“Katrathu kaiman alavu, kallathathu ulagalavu” – What we know: a handful of dirt. What we don’t: The width of the world, said the 12th century Tamil poet, and saint Avvaiyar. I always think about the great sayings our ancestors left for us based on their experience and wisdom.
Here, I wish to share my learning experience working as a postdoc researcher in an NSF-funded project with Marisa, Mihaela, Deepti, and Suzhen. Several things were new to me when I started in August 2021. Although I have an engineering background, computing education is not something I am familiar with. Also, competency-based education was another new area for me. BTW, what do postdocs do? I’ve never spoken to a postdoc before to know that either.
I stepped into this role with a half cup of coffee. I have conducted several research studies using various methodologies but I was getting ready to learn several more. Needless to say, the past year has been a great learning journey.
The collaborative research project I am working on is called Data-Driven Employer-Academia Partnership (DEAP) for Continual Computing Curricular Change. This project advocates the idea of competency-based curricula in computing education and proposes to develop the tools needed for creating a competency-driven curricular change. The new ACM/IEEE-CS CC2020 curricular guidelines have taken a major step towards proposing new curricula based on competencies, away from the traditional way of designing curriculum based as a body of knowledge. Competencies reflect elements that an individual must demonstrate to be effective in a job, task, or function. Competencies are written as task-oriented action phrases that integrate three key dimensions: knowledge, skills, and dispositions. While traditional academic programs are knowledge-oriented, skills and dispositions are more important to success in the workplace, indicating the need for intentional commitment to competency development in higher education.
We are applying our approach to an ecosystem of three universities in Alabama, with a special focus on serving students from racial, ethnic, and gender groups with a longstanding underrepresentation in computing. We look forward to sharing our findings at the national level in various academic conferences. Also, we are creating resources that will be hosted on the DEAP website. These resources would assist faculty who teach computing related courses to apply competency-based learning activities in their instruction.
Our research was two-pronged. (1) we conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) that looked at studies conducted over a period of 11 years. (2) Since most students seek employment in industry after graduating with degrees in computing disciplines, a competency-oriented curriculum must be informed by employer needs. So, we interviewed computing professionals to learn about what employers and professionals look for in their employees in the workplace.
I worked mostly in conducting the SLR, where we wanted to look at prior research on computing competencies required in the workplace. This was a challenging process and as a team we were able to complete the process starting with nearly 5,000 identified studies from popular databases. The process included multiple review stages followed by several rounds of discussions and numerous hours of coding. Thanks to our collaborative effort, we have crossed several milestones. We grew as a team and quickly learned to use new digital tools that greatly enhanced our process. This journey was one of exploration and learning, filled with challenges and opportunities to learn from failure. Although this journey is not yet over, I can say that it has been fruitful and my cup of coffee is filling to the brim, while my cup is getting bigger.
If you are interested, please view this video where Suzhen and I share our experiences about conducting the systematic literature review. As I said this project is ongoing and I will share more details in my next blog post. This is something I wanted to do for a long time. I am happy I did it today, during office hours 😉