Hi Christine,

The faculty PD sessions we have run so far have probably been as educational for us as for the faculty participants; faculty participants have had a wide variety of teaching philosophies, influenced by the different populations of students they teach, the different local industries they prepare students for, and different state educational bureaucracies they operate within.

Our projects try to reflect the kind of tasks a graduate of our program might encounter if they got a job without significant other training.  For example one project in our "cloud administrator" course has students configure separate spaces for different departments within a cloud service, and set up user accounts associated with the departments: this is something that might be asked of administrative staff in a tech company; it requires a thorough understanding of how cloud services handle accounts, but does not require programming.  

Hi Harrison,

This is an excellent question. We do not limit our community college partners as to how they offer a course. It is completely up to the individual colleges if they prefer to offer a course within a particular major or if they decide to offer it as a general elective accessible to non-STEM students. That being said, I believe that so far the courses have been mostly offered to STEM focused students.

When it comes to our development and research activities we are focusing on STEM students. However, you are suggesting a very intriguing direction that we have been considering for a while as well.

Hi Carmen,

I'm glad your question gives me the chance to geek out about self-efficacy measures!  We've been evolving the questions that we use to measure self-efficacy. We have in some cases asked a very general, single question after each module ("How confident are you that you will be able to do a similar task to this if it comes up in the future?") and in other cases asked a short battery of questions tailored to each learning objective (e.g. "How confident are you that today you could implement a basic CI/CD cycle for containerized microservices?").  We're redesigning this now to capture both some learning objective specific questions to capture self-efficacy for the course domain, and some more standard, general measures of self-efficacy in learning and in the domain (adapted from standard batteries MSLQ and LAESE).

In general we find that the course boosts self-efficacy, but this coming Fall will be the first time to get demographic data on students in a form that we can correlate with self-efficacy measures. So we should be able to share our first results at that time about how self-efficacy changes relate to inclusion and equity.

Hi LaShawnda,

We are still in the early phases, and we're also looking forward to seeing the impact on student outcomes.  We will be collecting baseline interview and quantiative data about students' experiences this coming year, and then introducing professional development for culturally relevant teaching for colleges starting in 2023; so we will then have before/after data that shows how CRTL can make a difference, or how to improve the way we teach it to instructors.  We are providing a base set of course materials for a very broad variety of different schools across the US, so we are intent on making sure instructors understand the importance of customizing and framing the material, and supporting students, in ways that are relevant to their own students and communities.

Hi Anasilvia,

We don't yet have findings about the gender gap; we will be collecting gender demographics starting this fall, and we are eager to see if features of our platform help narrow this gap.  Some research has suggested that gender gaps are somewhat associated with differences in self-efficacy; so for example we have designed autograders that attempt to give incremental, encouraging honest feedback as learners progress through a problem, and we hope to show that this can raise self-efficacy of learners of any gender who are uncertain about their abilities in STEM topics, thus helping everyone while narrowing the gender gap.