To be successful in their careers, computer science graduates need, in addition to in-depth technical knowledge, the ability to communicate and collaborate with a variety of audiences. To achieve this goal, it is important that students have instruction and practice in computational thinking and in communication skills throughout their curriculum. This project, Incorporating Communication Outcomes into the Computer Science Curriculum, will build upon two earlier CPATH projects to create a transformative approach to fully integrate communication instruction and activities throughout the curriculum in ways that enhance rather than replace their learning of technical content. The outcomes of this project will include: model curricula and syllabi for computer science and software engineering programs that capture and assess student learning outcomes generated in collaboration with industry; comprehensive support materials, including communications learning activities to address the learning outcomes identified by this project; demonstration and evaluation at two institutions with two very different academic profiles; and dissemination of results to raise nationwide awareness of this innovative approach.
This project will generate guiding concepts and disseminate resources that can be adapted by other institutions to meet nationwide needs for CS and SE graduates with better communication abilities while maintaining a mastery of technical content and computational thinking. The new curricula will serve as models for similar programs at other schools, the development of which will be supported by a series of workshops involving partners from industry and academia. The industry involvement will ensure that our graduates have the skills to meet their communication needs and the involvement of our academic partners will both leverage their expertise and encourage their adoption of the outcomes, curricula, and activities developed during this project. Graduating CS and SE students with effective computational thinking and communication skills will positively influence interactions and communications between practitioners in CS and other disciplines and thus enhance the benefits, impact and quality of CS upon society. We expect that an additional benefit may be that CS and SE will become more attractive to underrepresented groups, especially women, by making it clear that communication between people is an essential part of any computing career.
Communication skills, including reading, writing, speaking, and teaming, are among the abilities most sought after by employers of recent Computer Science/Software Engineering (CS/SE) graduates. These are skills that computing professionals often need to exercise but they are often not taught in CS/SE courses. The goal of this project, CPATH II: Incorporating Communication Outcomes into the Computer Science Curriculum, was to integrate communication skills training into the CS/SE curriculum so that students would gain experience communicating in the genres typical of the CS/SE workplace and learn to address a variety of professional audiences, not just their peers or instructors. The process proposed and implemented by this project was to create communication-focused assignments and instruction that could be inserted at all levels of a typical CS/SE curriculum so that students could build on their skills as they progress through the program. The assignments themselves involved scenarios that asked students to communicate the results of their technical course projects to coworkers, managers, clients, and other readers in a professional setting who would use the results to do their own jobs. This project focused on six courses that span the curriculum and often are considered core courses. They include the beginning programming courses typically taken by first-year students and concluding with the senior capstone/senior design course that concludes many CS/SE program and is intended to resemble professional practice. A goal was to develop instructional materials that could work at a variety of institutions. Our project participants were faculty from thirteen institutions. Project participants were multidisciplinary, with CS/SE faculty collaborating with Communication Across the Curriculum experts who helped with designing instruction and assessment materials. Project participants gathered for four multi-day working sessions during the project period. During the first year there were two such sessions—one at the start of the summer for initial training on communication outcomes and formation of project teams; the other at the end of the summer to review assignments developed by the teams. Participants also met the subsequent two summers to continue developing and refining assignments. The last session was also used to populate an assignment repository made publically available to disseminate project materials to other instructors. This site can be found at http://cs-comm.lib.miamioh.edu. In addition to developing an assignment repository, project participants also conducted several workshops, tutorials, and birds-of-a-feather (discussion) sessions at professional conferences. They made project presentations at the Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T), Frontiers in Education (FIE), and the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE). Participants are continuing to make conference presentations and conduct research that originated in the project To evaluate project outcomes we performed a multi-year study using surveys, focus groups, and evaluation of student work. We found that faculty become more accepting of including communication instruction and assignments in their courses as they became familiar with practices that focused on communication in the CS/SE workplace. We also found that even small adjustments to assignments can significantly increase students’ communication skills as well as raise their readers’ perception of their abilities to perform their technical work. Combining instruction in professional communication skills with relevant technical content should have a positive effect on students entering professional practice as they will be better prepared for the demands of the typical industry work environment. Integrating communication and technical skills can also be a tool for altering the external perception that Computer Science and Software Engineering are fields populated solely by the stereotypical "lone hacker? to fields that value communication, collaboration, and social interaction. One effect of this perceptual change could be to attract a wider variety of students to the computing disciplines, particularly women and underrepresented minorities.
