techniques. To allow educators and researchers to mine this material, EPCoS is systematizing it within a template-based catalogue, augmented with indexing and abstracting devices. Moreover, EPCoS is examining the process by which practices are transferred between institutional contexts, with a view to identifying effective models of the transfer process. Three key elements of transfer are the identification of appropriate practices, the selection of a practice for a purpose, and the integration of a chosen practice into the existing culture. Structured resources and process models are essential tools for supporting responsiveness in the current climate of continual change: the rapid development of computer technology is demanding new range and flexibility in project work, and EPCoS's mapping of project-based teaching allows practitioners to respond to these changes. This is one context in which educational research into how projects work can generalize to professional practice
Then and Now: Past Experience Echoed in University Computing Teachersâ Current Practice
Individual experiences, and the sense we make of them, shape who we are. For educators, experiential narratives affect both their day-to-day practice â the way they teach â and also the kind and quality of changes they make to their practice. In this work, we draw on data collected as part of a longitudinal study for the Sharing Practice project to explore how teachersâ experiences are âechoedâ in their current practice. We describe the concept of âpedagogic stanceâ and propose ways in which it may be identified. We suggest that an understanding of pedagogic stance may enable researchers to affect educatorsâ practice more effectively
Scaffolded autoethnography: a method for examining practice-to-research
Teachers often perceive educational research as confusing and can be disenfranchised by the research process. We propose scaffolded authethnography as a method to support principled examination of authentic practice. The approach is appealing because it is motivated by the teacherâs own day-to-day practice in a research context. Our demonstration of this method uses an analytical autoethnographic approach coupled with a data capture tool that documents the pedagogic content knowledge of a practicing teacher. We include a short case-study description where the method was used in the context of research in the area of threshold concept identification
- âŠ