Episode 3: Rosanne English on graduate skills for Computing
What do employers want from Computer Science students and how good are Universities in producing graduates with what employers need? In episode 3 of our community podcast, we spoke to Rosanne English at the University of Strathclyde about her paper co-authored with Alan Hayes Towards Integrated Graduate Skills for UK Computing Science Students published at ukicer.com. From the abstract:
In preparing computing science students for industry, degree content often focuses on technical skills such as programming. Such skills are essential for a successful post-study career in industry and is popular with students. However, industry notes that students are often limited in what can be referred to as graduate attributes or transferable skills. Such skills include effective teamwork, communication, and critical thinking amongst others. Similar gaps have also been demonstrated for computing science students more specifically, resulting in industry developing their own training programmes for graduates. To address this issue, graduate attributes could be incorporated more readily into computing curricula. Within the UK this is discussed in accreditation requirements as well as higher education frameworks. However, research which aims to explore how to achieve this is still comparatively limited. Building on existing work in this area, this paper presents a thematic analysis of graduate attributes at Russell Group Universities in the UK to identify the most common attribute themes, and uses the most frequent themes to begin to consider how these could be more readily embedded in CS curricula.
Full transript and selected references below, cite this blog post using DOI:10.59350/ybvmn-emw58
References
- Listen to this episode online at pod.co/the-rest-is-teaching/rosanne-english
- Subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts uki-sigcse.acm.org/podcast
- Rosanne English and Alan Hayes (2022) Towards Integrated Graduate Skills for UK Computing Science Students in UKICER ’22: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on United Kingdom & Ireland Computing Education Research Pages 1–7 DOI:10.1145/3555009.3555018 (free version via https://pureportal.strath.ac.uk… )
- This paper was discussed at ACM SIGCSE journal club meeting № 29, see DOI:10.59350/sigcse.1572
Episode Transcript, Machine Generated
⚠️ DISCLAIMER: Please note this transcript has been generated using speech-to-text software. It contains transcription errors and speech disfluency. ⚠️
Duncan: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Rest is Teaching podcast for computing education researchers and practitioners. In this podcast, we’ll meet people who are changing the way that we teach computing from school through to university and beyond. What is computer science anyway? Why should people learn it and how can we improve the way that it’s taught?
My name is Duncan. I’m your host and we’ll be meeting authors of studies and papers that tackle these important issues from our journal club. What is their practice and research? Why is it important, and how can their insights be useful to other people teaching computing in any area of education and at any level?
My guest today is Rosanne English. We talked about her paper co-authored with Alan Hayes on towards integrated graduate skills for UK computing science students that was published in UK SIR 2022. The proceedings of the conference on United Kingdom Ireland Computing education. Research conference.[00:01:00]
Thank you, rose, for joining us today. Could you start by just introducing yourself and saying who you are and what you do?
Rosanne: Sure. Um, so I’m Rose English. I am currently a senior teaching fellow at the Department of Computer Information Sciences at the University of Strathclyde, which is based in Glasgow.
I’m particularly interested, I suppose, in two general areas, um, teaching, cybersecurity, being one of them, but also supporting our school. Students in developing nons subject specific skills or sometimes referred to as grad attributes or transferable skills. Basically any skills which aren’t necessarily explicitly taught but will hopefully stand them in good stead as they move forward throughout their, their journey.
Duncan: Okay. And, um, if we travel back a little bit in time, can you, can you tell us a little bit of your backstory? Like [00:02:00] how, how did you get into computing? So I think you didn’t study, you studied something different to start with and then switched into computing. So
Rosanne: I did. Yeah, so I, I took a little bit of a, a roundabout path to get where I am today.
I’ve always had an interest in computing. I suppose that possibly comes from growing up with two brothers in the eighties and nineties where computing was really start to take off, um, from a home environment more than the kinda monolithic machines that we had. My first exposure to computing was programming with basic on a ZX spectrum, see figure 2.
Duncan: Alright. Okay.
Rosanne: So. From there, the seed was sown but I took a bit of a detour when I got to university, initially started in physics because I quite enjoyed it.
Duncan: The, the interesting computing started with home computing. Were we talking sort of, uh, what? BBC micro, commodore or, oh no, you said ZX 81. Sorry.
