Creating a Disciplinary Commons in Computer Science through the use of Course Portfolios

The Disciplinary Commons is a new project funded by the Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges and the University of Washington, Tacoma, having two primary objectives.

• to document and share knowledge about student learning on courses in Computer Science in two- and four-year institutions within a single geographic region.
• to improve the quality of teaching in Computer Science (CS) by establishing practices for the scholarship of teaching by making it public, peer-reviewed, and amenable for future use and development by other CS educators.

The mechanism for achieving the project goals is via the shared production of course portfolios. This mechanism will be instantiated through a series of monthly seminars involving 8 - 10 Computer Science faculty members at community colleges and baccalaureate-degree granting universities in the South Puget Sound region of Washington State. Participants will have an initial, full-day meeting in September 2005 and will then meet one afternoon per month over the 2005-6 academic year at locations that rotate among the participant home institutions. At these meetings, participants will learn how to construct a course portfolio, skills of classroom assessment and peer review, and will critically evaluate one another's work-in-progress.

Course Portfolios

The course portfolio, well known as a method for advancing teaching practice and improving student learning, is a set of documents that "focuses on the unfolding of a single course, from conception to results" (Hutchings, 1998). Course portfolios typically include a course's learning objectives, its contents and structure, a rationale for how this course design meets its objectives, and the course's role in a larger degree program. Importantly, the portfolio also includes evaluations of student work throughout the term, indicating the extent to which students are meeting course objectives and the type and quantity of feedback they are receiving. Each participant in the project will construct a course portfolio for a course that they teach that is on the path for a baccalaureate degree in a Computer Science program.

Outcomes & benefits

Benefits to Participation

• Professional development: As consistently reported in the research literature, staff creating course portfolios state that the critical reflection involved in portfolio construction results in significant and lasting changes to the course and to their own subsequent teaching.
• Community development: Although a culture of peer review and discourse is common within research communities it is rare among teachers as teaching most often happens in isolation, "behind closed doors". As we document our own work and review each other's, we overcome insularity and secrecy and are able to identify knowledge and best practices, which can be developed and shared as community resources.
• Documentation of practice: In a course portfolio, participants will have a persistent, peer-reviewed, documented deliverable that can be shared with others both inside of, and external to, their home institution.

Community Benefit

One of the criticisms of the course portfolio approach is that complete examples are isolated (both by institution/type of institution and by discipline). However the power of the portfolio approach is multiplied when there are several examples available for a single disciplinary aspect: our Disciplinary Commons will act as a portfolio repository and archive, charting and calibrating development over time.

What it involves

If accepted, each participant commits to:

1. Attending both initial and capstone full-day workshops,
2. attending all interim meetings, at 4-6 week interval,
3. completing a course portfolio for your itp course

As well as committing to attending and undertaking your own work, these activities will involve:

• Reading a small number of papers that will help in carrying out the goals of the project,
• Undertaking a peer observation of another participant, as well as being peer-observed by another participant in turn, and
• Reading and critiquing portions of other participants' portfolios.

What it isn't

Please note: the Commons does not:

• Aim to generate a courseware repository,
• nor is it a workshop for developing materials.

Workshop Leader

The leader for this project and workshop facilitator is Josh Tenenberg, Associate Professor and Undergraduate Coordinator in Computing and Software Systems at the University of Washington, Tacoma's Institute of Technology. Most recently, Josh has collaborated with Sally Fincher from the University of Kent at Canterbury and Marian Petre, from the Open University (UK), on research that centers on bringing practitioners and expert researchers together in order to initiate principled, large-scale teaching and learning research in Computer Science. As part of this effort, he is Principal Investigator in two grants from the National Science Foundation, (known as Bootstrapping and Scaffolding) that use a workshop format to provide Computer Science faculty with a 'way in' to high-quality CS Education research.

The Disciplinary Commons project has been co-developed with Sally Fincher who will be running a parallel series of workshops in the UK.