The Disciplinary Commons project had two primary objectives: to document and share knowledge about teaching and student learning in Computer Science (CS) classrooms, and to establish practices for the scholarship of teaching by making it public, peer-reviewed, and amenable for future use and development by other educators. The mechanism for achieving these goals was through a series of monthly meetings involving Computer Science faculty, one cohort of ten CS faculty in the US and one cohort of twenty in the UK. Meetings were focused on the teaching and learning within participants' classrooms, with each person documenting their teaching in a course portfolio. Surveyed on completing the project, participants discussed the value of the Disciplinary Commons in providing the time and structure to systematically reflect upon their practice, to exchange concrete ideas for teaching their courses with other CS educators in the discipline, to learn skills that apply directly to course and program evaluation, and to meet colleagues teaching CS at other institutions.
When an instructor adopts teaching materials, he/she wants some measure of confidence that the resource is effective, correct, and robust. The measurement of the quality of a resource is an open problem. It is our thesis that the traditional evaluative approach to peer review is not appropriate to insure the quality of teaching materials, which are created with different contextual constraints. This Working Group report focuses on the evaluation process by detailing a variety of review models. The evolution of the development and review of teaching materials is outlined and the contexts for creation, assessment, and transfer are discussed. We present an empirical study of evaluation forms conducted at the ITiCSE 99 conference, and recommend at least one new review model for the validation of the quality of teaching resources.
The EPCoS project (Effective Project work in Computer Science) is working to map the range of project work practices and to generate insights into what characterises 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. 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. Moreover, EPCoS is examining the process by which practices are transferred between institutional contexts, with a view to identifying effective models of that process. In this paper, we describe EPCoS's work-in-progress and describe briefly how technology makes the catalogue easier to use, providing tailored access, fast selection and juxtaposition, and the potential for an extensible, updated, distributed resource.
This session showcases the projects that have received support from a SIGCSE Special Project Award in the previous year.
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