Rosanne: It was, yeah, as a ZX spectrum that we had, uh, which apparently my mum and dad [00:03:00] stayed up most of the night playing Scrabble on.
So that, that was my first foray into, uh, programming. But. I took a little bit of a day. Um, when I started university. I started in physics because I’d enjoyed it at school, but for some reason physics just didn’t quite gel with the way that my brain works. And so I moved into mathematics where I discovered in fourth year my love for ciphers.
So I started reading books by the likes of Simon Singh, and I think it was from there really, that I started to get particularly interested in security. I tried,
Duncan: um, the code book, Simon Safety Code book.
Rosanne: Yeah, absolutely. That’s it. because I think when I was younger there was a TV series that went alongside the book.
Um, so that really sparked my interest at the time. After that, I then began working in industry. I tried to get into computing [00:04:00] roles, but at the time the employers were basically saying, well, unless you’ve got a computing degree, we’re not interested. So I went and did accountancy for a few years, which didn’t suit me terribly well, which just leave it that.
Um, so then I decided to return to formal education and I completed a conversion master’s, and as friends have said to me, they knew the second that I stepped. Back onto campus that I just wasn’t gonna leave again. And that’s pretty much exactly what happened. So I decided to continue on and complete a PhD in cybersecurity.
Um, and then after that I began doing a little bit of teaching as, as people often do whilst completing their PhD, but then also took on full-time roles in teaching. I continued down. Research, but I found that at least 90 to 5% of my time was really [00:05:00] focused on teaching. I just found that I really loved working with students, seeing those light bulb moments and he helping them to get there and see the wonderful things that you could do and security and databases and a variety of different things I taught at that time.
Duncan: Right. Okay. Good. So passing on some of your passion.
Rosanne: Absolutely as much as possible. I’ve clearly got less passionate ’cause I don’t think they’re quite, quite as interested now, but,
Duncan: okay, good. So, um, the paper that, uh, oh, so, um, the, the paper that we, we discussed at SIGCSE Journal Club was, to pull up the title of it Now is, um, bother.
I’ll find it one second. It’s towards employ, no, what was it? I’m gonna grab it.
Rosanne: Integrated graduate skills for UK computing science students.
Duncan: That’s what, so, [00:06:00] um,
Rosanne: a tongue twister.
Duncan: Yes. So towards integrated graduate skills for UK computing science students. Um, and that was published, uh, last year, it at UK isa, um, uh, 2022.
Um, so can you tell us a little bit about, can you try and summarize the paper? Um, I know there’s a lot of stuff in there, but what, what, can you summarize the paper for people who haven’t read it or, or heard of it? Sure.
Rosanne: So the idea here was to present an unnatural exploration of the types of skills which are frequently identified as important at Russell Group Universities, and try to consider this from a computer science lens.
We’ve been seeing in computing science over the last few years that there is a little bit of a skills gap. There’s generally a skills gap, but it seems to be particularly for computing science, where we’re getting employers saying that some of the, what’s traditionally thought of as softer skills, [00:07:00] like teamwork and critical thinking.
Elements such as that, which are less easily taught, are not necessarily being represented in graduate. So I was interested to see what universities were saying about what the students could achieve and how that might align to what we’re experiencing in terms of the skills gap.
Duncan: And how did you investigate this?
You, you, you look analyzed The words universities were using on there. On their recruitment websites or on the, on their official websites?
Rosanne: Absolutely. So we started off with looking at the list of Russell Group universities and from there basically traversing their website as, as deeply as possible to try and identify whether there were any externally facing resources that highlighted what they perceived all graduates in respect of the subject that they were taught.
Came [00:08:00] out with. So this included skills such as professionalism. I’ve already mentioned critical thinking, but also aspects such as being a global citizen or being ethically aware were the types or skills that the universities were claiming students had when they completed their degree.
Duncan: Right. Okay.
Rosanne: From there, we performed a thematic analysis.
So both Alan and I separately coded up what we thought all of the wordings really related to. So to do that, we looked at both the phrase that we used and also any additional explanation that the universities might have have come up with for that. And after that, we met to discuss our codes, tried to resolve them, and then identified themes from that and applied that to the data that we’d gathered.
