Resources for dealing with the Undergraduate CS Capacity Crisis: Guest Post from Eric Roberts

Eric Roberts emailed to SIGCSE-members a note with resources on the capacity crisis. He graciously agreed to let me share it here as a guest blog post. Thanks, Eric!

Everyone,

A month ago, I sent out an announcement of the report from the National Academies entitled “Assessing and Responding to the Growth of Computer Science Undergraduate Enrollments,” which is available on the web at the following URL:

https://www.nap.edu/catalog/24926/assessing-and-responding-to-the-growth-of-computer-science-undergraduate-enrollments/

SInce it’s hard to wade through a 184-page report (especially since our massive enrollments leave most of us with little free time), I’ve put together a web page of resources to help institutions meet these capacity challenges, which you can find here:

http://cs.stanford.edu/~eroberts/ResourcesForTheCSCapacityCrisis/

In particular, I created a PowerPoint presentation that offers background data and annotations for the nine findings from the National Academies report. That slideshow is linked from my resources page but is also accessible directly as

http://cs.stanford.edu/~eroberts/ResourcesForTheCSCapacityCrisis/files/AnnotatedFindings.pptx

A few of the slides contain animations that I have found to be more effective than text or graphs, most notably on the slides titled “Classrooms are Overflowing” (slides 9-10), “The Challenge of Faculty Recruitment” (slide 15), and “Locking the Clubhouse” (slide 43). Feel free to use any of these slides in your own presentations.

I hope you find these materials useful in making the case for increased resources.  And please send me any comments you have along with suggestions for any additional information that you would find helpful.

Sincerely,

Eric Roberts

Charles Simonyi Professor of Computer Science, emeritus

Stanford University