Regrettably, many tertiary institutions lack qualified lecturers and the few excellent lecturers they have in education are looking for a better career outside the teaching profession. However, when the tertiary institutions lack qualified lecturers to deliver their modules and do research effectively, then this will have a negative impact on improving the current education and the society at large.
The fundamental responsibilities for future advancement and development of nations in the world lie on the youths and students in particular. Therefore, adequate attention is required to ensure that the students are provided with the required information and skills for intellectual capacity.
Significantly, ICT could be useful to enhance teaching and learning processes among the lecturers and students at tertiary institutions. A computer-based learning package can be provided to help teachers and students to share information and do research projects at the same time. According to Bada, Adewole and Olalekan , the benefits of computer applications in education include the followings:.
Enhancement of self-assessment towards repetition of instructions until desired objectives are achieved. Computer : An electronic device designed and implemented to sequentially accept, process and store data on the basis of a predefined set of instructions to produce valuable information. Students : A group of learners enrolled in an institution for acquisition of specific learning experiences.
Computer-Managed Instruction : This is a computer application software that is used the by learner to acquire relevant skills without depending on the instructions of teachers. Advanced Search. Privacy Copyright. Skip to main content. Less obvious, but of potentially profound importance to the institutions, are actions that would push against long-standing institutional practices and core values. For example, for an institution that allows admitted students to major in any field they choose, it would be precedent setting, even mission altering, to impose limits on the number of CS majors.
Beyond institutional diversity, there are also important considerations related to student diversity. The offerings and atmosphere of any institution will attract different types of students, and institutional actions—including admissions and enrollment practices—play a major role in determining who is drawn to the institution and to specific programs, including the participation of underrepresented communities, and can impact the success and retention rates of different groups.
Every institution has its own distinct distribution of intellectual endeavors. In the face of increasing demand for a specific discipline, ensuring the vitality of less-populated disciplines might be a priority. Too much migration to popular.
For institutions that prioritize a broad, liberal arts education for their students, requiring early declaration of major, in particular during admissions, could inhibit the tradition of discovery during the first years of a broad education. Alternatively, they may want to maintain or increase the academic profile or ranking of the institution by maintaining or introducing high entrance requirements.
It is crucial that institutions be thoughtful and intentional in choosing strategies to respond to growth in computing enrollment. This includes a consideration of mission and values, and the consequences of actions—or inaction. While the challenges of increasing enrollments in undergraduate computing courses are very real and some institutions are in dire need of relief, it must be noted that resources at academic institutions may be limited.
In particular, investments in one area typically mean that cuts must be made to another. Accordingly, strategic decisions about how to respond to the surge in demand for computing must be made based on an analysis of the overall costs and benefits for the institution of the various possible actions. In this section the range of responses available to academic institutions are reviewed, including those listed in the CRA survey and discussed in the previous section.
In general there are four categories of responses available to institutions: 1 limit participation, 2 leverage resources in new ways, 3 grow programs and the resources that feed them, and 4 restructure the nature of computing education within the institution.
The categories range from relatively inexpensive and nondisruptive actions to major changes in organization and resource commitments. The responses are briefly evaluated in terms of their advantages and risks.
Because the needs and priorities of U. Instead, institutions must identify how the advantages and risks will translate to their individual circumstances, and decide how to proceed.
Institutions can take actions to limit the number of majors in their computer science program. These limits could be imposed at the point at which students are formally accepted into a major program, which occurs either before if students must apply directly to a degree program at the time of application, as at Carnegie Mellon University, for example or after they enter the college or university whenever the institution requires major declaration.
Enhanced restrictions to limit enrollment could be made by imposing a set of threshold performance requirements for entry into the program based, for example, on high school or college grades, grades in particular courses, performance on exams in certain courses, entrance or qualifying exams, or other factors.
Alternatively, caps could be imposed with acceptance into the major based upon lottery, first-come-first-served, or some other non-performance-based prioritization. Advantages: Imposing limits would prevent potentially unmanageable growth in computer science degree programs, and alleviate the associated pressure on departmental resources.
Depending on how the restrictions are implemented, limiting enrollment should be administratively expedient. There is the additional benefit of near certainty about student numbers, making it much easier for units to plan. Depending upon where in the process the limit is imposed, it may also introduce stress or an environment of real or perceived competition for students who desire to enter a CS program, which could discourage participation among underrepresented groups.
A ranking-based approach for determining eligibility would promote head-to-head competition based on the chosen requirements, which could cause students to focus on these requirements rather than other educational objectives. This strategy could also affect the climate for faculty, instructors, TAs, and support staff, by requiring them to respond to enhanced student stress, angst, or competitive attitudes, which risks diminishing the talent within the university.