Duncan: It
Rosanne: did come up with other themes.
Duncan: And what, so what were the [00:09:00] themes in, in, I think in table one, in the paper, you have a, a list of, um, uh, occurrences. So some, some things occurred more than others. And what were the what? The basic, uh, what the, what the basic results
Rosanne: it did. So we found that the majority of universities did have some graduate themes, so we found that.
15 universities out of the 24 Russell Group universities were identified as having some form of graduate attributes. The most common, which we focus on from uh, discussion lines in, in computing science in the paper are global citizen, ethically aware and critical thinking.
Duncan: So those are the three most common.
Rosanne: Those were identified as the three most common themes, right from the graduate attributes that we reviewed. But there was also attributes such as confidence being adaptable, um, skills beyond the discipline, independent thinkers. But those [00:10:00] tended to be less common than the three that I’ve mentioned there.
Duncan: Okay. Good. Um, alright. Um, so were there any, I mean there any particular surprises in that analysis? I mean, so I guess you, you’ve obviously, obviously already presented this paper at UKI. So what was any feedback from people so far on, on the analysis that you did?
Rosanne: Sure. So I think some of the analysis, um, people thought that perhaps some things could be grouped differently, and so we certainly.
Consider that there were only two reviewers doing this. Um, so it would be worth expanding that. But I would say for me, the global citizen thing, I, I can understand where that’s coming from. With things like the, um, sustainable development goals, I can appreciate that from a university perspective, if they want to engage with those things in global citizenship might capture those.
And so to me, that seemed to have moved up from where I expected that to be. From my [00:11:00] own personal experiences of going through university at an earlier stage in life, I felt like that had changed from when I completed it.
Duncan: Yeah. Hannah, I dunno if there’s a, if, if, if universities are talking about that because they’re trying to obviously recruit students from outside the uk so trying to look less and more, you know.
Global as possible is, is gonna Yeah, that, that’s a good point. In India and places, um, which probably has been less of a case in the past, I guess, but I’m speculating.
Rosanne: I, I, I, I think so. I believe the international numbers, I think for, at least from the people that I speak to, international numbers, um, for student recruitment has seemed to have gone up quite dramatically for a number of universities, certainly across Scotland and I think England as well.
Duncan: Okay, good. Alright. Um, so we had some questions. So, so, um, [00:12:00] from, um, people who came to the journal club, um, I’m, I’m not gonna put names to individual questions, but I’d just like to thank some of the people who came. So we had re Luca Ro from cern. We had Karen from, uh, university of Central Lanre. We had Paul Dempster from Lancaster.
Lloyd Hor from Manchester and Michelle Inger from the Oakland University amongst others asking various questions about, um, about the paper. So I, I thought we could go through some of those now. Um, so you’ve, you’ve, you’ve, I mean, is there anything else you want to say about the paper that you haven’t already, uh, uh, already covered that in terms of, I think that’s quite a good summary of what you did.
Rosanne: I don’t think so. Um, I think it’s probably worth coming back to. Where we want to go with it and yeah, potential limitations there, but I think it mostly covers what we’re trying to achieve.
Duncan: So that, that was actually one of the questions that came up was, um, uh, obviously the, the analysis is interesting in, [00:13:00] in itself, but it wasn’t clear what the motivation for writing, you know, doing the analysis was, and perhaps more importantly like where, where you are going with this in the future is where, where do you see this work going in the future?
Rosanne: Sure. So I guess. My perspective on this is that I’ve always been adamant that a university degree is about a lot more than coming out a subject expert. Um, so that might come from the fact that my undergraduate degree was in pure mathematics, which doesn’t necessarily have an immediate application. So what I’ve always felt is that what it taught me more than learning a number of proofs.
Are things like critical thinking, being able to break down problems, being able to analyze things. I feel like those were the key skills, even if they weren’t necessarily explicitly mentioned to me at the time that I earned from, from completing that degree. So I’ve always been passionate about trying to [00:14:00] help students.
Identify where they are learning those skills so that they can go on and use them. Of course, initially in things like job applications, but more in their future lives and careers as they move forward. So that’s sort of where it come, where it came from. ’cause I think that in computing we don’t necessarily do an excellent job in.
