We present the lessons learnt in the process of adopting the Conceive-Design-Implement-Operate (CDIO) approach for the curricular reform of the Computer Science program at the School of Engineering of the Universidad Católica de la Santísima Concepción, Chile. These lessons were gathered through a participatory and iterative process involving…

Student engagement and group work are critical to developing competencies, deeper learning, and attributes that align with 21st-century skills. In an increasingly competitive and dynamic workforce, the ability for employees to engage in collaborative workgroups is essential. A new capstone group-work assignment using Online Human Touch (OHT)…

Concerning the underrepresentation of female students in computer science (CS) classes at the K-12 level and math-intensive STEM fields, this study investigated the relationship between female students earning less credits in CS courses during high school and their STEM major choices. Data were drawn from a nationally representative sample of U.S.…

This paper is derived from a field study in the framework of my doctoral dissertation, in which we analyze life stories (Bertaux, 2005) of young people who have discontinued their studies at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) in four courses with a high rate of dropout between the years 2005-2015: Computer Engineering, Anthropological Sciences,…

Background & Context: As graduate programs in computing expand to online environments, existing research is limited in its ability to inform both practical and theoretical understandings of the factors influencing student success. Objective: We explore student perceptions of their learning environment at the understudied intersection of online…

Academic research has consistently shown effective teacher presence to be a significant factor in student satisfaction, engagement, perceived learning, and sense of community. The need for effective teaching presence remains of significant importance, particularly with the vast growth of online courses and online degree programs. It is, therefore,…

A central issue in the design of curricula for all school levels is the development of the learners' high-order thinking skills and metacognitive skills. Among such required skills is the ability to solve problems. The literature dealing with the development of problem-solving skills is vast and primarily addresses the scientific disciplines, even…

Cyberethics in IT remains a hot-button issue for higher education institutions and governments worldwide as high numbers of violations continue to surface globally. Since unethical behavior in IT knows no boundaries and college students are a growing portion of the population of cybercitizens studies in cyberethics is a necessity. By reinforcing…

Short-term outreach interventions are conducted to raise young students' awareness of the computer science (CS) field. Typically, these interventions are targeted at K--12 students, attempting to encourage them to study CS in higher education. This study is based on a series of extra-curricular outreach events that introduced students to the…

One of the challenges of global software engineering courses is to bring the practices and experience of large geographically distributed teams into the local and time-limited environment of a classroom. Over the last 6 years, an on-campus studio course for software engineering has been developed at the University of Queensland (UQ) that places…

This brief report presents six trends in Canadian education for 2018-2019. Each trend is presented with a list of facts and relating report to support the trend. The six trends are: (1) Provinces and territories are conducting whole system reviews and reforms to their education systems; (2) Minority language revitalization in education has become…

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts over 8 million job openings in IT and computing, including 1 million cybersecurity postings, over the current five-year period. This paper presents lessons learned in preparing middle-school students in rural Georgia for future careers in computer science/ IT by teaching computer programming in the free,…

The ideal of self-paced learning, which was introduced nearly 50 years ago by Keller in his Personalized System of Instruction (PSI), has not yet been widely adopted. In spite of its perceived promise of helping students to learn at the speed aligned to their individual backgrounds, motivation, and skills, PSI has been challenging to implement.…

The problem-based learning (PBL) approach has been successfully applied to teaching software engineering thanks to its principles of group work, learning by solving real problems, and learning environments that match the market realities. However, the lack of well-defined methodologies and processes for implementing the PBL approach represents a…

Computer programming has for decades posed several difficulties for students of all educational levels. A number of teaching approaches have been proposed over the years but none seems to fulfil the needs of students nowadays. Students use computers mainly for playing games and the Internet and as quite a few researchers state this aspect of…