However, some of these challenges could be overcome by introducing the limits at the time of acceptance of prospective students into the college or university, so students would have advance knowledge of whether a given institution will permit them to major in CS or another computing field. At the same time, in the extreme, limiting CS enrollments at all institutions would not be in the national interest, as it would restrict the total production of CS degrees feeding into the economy at a time when demand for computing professions is expected to grow.
Measures to limit major admission or declaration would likely result in reduced demand for more advanced courses or major-only introductory courses,. On the other hand such limits could affect the overall climate in such courses, and thus the level of interest in the course. Another action, which is not mutually exclusive with limits on majors, is to simply limit course enrollments. Advantages: This approach will remove the pressure on departmental resources associated with growth in student course enrollments, and would enable more individual attention to be paid to students than would be possible in larger classes or cohorts.
Risks: Again, this approach risks barring students who may have a sincere passion for the field, or who may need the course or associated skills for their major area or intended career path. It also limits the ability of a student population to be exposed to computing. Students may try to influence enrollment decisions by pleading with or pressuring faculty responsible for enforcing limits, which can lead to a negative environment for the department and the institution.
This option carries many of the risks associated with limiting majors. In particular, capping course enrollment based on past performance or experience could disproportionately affect women and underrepresented minorities. Restrictions on course enrollment or declaration of major are often associated with efforts to redirect students into alternative courses or majors. This can be done by communicating e. Advantages: This approach has the benefit of clearly presenting the challenges of the program to the students before they decide to pursue them.
It may also prompt students to look more closely at what is best for them. Risks: This approach could also serve to discourage students who might otherwise enjoy and succeed in computing courses or the major, and close what might have been successful pathways.
In addition, telling students who are still deciding which institution of higher education to enroll in about the challenges or limits associated with CS at a given institution may cause them to lose interest in the institution. In particular there is a risk as discussed in previous chapters that limiting access to courses could lead to declines in participation of women and underrepresented minorities. Growth is an obvious response to increased demand, but growth may have its own disadvantages, including potentially large opportunity costs for other university programs and priorities.
One response to increased course demand is to allow class sizes to grow to accommodate the demand. Advantages: This has the benefit of allowing all interested students access to the courses that they want to take, and would likely help to avoid the sense of scarcity and competition that comes with the imposition of limits. Risks: Larger class or lab sizes may or may not align with pedagogical needs or goals, depending on the nature of the course, and could negatively impact learning outcomes.
Larger classes will be less agile in meeting individual student needs. They could also affect the student experience further by limiting individualized interactions with faculty and teaching staff, creating the sense of being lost in the crowd, and heightening competitive pressures, which could also have a negative impact on student diversity.
A larger number of students per class or lab will increase the workload on faculty or teaching staff and the required management skills may limit who can teach these effectively. Even if additional hires are made, junior faculty with less experience are generally not effective instructors for large classes.
In addition, physical resources such as classroom space may be stretched beyond capacity. Strategies can be deployed to mitigate the negative aspects of large lecture classes, such as recording lecture material to permit student replay at a later time, expanding tutoring or office hours, and optional special sessions to provide further challenge or enrichment. Additional actions may be necessary to manage the burden of larger classes on academic resources.
Technology can be leveraged to support grading and course communications, including online forums, and is already quite common at many institutions. Faculty teams, rather than individual faculty, may offer courses collaboratively, enabling greater.
In addition, new pedagogical strategies such as collaborative projects and peer-to-peer instruction discussed earlier in this chapter could also ease some of the workload associated with teaching larger classes. New teaching arrangements may require initial investment of time and resources, especially at the onset.
The ability to handle exceptions effectively or not can contribute significantly to the climate of a course and the program, either positively or negatively. Departments may offer additional lecture sections for a given course, or offer similar courses that address the same student needs, rather than simply increasing the class size of one offering. Advantages: This approach meets student demand without the downsides associated with increased class sizes. If the same instructor is simply teaching additional sections of the same course, the additional time required for preparation of materials is minimal.
Other benefits of scale may derive from this approach. Multiple offerings provide an opportunity to specialize individual sections toward different student backgrounds and the freedom to respond to student interests in a given course. For example, an introductory course with two sections could target students with prior programming experience in one section, and those without in the other.
Similarly, the need to offer more sections could provide an opportunity to offer more distinct courses to better explore the specific interests of a diverse group.
It could also augment the course schedule by making sections available at alternative times, such as evenings, weekends, or summers, which would make better use of existing facilities, provide benefits to students with nontraditional schedules, perhaps due to commuting distance and job schedules, and additionally help students to avoid conflicts with other courses.
