New APCS trial at UCSD

Lisa Kaczmarczyk is going to blog on Beth Simon’s trial of the new AP course “Computer Science: Principles” at UCSD.  There are five trials total, and Beth’s is clearly the largest.

This pilot poses some exciting challenges. First of all, Beth will be delivering twice weekly lectures to approximately 750 students. Yes, 750. The students will be from two very different audiences: one group will be upper division Psychology students and the other will be freshmen who may end up majoring in any area.  Most have not currently expressed a preference for computing (otherwise they would likely be enrolled in the CS1 course). All of the students are required to take this course. Students will be seated in three adjacent lecture halls. Using various pedagogical techniques that Beth has been refining over several years, including innovative use of clickers to create dynamic interchanges between student and instructor, this pilot will aim to demonstrate that the Principles course can be scaled to the largest of classroom audiences.

via Interdisciplinary Computing Blog: APCS Principles Course Development at UCSD.

Do faculty cover their salary? TAMU plans to compute profit-loss per prof

My suspicion is that this doesn’t really work like this.  There are faculty in our School who bring in more money, and those that bring in less.  Some of those who bring in less have expertise and teach classes that we want in our School, that nobody else in the School can replicate.  There are lots of areas in Computing that don’t bring in a whole lot of external funding, but are important, and I know I can’t teach their classes. Even if the classes aren’t large, we need to have them.  As long as the overall School covers its costs, isn’t it okay if individual faculty don’t?

Then as we move beyond Computing, the case gets more complicated.  We’re a lot better situated for external funding in Computing than other schools/colleges on campus. Should we stop teaching Philosophy or Art except in huge classes, in order to cover individual faculty costs?

We’re going to see more of these kinds of efforts.

A several-inches thick document in the possession of A&M System officials contains three key pieces of information for every single faculty member in the 11-university system: their salary, how much external research funding they received and how much money they generated from teaching.

The information will allow officials to add the funds generated by a faculty member for teaching and research and subtract that sum from the faculty member’s salary. When the document — essentially a profit-loss statement for faculty members — is complete, officials hope it will become an effective, lasting tool to help with informed decision-making.

via A&M System grades faculty — by bottom line | Bryan/College Station, Texas – The Eagle.

Good teachers are born not made?

American Radioworks is making two claims in this piece that I find disturbing (though both could very well be true). First, that it’s not possible to make teachers effective — they’re either good or they’re not.  From the below quote, the authors of the piece aren’t comfortable with that idea either, since they quickly shift to a project showing progress in improving teachers and thus dispute Hanushek’s claim.

But the scarier claim is the implicit challenge to the old Bruner claim: “We being with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.”  I’m presuming that adults (even ineffective teachers) are a kind of “child at any stage of development.”  At some point, is the Bruner hypothesis false, and we just have to give up? That there are humans who lose the plasticity of their cognitive systems and can no longer be reshaped and reformed?

Is it possible to take ineffective teachers and make them better? Economist Eric Hanushek, who has done some of the most influential research about the importance of teachers, thinks the answer is, “no.”

Hanushek: My interpretation of the evidence is that teachers are born and not made.

There have been only a few big studies of programs that are supposed to help teachers improve, and the evidence is: they don’t work. That’s why Hanushek thinks the focus should be getting rid of bad teachers, and recruiting better ones. But there are more than three million teachers in the United States. If every child is really going to have a good teacher, there needs to be some way to help teachers improve.

via Testing Teachers — American RadioWorks — Transcript.

New book on role of technologies in assisting disabled students

I’ve always thought that computing educators should be at the cutting edge of the use of technology for all forms of education, including adaptations for students with disabled.  We have the most flexible medium for teaching and for teaching about — we teach about computation using computation.  Richard Ladner is a world-leader in making CS accessible to disabled students, and his NSF BPC Alliance on AccessComputing provides resources to help with that adaptation.  I’d love to see more computer scientists building technologies to help us teach computing to more people and better.

Assistive technologies can include anything from electronic tools for time and materials management; hearing aids and amplification devices for those who are hearing impaired; glare-reduction screens, note-taking devices and screen magnifiers for visually impaired students; voice-recognition software that can turn the spoken work into type on a computer screen so students suffering from paralysis may take part in discussion. Technology is even advancing so much that severely disabled students can now control their computers by simply following letters and commands on the computer screen with their eyes. The term “eye tracking”, the process of measuring either the point of gaze (“where we are looking”) or the motion of an eye relative to the head has gained a strong presence when discussing applications of assistive technologies.

via IGI Global – Educational Technologies Blog > No Two Students are Alike – Technologies that Embrace Disabilities.

Mid-career job changers to education don’t often work out

New study shows that people who switch into teaching in the middle of some other career, don’t often work out.  We definitely see some of these problems among people who switch into teaching CS from an IT career.  Sometimes they do it because it’s a second or third choice, and they’re not too happy about it.

Many people assumed that mid-career job changers would prove the salvation of public education by bringing their content expertise and successful work experience with them.

It turns out that many have neither expertise nor great success.