Identifying these skills to students. Yeah. Communicating their value and making sure that they recognize when they’re, they’re doing these things. So I think we could do better than that. So this is an initial step to identify, okay, what are the universities that we’ve looked at here identifying as graduate skills for all students, and then trying to view that through a computer science lens.
Duncan: Okay, good. Um, we were wondering, um, [00:15:00] why you only analyzed Russell Group Universities. I guess there was, there was, there was a reason for that. Um, uh, ’cause you had, I think, did you say 24? That 24 Russell Group Universities.
Rosanne: Yes. I think that’s, that’s a correct number.
Duncan: Um, and obviously there’s a lot more universities in the UK that you could have looked at.
Was it, was it just a case of cutting down the pool to a sort of reasonable size that was manageable or was it that, was there a reason you didn’t look at other universities in the uk?
Rosanne: Sure, yeah, for the most part it felt like a reasonable initial step to identify the universities that I think a lot of universities.
Turn to to see what they’re doing. So even if they’re not a Russell Group University, I feel that they do still have some sway and set expectations in terms of what a university does. Yeah, so it’s certainly, it is something that, that we need to look at. And I think it will be really interesting looking at different types of universities, like remote universities like the Open University or post 92 [00:16:00] universities.
See whether are there are any noticeable differences between what they claim as graduate attributes versus what Russell Group Universities do. So it was an initial grouping that felt reasonable within the timeframe that we were working on, but it’s certainly worth exploring how we expand that to a wider range of universities.
Duncan: Because it would, I mean, I suppose this is future work really, isn’t it? So it would be interesting to see that, well what, what do different new kinds of universities teach? Are we all actually teaching the same thing? That might be an interesting exclusion or, yeah, definitely. Are we actually teaching different things?
And if so, you know, why are some people putting more emphasis on these skills than others? Um. So, um, I, I suppose we, we can’t really say yet. We can’t really speculate. We can only really speculate on, you know, is there a difference between the kind of skills that each university is teaching me all? There are, there are some, some things that come out that are more common in your paper and some that come out lower down.
Um,
Rosanne: yeah.
Duncan: Um, one of the things that we’ve [00:17:00] already talked about was the, the global citizenship, and one of the questions we had was, does every student need to become a global citizen? Do you think in that, you know, may, maybe some students are, if you’re gonna work for a big multinational company, maybe you need to be more of a global citizen than if you are not.
I, I dunno if you had any thoughts on, on that.
Rosanne: Yeah. I think my personal opinion is no, but it does seem to be. A highly rated attribute from Russell Group Universities, and they all converged on that wording. There wasn’t much variance where some of the other themes that we come up with captured a number of different wordings or, um, definitions.
Duncan: Yeah.
Rosanne: Where it was a global citizen. It all just basically said global citizen and, and that was, that was kind of it. There wasn’t as much variance in that theme. As there was in some of the other themes.
Duncan: Yeah,
Rosanne: I think for computing science, I think there probably [00:18:00] is an element of being global in most of, of what our students going to do, given the reach that computing can have.
So if you build something that goes into the app store, that can be used in so many different countries. So I think if you look at it from that perspective, there’s probably always an element there. I think one of the interesting thing with grad graduate attributes is it’s not, it’s, it’s almost more akin to a competency that you see in the medical area rather than how good are they a particular thing.
It’s more of, you should be aware of this, or you should have this general skill. It’s not necessarily articulated more precisely than that, whereas if you complete. A class in cybersecurity should come out knowing particular things, whereas this seems to be a bit more ephemeral.
Duncan: Yeah. Yeah. I, it is kind of, it’s interesting they all standardized on that one term, although actually, like you say, it’s actually quite hard to define what it means.
It’s quite, [00:19:00] these words all a bit slippery, aren’t they? So the nature language, I suppose. Um, so, um. Another word that, so we were, we’re discussing how the, the being professional is, uh, sometimes these kinds of skills are called professional skills and in certain guises, and, and being professional is clearly something that we want universities to teach students.
Um, it, it can be interpreted in lots of different ways as to what professional means in certain contexts. Um, but it was quite surprisingly low in the count you and we wondered. It, it, you know, is that’s, that’s, that was kind of interesting that I was, I was, I would’ve, I would’ve expected the word professional to come out, um, yeah.