In particular, summer offerings not only expand capacity, they can also alleviate difficulties in satisfying prerequisites in the presence of over-enrollment. Risks: In the absence of additional faculty or teaching staff, an increased number of course sections serving a larger number of students will increase workload in the form of lecture hours, advising time, grading responsibilities, and other individual interactions with students. The question of how teaching load is counted for an instructor teaching multiple instances of the same course needs to be addressed.
Proper synchronization between sections of the same course taught by the same or a different instructor is often needed. This approach is also constrained by the number rather than size of available classrooms to accommodate additional sections. Advantages: Increasing the number of faculty or teaching staff makes it easier to offer more courses or course sections, and provides more opportunity for students to interact one-on-one with instructors.
Adding faculty also leads to an expansion of research and related activities which benefits both the institutions and the regions that they serve.
Risks: Other than the issues associated with adding faculty in any field—such as institutional budget constraints and the costs associated with a faculty search—computer science faces an acute shortage of Ph. In addition, the number of qualified individuals interested in a teaching faculty or other instruction position may be similarly low. The availability of short-term or contract instructors varies considerably, often driven by the geographical location and other employment opportunities around an institution.
Furthermore, the same pressures make current faculty more difficult to retain, as they are recruited by both industry and other institutions. Rather than maintaining the status quo and continuing to conduct computing instructional programs in the manner of past decades, programs have the opportunity to embrace change and make use of existing resources in new and more flexible ways.
The economic justification for improving CS education in the province was clear. Growing parental demand helped create the impetus for changes to the CS curriculum in Poland. According to Kozlowski , Polish parents perceive CS professions as some of the most desirable options for their children.
The lack of in-school CS options for students created the push for curricular reforms to expand CS in primary and secondary schools. Previous efforts to expand access to devices, connectivity, or basic computer literacy in schools provided a starting point in several jurisdictions to expand CS education.
For example, the Uruguayan government built its CS education program after implementing expansive one-to-one computing projects, which made CS education affordable and accessible. In England, an ICT course was implemented in schools in the mids. These dedicated hours during the school day for ICT facilitated the expansion of CS education in the country. More recently, Plan Ceibal has involved teachers and school leaders more closely when introducing CS activities.
In England, the transition from ICT courses to a computing curriculum that prioritized CS concepts, instead of computer literacy topics that the ICT teachers typically emphasized before the change, encountered some resistance.
Many former ICT teachers were not prepared to implement the new program of study as intended, which leads us to the next key lesson. The case studies highlight the critical need to invest in training adequate numbers of teachers to bring CS education to scale. For example, England took a modest approach to teacher training during the first five years of expanding its CS education K program and discovered that its strategy fell short of its original ambitions.
While over master teachers were trained, the numbers were insufficient to expand CS education at scale. Hubs offer support to primary and secondary computing teachers in their designated areas, including teaching, resources, and PD Snowdon, In just over two years, England has come a long way toward fulfilling its goals of training teachers at scale with over 29, teachers engaged in some type of training Teach Computing, Several education systems partnered with higher education institutions to integrate CS education in both preservice and in-service teacher education programs.
Similarly, in Poland, the Ministry of National Education sponsored teacher training courses in university CS departments. In Arkansas, state universities offer CS certification as part of preservice teacher training while partnering with the Arkansas Department of Education to host in-service professional development. Still other systems partnered with nonprofit organizations to deliver teacher education programs.
In Chile, the Ministry of Education partnered with several nongovernmental organizations, including Code. The volunteer experts support instructors to learn CS independently over time and develop sustainable high school CS programs Microsoft, n. To encourage teachers to participate in these training programs, several systems introduced teacher certification pathways in CS education.
For example, in British Columbia, teachers need at least 24 credits of postsecondary coursework in CS education to be qualified to work in public schools.
The Arkansas Department of Education incentivizes in-service teachers to attain certification through teaching CS courses and participating in approved PD programs Code. In South Korea, where the teaching profession is highly selective and enjoys high social status, teachers receive comprehensive training on high-skill computational thinking elements, such as computer architecture, operating systems, programming, algorithms, networking, and multimedia.
When faced with shortages of qualified teachers, remote instruction can provide greater access to qualified teachers. For example, a dearth of qualified CS teachers has been and continues to be a challenge for Uruguay.
To address this challenge, in , Plan Ceibal began providing remote instruction in computational thinking lessons for public school fifth and sixth graders and integrated fourth-grade students a year later.
Students work on thematic projects anchored in a curricular context where instructors integrate tools like Scratch. In a typical week, the remote instructor introduces an aspect of computational thinking. With the ongoing COVID pandemic forcing many school systems across the globe to adopt remote instruction, at least temporarily, we speculate that remote learning is now well poised to become more common in expanding CS education in places facing ongoing teacher shortages.