“When we looked at these alternative or lateral entry teachers, many of them were quite young and were simply frustrated in getting a job in their chosen profession,” said Gary Henry, director of the UNC Carolina Institute for Public Policy. “The folks switching from high-performing private sector jobs are a very small minority.

via No superheroes to the rescue of schools. Good teaching seems to depend on good supports. | Get Schooled.

“Georgia Computes!” (read: Barb) impact on CS1 in Georgia

I’m working on my (er, overdue) annual report to NSF on “Georgia Computes!” and just found this pretty remarkable tidbit.  One of the big projects we’re doing as part of our two year extension on “Georgia Computes!” is to conduct a survey of all CS1 students in the whole state — what’s our real WDF rate? where are these students coming from?  29 schools in the University System of Georgia have computing programs, and 19 of those participated in our survey.

Here’s the factoid.  Barbara (through the Institute for Computing Education) has now taught CS high school teachers at 152 of the 422 (about 36%) high schools in Georgia. Of the 1,349 students taking CS1 last year and participating in our study, 64% (865) went to a public high school in Georgia.  (I thought that that was a surprisingly low percentage.)  But here’s the kicker: 58% of those kids (498) came from the schools where Barbara trained the teachers.

If we’re only in 36% of the schools, but those are the ones generating 58% of the (responding) CS1 students, I’d say that Barb’s workshops are having a disproportionate impact on CS1 in the state.

Tips for Women on Surviving STEM Graduate Studies

The advice in this blog rings true for me (i.e., my experience suggests that these recommendations would help), but it’s also depressing.  Do we still have men saying to women graduate students: ”Of course you want babies and a family,” even though you say you don’t, or “Since you have children, you are certainly not working as hard as you should,” or “You will certainly follow your husband for his job”?  It’s still not getting any better?

From teaching this course over the years, I have learned of the difficulties faced by many women grad students in STEM disciplines, especially in the lab sciences. Practices of favoritism, exclusion of women from team experiences (field research trips, for example), poor/difficult communication, lack of acknowledgment of women’s contributions, and on and on create a hostile environment for many female grad students. I try to give them strategies for dealing, and I talk in the university about the problem every chance I get, but of course I don’t get much credence because I am not a scientist.

If you could blog about survival strategies for women graduate students in the STEM fields, especially in lab cultures, it would be very helpful.

via Career Advice: Survival Tips – Inside Higher Ed.

MOOC: Massive Open Online Course

I learned a new term today.  I found the Chronicle article about MOOC’s disappointing.  They talk about how much students like it, and about how energized the faculty were about doing it, and how the challenge was getting these huge number of students to “behave.”  But did anybody learn?

Still, the concept is spreading. The classes have even spawned a new name: Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC. In February, Wendy K. Drexler, a postdoctoral associate at the University of Florida who studied with Mr. Siemens and Mr. Downes, will help lead a new would-be MOOC about technology and learning. Ms. Drexler calls their course, which she took for credit as a high-school teacher, one of the most valuable learning experiences of her life.

She found herself interacting mostly with participants who weren’t taking the course for credit. Corporate instructional designers, other classroom teachers, consultants: The chance to engage with so many different people on a focused topic, she says, was “mind-boggling.”

via ‘Open Teaching’: When the World Is Welcome in the Online Classroom – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Georgia Tech wants avatars to sit in classrooms?

I am hoping that the AJC reporter just got it wrong.  It’s not a great idea for people to sit in classrooms.  How is it any better for avatars to sit in classrooms?  We don’t know much that virtual worlds make better in education. I’m hoping that the new strategic plan is more than what’s described here.

Georgia Tech students may learn in virtual classrooms, with avatars of themselves “sitting” in the class. Students and professors will work to solve the world’s problems using new areas of study. The institute will expand globally, while also taking on a larger role in Atlanta.

These are just a few aspects of the strategic vision Georgia Tech President G.P. “Bud” Peterson will share in a speech Tuesday. The plan outlines goals and priorities to shape the institution for the next 25 years.

via Georgia Tech prepares for 2035  | ajc.com.

What are the fundamental education issues for next 10 years? Computing education issues?

NSF’s Division of Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences is seeking white papers on the grand challenges in these areas over the next 10 years.  Reading through the questions they want answered, I’m wondering if some of the important grand challenges are computing education grand challenges.  I think it’s increasingly important that we understand how to improve how students come to understand computing, because that understanding can drive creative and innovative use of an incredibly powerful set of technologies.  Due date for white papers is September 30.

NSF/SBE invites individuals and groups to contribute white papers outlining grand challenge questions that are both foundational and transformative.  They are foundational in the sense that they reflect deep issues that engage fundamental assumptions behind disciplinary research traditions and are transformative because they seek to leverage current findings to unlock a new cycle of research. We expect these white papers to advance SBE’s mission to study human characteristics and human behaviors in its Social and Economic Sciences and Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences divisions, as well as to be the nation’s resource for understanding the structure and development of science through its Science Resources Statistics division.

via US NSF – SBE – SBE 2020.