Higher than it did.
Rosanne: Definitely, certainly was interesting. So say, so seven out of the 15 first group universities that we were able to find graduate attributes for had something balling under the theme of [00:20:00] professionalism, and it was something that Alan and I had to discuss. Ultimately, we decided that, where it was more specific in the wording saying professionalism or something really quite.
Similar to that, then we would label it as such. But otherwise we would say where it was one element of professional practice, we’d give it a more meaningful code. Yeah. If possible. Um, so it’s almost like there is quite a lot of attributes there that you could probably all bundle together into professionalism, but then you just end up with something that is not necessarily as meaningful.
Duncan: Yeah.
Rosanne: Because you’ve just got a big branch of. You’re just professional. And so we tried to, when it was more specific, we tried to give it a theme that related to that more specifically. Yeah. Um, whereas when it was just general, here’s it’s professionalism, you need to be a professional, then we would classify it [00:21:00] as professionalism, which perhaps caused some weight to explain why it’s perhaps lower than what one might expect.
But you could recode these. Indeed, I think it would be good to get more researchers looking at these things and seeing how they code them up as well.
Duncan: Yeah, I think there’s one of the sort of comments that people said is that actually being a professional is actually a collection of many different skills rather than Absolutely.
So maybe, maybe that’s one reason why it comes down lower is it’s too, it’s it’s too high level, uh, in a way. Yeah. Um, okay. Um, so we had, uh, some discussion about, um. Whether it is you, you divided some of the skills into hard skills and soft skills, and it’s, it’s, it’s quite difficult to do sometimes. I think one of the ways you can define between hard, hard skills and soft skills is things you can measure versus things you can’t.
Yeah. So hard skills, things that you can measure and soft skills are things that you can’t, you know, very naive interpretation, but, um. [00:22:00] Um, did, can you talk about a little bit how you separated those skills into different categories? So, um, for example, some people might argue that critical thinking is, is a hard skill ’cause you can, you can can measure it.
For example, I can tell, I can tell if a student can think critically by, can they look at something and pull it to pieces rather than just describing it.
Rosanne: Sure. Yeah. I think, I think it’s a really good question. Um, so I think for the, for the purpose of the paper. We identified hard skills as clearly technical skills such as data analysis, um, subject knowledge, research skills, soft skills we thought were more e emeral.
We didn’t, didn’t necessarily have an easy or obvious way to measure or assess them. As such for the paper, we, we ended up deciding to put critical thinking into the soft skills category. ’cause that is often where people argue that it should be. Yeah. But I do think a strong [00:23:00] argument can be made that critical thinking is a technical skill.
In fact, there’s a really good. Article discussing exactly this question, um, by CIA Kaminski. I think I’m saying that correctly on the learning side to blog, which is really interesting, if any has got the, the time and inclination to have a look. And I think after reflecting on it more, I’d, I’d probably land, um, on critical thinking being a hard skill.
It’s just reassessing of, it can be challenging.
Duncan: So it’d be good if you can send us the link to that. I can put that in the show. I do,
Rosanne: yeah, absolutely.
Duncan: They’re interested and always you link to the paper. The other thing we should say is, I don’t think we’ve properly name checked him, but your co-author on this is Alan Hayes, who’s a uh, uh, professor.
Is that right? The University of Bath?
Rosanne: Yes. Yes. Apologies. Alan Hayes does indeed work at the University of Bass, um, and helped me out with coding on this research paper and his insight was really helpful.
Duncan: Um. So, [00:24:00] um, I think the other thing that we discussed was, um, this, you’ve kind of got a framework here for, for talking about these skills and analyzing who’s, who’s teaching them.
Um, um, I do is do you think there might be a discrepancy or how much of a discrepancy do you think there might be between what universities say that they’re teaching and what they end up teaching? A bit like you were saying with your degree. You know, uh, you were, you know, on the face of it, you were learning how to do proofs, but actually the skills were much deeper than that.
So do you think, do you think there’s any discrepancy between what the advertised skills are and the actual skills are in this case?
Rosanne: I certainly think there can be. Um, I think if you’re looking at individual students, I don’t think we can necessarily guarantee that all students. Come out with, uh, strong performance in each of those skills in the same way that our module can have [00:25:00] intended learning outcomes and the idea of sufficient passes, the module module, then they will have met a lot of those learning objectives.
