Toward Competency-Based Professional Accreditation in Computing

Abstract

Program accreditation in medical or religious professions has existed since the 1800s while accreditation of business and engineering programs started in the early twentieth century. With this long history, these disciplines have focused on ensuring the competence of their graduates, as modern society demands appropriate expertise from doctors and engineers before letting them practice their profession. In computing, however, professional accreditation started in the last decades of the twentieth century only after computer science, informatics, and information systems programs became widespread. At the same time, although competency-based learning has existed for centuries, its growth in computing is relatively new, resulting from recent curricular reports such as Computing Curricula 2020, which have defined competency comprising knowledge, skills, and dispositions. In addition, demands are being placed on university programs to ensure their graduates are ready for entering and sustaining employment in the computing profession.This work explores the role of accreditation in the formation and development of professional competency in non-computing disciplines worldwide, building on this understanding to see how computing accreditation bodies could play a similar role in computing. This work explores the role of accreditation in the formation and development of professional competency in non-computing disciplines worldwide, building on this understanding to see how computing accreditation bodies could play a similar role in computing. Its recommendations are to incorporate competencies in all computing programs and future curricular guidelines; create

Using Skills Profiling to Enable Badges and Micro-Credentials to be Incorporated into Higher Education Courses

“…Some disciplines have developed competency-focused criteria (e.g. Nursing, Medicine, Education) (Raj et al 2022), though not the computing discipline. Indeed, a recent UK governmental review made several recommendations regarding improving computing graduate work-readiness (Shadbolt 2016).…”

“…Such development has not been without challenges in the form of bogus providers and credentials (Ezell & Bear 2005). One solution to this is to use micro-credentials to personalise professional development (Hunt et al 2020) either alongside or within formal qualifications, especially where completing a university qualification is the foundation of professional formation (Raj et al 2022) (e.g. Computing, Engineering, Medicine, Nursing, Teaching).…”

Teaching Programming Competencies: A Role for Craft Computing?

“…Competency-based education for computing-related degrees is the model recommended by CC2020 and CS2023. The implementation of this approach has been explored by recent ITiCSE Working Groups, with one in 2022 highlighting how a focus on competency may help address the issue of computing graduate employment and underemployment [4]. Learning to program requires the development of craft competencies and deeper understanding beyond the actual writing of code.…”

Board 363: Promoting the Dispositional Dimension of Competency in Undergraduate Computing Programs

“…More recently, curricular efforts in Data Science [14] and Computer Science [15,16] have also continued this emphasis. The role of competencies in computing accreditation criteria has also been covered [17,18].…”