A Program to Enhance Faculty Development Through Outreach and Participation in Regional Computer Science Education Conferences

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This project is a cooperative effort between the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) and the Consortium for Computing in Small Colleges (CCSC) to provide outreach services to Computer Science faculty in various regions of the United States. These two cooperating organizations share a primary priorities of improving faculty teaching skills, increasing awareness and knowledge of current issues in computer science education, and providing opportunities for faculty to share ideas. SIGCSE conducts a very well-known and highly successful annual technical symposium; but the organization has no appreciable regional presence. CCSC, on the other hand, has been providing very successful regional conferences for over a decade; but conducts no national conference. The two organizations are, therefore, quite complementary. In an era of reduced or nonexistent travel budgets, especially for faculty in undergraduate institutions throughout the country, this project seeks to involve these faculty in many of the most current and relevant national CS education issues and concepts. The two-year project is to offer SIGCSE Technical Symposium workshops at each of the six regional CCSC conferences each year. This will allow more faculty to take advantage of the high-quality workshops from the national Symposium, but within the context of a less expensive regional conference, closer to home. The effectiveness of the project will be ascertained by two separate evaluations from participants: one immediately following the workshops, and one six months later in order to determine impact on courses, curricula, and professional development in CS education. It is noteworthy that due to the success of earlier federally sponsored outreach activities, the SIGCSE Board has decided voted to allocate up to 25% of its annual budget surplus to fund these export/outreach activities to regions (though not limited specifically to CCSC conferences). Thus we have a sort of "matching" funds to repo rt as part of the present application.