But I think it could be possible, depending on module design, that somebody passes a class and isn’t necessarily. Strongly, um, performing in it. So I think there’s definitely room for discrepancy between what is advertising, what the actual skills a student might have. I think there may also be the hidden skills that I think you’re maybe alluding to there in the question that students are perhaps coming out with skills that even we as educators don’t necessarily recognize at the time of, um, of creating a module or designing a module.
Or indeed, uh, a university program of study.
Duncan: Yeah. Okay. Good. Um, um, so the other thing then is, and you, you, I think you talked about this in the paper a little bit, is, [00:26:00] um, how do we actually go about teaching these teaching and assessing these, these kinds of skills? We’ve talked about some of the difficulties in assessing them, but
Rosanne: Absolutely, yeah.
Duncan: Go on. How, how do we, how do we go in this stuff?
Rosanne: I suppose my, my caveat, my caveat straight off the bat is I don’t think teaching or assessing these skills is easy, particularly in a computing or, or generally in a scientific setting. I think it can be particularly challenging. I think we could do a better job of highlighting to students when they are developing these skills.
Through the likes of assessments. Um, and I think as we spoke, spoke previously, when we don’t formally assess students on these skills, I think they can sometimes put them to side to the side and not recognize that they’re worth putting the time into. Unfortunately, I [00:27:00] think with the way that higher education has has gone, we’ve now got into a situation where students obviously prioritize.
Things they are being directly assessed on. Um, so just as an example, a number of years back, I kind of came to the realization of if I’m trying to get students to work as a team, then I need to actually assess how well they work as a team. You know, I can’t have an exercise that says, give me this end product, and by the way, I want you to learn how to work as a team and not assess that component.
So I think if we’re more explicit. Incorporating that into assessment in some way, then it might help students to more readily recognize this because they need to do it. When they go into assessment centers, when they go into job interviews, they need to provide specific examples. Just saying, I’m very professional, or I work in a timely manner, or I can meet deadlines.
Isn’t going to get you the job. You need to be able to articulate an instance where you’ve done that, where you’ve [00:28:00] dealt with, um. A conflict within a team, for example. So I think if we start introducing more reflective elements and more explicit assessment of these skills that might help students better understand where they’re trying to be or, but alongside that, obviously we can’t do that without providing scaffolding to students to develop those skills.
Yeah, and I think certainly from what. Own experience. I can’t speak for other universities, but from my own experience, we’re not necessarily great at doing program level assessment. So there’s not necessarily what
Duncan: you mean by program level. So you mean at at the, at the degree level, or,
Rosanne: yes. Yeah, absolutely.
Or even just connected from module to module. As I think students often go through a range of different modules. They don’t necessarily connect that. So they don’t connect what they’ve learned in programming, but structuring programs to another class, I know, I can’t think of a, an example now [00:29:00] I started down that, but you know, those skills, it’s almost like the goal, well it’s in that module and it doesn’t touch any of the other modules.
Um, so I think it
Duncan: siloed all these silos of different, different topics that are completely independent, but then actually they all relate
Rosanne: to Absolutely. And I, I vividly remember teaching databases. And I was giving the students an opportunity to connect a database to, um, a Java application. I remember wandering around the lab and I think the students didn’t recognize that I was just behind them and they said, she’s expecting us to know what’s happening in programming as well as databases.
And I’m thinking, yes, yes, I’m, that’s exactly, that’s exactly what I’m doing. Um, and it, it just seemed to cause. So much frustration. So I think if we provide more scaffolding, certainly in initial years, so for example, that could be guidance on how to break down problems, computational [00:30:00] thinking and structures, such as a set of questions.
If we’re asking students to perform reflective practice, to do reflective writing or um, presentations, then I think we need to give them opportunities to do that in a low risk environment. So I think. We need to do a better sales job effectively and kind of highlighting where we are trying to do these things and provide the necessary support to allow students to achieve that in a meaningful way.
I don’t think assessing them is, is particularly easy. I think by the nature of some of these skills are more subjective, so elements such as having multiple assessors say for presentation to help. As well as things like portfolio assessment might help building, um, a portfolio of the different skills that students are able to do.
