Future Directions in Computing Education Summit Part Two: Institutional Challenges to Supporting and Growing Computing Education Research

A summit was held at Stanford March 24-25, 2014. It focused on the structural issues inhibiting the growth of computing education research (CER). Summit attendees identified four different challenges and opportunities: Hiring and promotion of CER faculty: The CER community needs to decide how best to position new PhD’s doing CS Education research such that they can be hired into computing (including computer science and informatics) academic units (departments, schools, or colleges). Further, the CER community needs to identify fair means to evaluate tenure, and promote computing education researchers? Clearly, having senior faculty within a computing unit who appreciate the computing education research and are sympathetic to the needs and constraints of a new field are critical. Advocating for the discipline: The CER community needs to advocate on behalf of computing education research. This includes formulating the important research questions, demonstrating their relevance to all areas of computing and showing that we as a community have the ambition to answer those questions for the good of society. The community needs to identify clear definitions and grand challenges for the field. The January 2014 summit focused on identification of a set of significant computing education research areas and questions. Answering these questions could have a significant, positive, and disruptive impact on much of the computing landscape. Growing the community of computing education researchers (faculty and PhD students): It is necessary to create the models by which we can use resources to develop more computing education PhD students who can be successful in answering important computing education research questions. While it is likely no single model will be appropriate for all schools/institutions, a set of successful approaches needs to be identified and supported. Couching CER as a "disruptive technology": A strong justification/rationale needs to be provided to convince department heads/chairs, deans, and other senior administrators to support the efforts needed to grow this community. For example, being able to produce more and better software engineers in less time would have a dramatic impact on the software industry. Being able to develop computer science teachers for high schools would likely have an enormous impact on the diversity of computing professionals.