The fact that English teachers teaching in a computer science department may not really know detail about information technology (IT) as a subject, as well as its terminologies, brings about difficulties when deciding what kind of teaching materials are appropriate to the student’s learning needs. Another issue is that some computer science teachers do not have an English language teaching background. This can be a drawback for this group of teachers since they do not really know how to teach the language. The following discussion is a needs analysis used as a preliminary study to develop an in-service training (IST) model to improve English teachers’ pedagogical and professional competencies in a computer science department. Pedagogical knowledge, skill, and attitude, and professional competency became the core study since these two were the obvious difficulties faced by the two groups of teachers. This study involved English computer science teachers, the curriculum administrator, and the students in two private universities and one state university in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Observations, open interviews, and questionnaires were used to gather the data.

Many factors are required in order to increase the skills of English of higher education students, specifically computer science students. Of the factors, teachers play a very important role since they are the agents of change in the classrooms; not to neglect that the students are also the agents of their own changes. Using Brown’s 12 pedagogical characteristics of a good language teacher as its theory, this is a report of the first step of design-based research, practical problems encountered by teachers of English to computer science students conducted at two private universities in Indonesia. Among the 12 characteristics, knowledge of approaches to language teaching seems to be the biggest challenge that came upon the teachers. The findings of this step will subsequently be used as the bases to go further to the second cycle of design-based research, which is the development of solutions informed by existing design principles and technological innovations.

The community service programme was conducted in the form of an English Club intended for high school students. The high school partner was SMA Immanuel Kalasan, Sleman, Yogyakarta Special Regency. A total of 13 students participated in this extracurricular activity. There were six online, synchronous meetings conducted once a week. Themed "Going Global", the programme aimed to not only facilitate the student participants to improve their English language but also to facilitate them to possess intercultural competence. It was hoped that they would consider globalisation era an opportunity to understand one another and to collaborate to achieve goals together. In practice, each meeting used the combination of a 60-90 minute synchronous Zoom session and asynchronous activities through tasks that should be completed and submitted before the next synchronous meeting. Seen from the indicators of attendance and submission of tasks, it could be stated that several participants were not very motivated to actively participate in the programme. However, seen from the qualitative testimonies of several participants, the programme was engaging and could provide them with meaningful learning. Based on the evaluation of the degree of success of the programme, several conclusions were suggested along with suggestions for future programmes’ improvements.