Some examples that are provided in the paper are things like asking [00:31:00] students to peer review codes. So obviously to support that at an early stage, you could provide structured questions to help students evaluate the code. So it could be things like, are the variables named in a meaningful way? Are you able to, do you think you would be able to add to this code elements such as that might help them understand what we’re trying to get at and what it’s that we’re trying to assess?
Duncan: Yeah. Okay. Okay. Good. Um, so, uh, what there’s a sort of question here is that, and we’ve all heard employers moaning about computer science students saying, oh, they don’t do this, and they don’t do that, and they can’t do this, and they can’t do that. Um, so the sort of question here is where does the education stop and the training start?
So a lot of training, a lot of employers will have onboarding programs that. Perhaps plug or, or try and fill some of the gaps that the universities aren’t providing. So [00:32:00] the question is, it is how do we, how do we separate the two? How do we separate the sort of education that people do at university from the training that they might get on the job?
Rosanne: Yeah. So I think it’s. It’s a challenging one to think about. I think obviously from a traditional perspective, there are natural endpoints from when an educator role ends, when the student graduates from the degree, um, and when the employer starts. But I think what we’re seeing is some of the key work, um, by the likes of Best, Simon, where they interview students who completed a degree in computer science or software engine a year ago.
You can see the different mentality of them kind of looking back and going, oh, actually I, I kind of understand the point of that now. Um, and it seems that their mindset somewhat changes. I think that kind of delineation is starting to [00:33:00] blur a little bit more with the likes of, um, the increasing graduate and degree apprenticeships that we’re beginning to see.
Where students are completing their degree alongside completing, um, their day-to-day jobs. So they’re learning both on the job alongside completing the university side of it,
Duncan: I think. Is that something you offer at Strath by, do you do degree apprentice? We do. As well as, as well as classical degrees as it were.
Rosanne: We do. Um, so we have I think quite a, a wide range of, of program types at, at Glasgow, sorry, Strat. Now where we’re teaching graduate apprenticeships. We’ve got our graduate apprenticeships, masters in cybersecurity as well as an undergraduate graduate apprenticeships. We’ve also got a degree apprenticeship.
Which is more England based, I believe. Um, so we actually get students coming up from England to Glasgow in order to study at Strat Lyde for a a [00:34:00] small period of time. And a lot of what they do is then remote. So we’ve got that alongside our traditional undergraduate and postgraduate programs as well as conversion master’s programs.
So certainly our, our demographics are changing quite, um, dramatically compared to where they were perhaps 10, 15 years ago.
Duncan: Okay. Okay, good. Um, just a few more questions then before we wrap up. So, um. Um, how do you think students perceive these skills? We’ve talked about sometimes, sometimes these skills get sidelined either deliberately or inadvertently by, by universities.
Do you, do you have any, um, any thoughts on how students perceive these kind of skills that were your either analyzed in this paper?
Rosanne: Sure. So I think if you were to ask them straight out do they think it’s valuable, they would probably say yes. I don’t think that necessarily results in action or engagement from the students.[00:35:00]
Even when I’ve brought in industry contacts to speak with our students, and even when they say this is the most important bit, the students are still really struggle with motivation to do things like class diagrams or use cases or user stories and acceptance criteria. So those. Sorts of things alongside the skills that we focus on in the paper, like critical thinking.
I think many students, well, they might on paper say, yes, I agree that this is an important thing. They don’t necessarily enjoy engaging with it, but that’s just my, my personal experience. We do seem to have a, a recurring approach to this, at least that I’ve seen in a number of different universities across the UK and Ireland, where they are put into a separate module.
And I think that’s probably not the best way to embed those skills. [00:36:00] So I think a common one is to meet the BCS accreditation criteria is that a lot of programs will have an ethical and professional skills unit or module within their degree program. I think students need to see it in practice. I think it needs to be embedded alongside.
The coding, coding alongside the consideration of how you’re gonna do user authentication, we should be talking about things like the Data Protection Act and how that impacts, um, what they do or ethically. So for example, um, I teach cybersecurity whenever I touch on facial recognition. I touch on the ethics of machine learning and the ways that that has gone so badly wrong.
