Deborah Boisvert

National science foundation advanced technological education projects and centers of excellence for information technology education: an overview

This paper gives an overview of initiatives for information technology (IT) education undertaken by projects and centers of excellence for Advanced Technological Education (ATE) with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF). While these centers have a common goal to advance IT education regionally and nationally, they differ in the means of doing so. Several aspects of these projects and centers are highlighted, including challenges and opportunities that are beneficial to other ATE projects and centers. Current issues pertinent to IT curriculum development, including curriculum guidelines and accreditation of IT programs, are presented and discussed. The paper concludes with recommendations and future steps that are of import to IT educators at large. This paper will be presented at SIGITE 2005 in conjunction with a panel discussion involving principal investigators of current NSF ATE projects and centers for IT education.

Applying skills standards to the development of multi-institution information technology programs

The Boston Area Advanced Technological Education Connections (BATEC) is a National Science Foundation center designed among other things, to develop a coordinated Information Technology (IT) education delivery system that cuts across different educational institutions: group one, high school; group two, community college; and group three, university. This paper describes the strategy used by the BATEC center to develop a coherent sequence of curriculum initiatives based on the application of national IT skills standards.

How Educational Innovators Apply Diffusion and Scale-Up Concepts

The challenge of how to diffuse and scale up effective educational interventions has received increasing attention from researchers in recent years, though achievement of this objective has confounded policy makers, practitioners, and the scholarly community at least since the 1970s. This chapter presents three case studies of efforts at US community college STEM centers to apply diffusion and scale-up concepts to their educational innovations to advance student learning. Ours is an analysis of knowledge use. These community college innovators participated in a series of meetings and activities over 3 years to familiarize themselves with concepts and strategies about diffusion and scale-up and were encouraged to apply these concepts in practice. Case study results show that teams of innovators did try to use these concepts, some more than others, and worked to resolve the combined use of concepts to best suit their own objectives. Innovators found some concepts to be overlapping or redundant, some too complex to apply, and some in contradiction. We conclude that teams acted in creative ways to implement diffusion and scale-up concepts. Recommendations for future efforts to spread educational interventions are made.

Re-envisioning community college transfer

In this paper, we describe an innovative project that is gathering information for a re-envisioning of transfer procedures between two and four-year higher education institutions in three states. Convening relevant administrators, faculty, and local business partners within each of the three regions, this project has been researching current transfer models (successful and unsuccessful), identifying exemplary frameworks and identifying the variables that lead to enhanced upward progression. The authors will discuss the current status of transfer in the regions and will identify processes that are being used to identify more innovative and effective methods to increase student transferability between levels.

Growth in IT and organizational experience in BATEC

The growth of the IT sector masks important dynamics: occupational complexity; the spread of the IT workforce into other sectors, and a transformation in traditional human resource practices. Handling these tensions is demanding regional workforce development strategies, especially to create institutional connections, or labor market intermediaries, that can assure the flow of talent through specific segments of the educational pipeline, from high school to higher education, and into specific employers, industries, and local sub-regional labor markets. The Boston Area Advanced Technical Education Connections (BATEC) is one of such intermediaries. BATEC has created the a basic template of practices that can be used to up-scale its efforts and contribute to shape a regional workforce development system.

Aligning programming education between community colleges and universities

This paper discusses efforts to align Java programming education among Boston area community colleges and the University of Massachusetts Boston. Several forces have converged so that Java is the first programming language taught in most Secondary and Tertiary introductory programming courses. Teaching a common language should lead to clear articulation paths between institutions. However, we have found that students moving from one institution to another are not adequately prepared for subsequent programming courses, particularly at the University level. We have developed a multi-faceted, cooperative approach to improve this problem. We are developing a modular, problem-based approach that allows institutions flexibility while supporting student articulation. Our solution includes better inter-institution communication and cooperation, modification of curriculum and teaching methodologies at all levels, development of shared materials, and teacher training. This article describes our preliminary work and analysis. Later reports will discuss implementation of these recommendations.

The Authentic Inclusion and Role of Community Colleges in National Efforts to Broaden Participation in Computing: (Abstract Only)

Over half of community college (CC) students are non-white, and more than half of all Hispanic and Black undergraduates start at community college. Given that community colleges (CCs) enroll minorities and women in larger numbers than four-year institutions, it is imperative for both, CCs and four-year institutions, to engage in collaborative efforts to broaden the participation of diverse peoples into computing and facilitate unobstructed pathways from the two-year to four-year educations. While CCs are rich in diversity, their students face an inordinate number of obstacles transferring to a bachelors degree particularly in computer science (CS). The complexities of the CC landscape require that experts from various backgrounds come together to share knowledge and experiences to contribute to a better understanding of the role CCs can play with four-year institutions in broadening the participation efforts in CS and information technology (IT).

The Authentic Inclusion and Role of Community Colleges in National Efforts to Broaden Participation in Computing

ACM Reference format: Amardeep Kahlon, Deborah Boisvert, Louise Ann Lyon, Melanie Williamson, and Cheryl Calhoun. 2018. The Authentic Inclusion and Role of Community Colleges in National Efforts to Broaden Participation in Computing. In SIGCSE ’18: 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Feb. 21–24, 2018, Baltimore, MD, USA. ACM, NY, NY, USA, 2 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3159450.3159627

Exploring the Landscape of Data Science

The panel will discuss and answer questions the landscape of employment and education pathways in data science and analytics. The panel will also talk about the current discussions within ACM and the role(s) the information technology discipline should have in the field. Finally the panel will solicit feedback from the audience on current work and desired next steps in order to address the global education and workforce needs.