Most education systems have underserved populations who lack the opportunity to develop an interest in CS, limiting opportunities later in life. For example, low CS enrollment rates for women at Italian universities reflect the gender gap in CS education. As of , Further, female professors and researchers in these two subjects are also underrepresented.
In , only 15 percent and 24 percent of professors and researchers in CS and computer engineering, respectively, were women Marzolla, Similar representation gaps at the highest levels of CS training are common globally. Thus, continuing to offer exposure to CS only in post-secondary education will likely perpetuate similar representation gaps. To address this challenge, several education systems have implemented programs to make CS education accessible to girls and other underserved populations in early grades, before secondary school.
During the academic year, the girls attended extracurricular CS courses before developing their own technologically advanced products and showcasing their work at an event at Bocconi University in Milan Brogi, In addition to introducing the participants to CS, the initiative provided the girls with role models and generated awareness on the gender gap in CS education in Italy.
In British Columbia, students are exposed to computational thinking concepts as early as primary school, where they learn how to prototype, share, and test ideas. In the early grades of primary education, the British Columbia curriculum emphasizes numeracy using technology and information technology.
Students develop numeracy skills by using models and learn information technology skills to apply across subjects. In kindergarten and first grade, curricular objectives include preparing students for presenting ideas using electronic documents.
Several systems have also increased participation in CS education by integrating it as a cross-curricular subject. This approach avoids the need to find time during an already-packed school day to teach CS as a standalone subject. For example, in , the Arkansas legislature began requiring elementary and middle school teachers to embed computational thinking concepts in other academic courses.
As a result, teachers in the state integrate five main concepts of computational thinking into their lesson plans, including 1 problem-solving, 2 data and information, 3 algorithms and programs, 4 computers and communications, and, importantly, 5 community, global, and ethical impacts Watson-Fisher, In the years following this reform, the share of African American students taking CS in high school reached After-school programs and summer camps, jointly organized with external partners, have also helped promote demand for CS education through targeted outreach programs to commonly underserved populations.
For example, Microsoft Thailand has been holding free coding classes, Hour of Code, in partnership with nonprofit organizations, to encourage children from underprivileged backgrounds to pursue STEM education Microsoft celebrates Hour of Code to build future ready generations in Asia, In the past decade, Microsoft has extended opportunities for ICT and digital skills development to more than , youth from diverse backgrounds—including those with disabilities and residents of remote communities Thongnab, Also in Thailand, Redemptorist Foundation for People with Disabilities, with over 30 years of experience working with differently abled communities in that country, expanded their services to offer computer trainings and information technology vocational certificate programs for differently abled youth Mahatai, n.
In British Columbia, Canada, the Ministry of Education and other stakeholders have taken steps to give girls, women, and aboriginal students the opportunity to develop an interest in CS education. With In addition, the B. As these examples suggest, private sector and nongovernmental organizations can play an important role in the expansion of CS education, an issue we turn to now. In most reviewed cases, the private sector and nongovernmental organizations played a role in promoting the expansion of CS education.
Technology companies not only helped to lobby for expanding CS education, but often provided much-needed infrastructure and subject matter expertise in the design and rollout of CS education. For example, Microsoft Thailand has worked with the Thai government since in various capacities, including contributing to the development and implementation of coding projects, digital skills initiatives, teacher training programs, and online learning platforms Thongnab, ; Coding Thailand, n.
The workshop is conducted by Edutech Thailand Co. The DfE has relied on outside organizations for help in executing its CS education responsibilities. These initiatives offer the opportunity for hands-on learning projects and programming activities that students can perform from their home computers.
Some of the same partners also provide online training platforms for teacher PD. Industry advocacy organizations can also play an important role in the expansion of CS education. Accelerate Arkansas was established in as an organization of 70 private and public sector members dedicated to moving Arkansas into a more innovation- and knowledge-based economy State of Arkansas, Similarly, in England, a network of organizations called Computing at School established a coalition of industry representatives and teachers.
It played a pivotal role in rebranding the ICT education program in to the computing program that placed a greater emphasis on CS Royal Society, To ensure sustainability, one key lesson is that the government should coordinate across multiple stakeholders. The reliance on inputs from external organizations to drive CS education implies that the heavy reliance on NGO-provided training and resources in Chile have been insufficient to motivate more schools and teachers to include CS and computational thinking in classroom learning activities.
By contrast, the DfE has effectively coordinated across various nongovernmental organizations to expand CS education. In sum, the experience of decades of educational policies across the education systems reviewed shows that schools require long lasting, coordinated, and multidimensional support to achieve successful implementation of CS in classrooms.
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