So for facial recognition, um, there was a lot of really great work done, which looked at how facial recognition initially was based predominantly on Caucasian males, so it didn’t [00:37:00] perform as well with females and it didn’t perform. It performed even more poorly with. Individuals of minority, minority, ethical backgrounds.
So it was obviously not really doing its job. So whilst functionality, it’s like, yes, okay, you’ve created official recognition software. You’re not really thinking about the bigger picture. So I think if we can embed and high highlight these things in a more meaningful way, that it’ll help students.
Better understand how that looks in practice for them, rather than taking it completely separate and going, let’s think about ethics now because it isn’t separate in our day-to-day lives.
Duncan: Yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay, good. Um, then there was a, a question from, um, Michelle at the Open University was asking about in, in his case.
Um, it’s quite difficult to, I mean, you mentioned you, you have remote learners in strath wide as well. Um. Teaching teamwork is a [00:38:00] bit of a challenge if, if people aren’t in the same place at the same time. So do you have any, any, any, any strategies for doing that in a, in a, in a more, um, I don’t know, what’s the word that’s, that’s more compatible with the lifelong learning rather than traditional students in a lecture theater or a lab scenario?
I,
Rosanne: I think the short answer is not at the moment. I think that is a, a really tricky one, particularly around teamwork. And I know that students, especially where they are, um, in a job environment alongside studying, they do have a tendency to come back and say, well, why do I need to do anything team-based?
I’m doing team-based in my, my real job, my day-to-day job, so why should I have to do it? Teamwork. I think there’s a larger picture there. I think if we do team exercises, there are other end goals that allows you to do something that’s more complex, that’s more realistic. So I don’t [00:39:00] have a quick solution for how we can get students to engage when they’re doing things asynchronously.
I think the one thing that teaching remotely during COVID taught me is. How much of an impact on learning, just having a community around you makes So I think the university certainly, um, my experience was that they were very keen to, to ask staff to try to emulate, uh, that community, feel that sense of belonging.
Yeah. And I think we, we ended up on the. The final conclusion that effectively what students were missing was popping down to the coffee shop afterwards, having a chat on the way to the next lecture going, did you understand what they were saying? Nope. Didn’t have a clue. What do you think of this? What do you think of that?
That kind of processing that’s happening in that community. Having that so disjoint and making students feel so isolated, I think really impacted them. [00:40:00] We’ve obviously got a lot more tools now to assist in a remote team working. I think the asynchronous nature really causes a lot of challenges, so I think it’s an area worth looking into more, but for the moment, I, I don’t have a, a quick solution for that, I’m afraid.
Okay. Okay, good.
Duncan: So, um, to finish up then, so we, we talked about sort of future work in, in the things that you might do with this in the future. Have you, uh, what are the plans for, um, I mean, I guess yourself and Alan might still be doing work on this. Um, what, what comes next?
Rosanne: Sure. So I think, as I’ve maybe already touched on, I do think it’s worth looking at a wider universities, um, set of universities to look at whether there’s any differences or similarities in what they’re articulating.
But I think the long term goal is to try to develop a, a framework or a set of templates or something if [00:41:00] an educator comes and says, I want to assess these particular skills. To be able to look at that and say, here’s how I might do that, because I think that’s a lot of work for an educated goal. I want to do this.
How do I assess it? You know, you’ve easily got a few days of research ahead of you trying to figure out how you might do it and how you might apply that to your particular context. I think if we could get to a point where we can take some of the most common skills. And pull together that literature and put that into almost a pack or a structure for people to kind of dip into as when needed.
Then we might move towards more of an integrated graduate attributes, uh, exploration in computing science.
Duncan: Good. Okay. Um, that’s probably a good point to finish on. So, um, thank you Rose for joining us today.
Rosanne: Thank you for having me.
Duncan: We look forward to seeing whatever follows on from this, from yourself and and your colleagues in in Strat Guide in the future.
Rosanne: Thanks so much, Duncan.[00:42:00]
Duncan: Thank you for listening to The Rest is teaching a podcast for computer science educators and practitioners. You can subscribe or listen to this wherever you get your podcasts. We’d like to thank and acknowledge the Council for Professors and Heads of Computing. That’s cphc.ac.uk who have funded this podcast.
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