S4xE19: EngageCSEdu
Episode Summary
Joining us today are Brian O’Neill, Associate Professor at Quinnipiac University, and Olivier St-Cyr, Associate Professor, Teaching Stream at the University of Toronto, co-editors-in-chief of EngageCSEdu. EngageCSEdu is a place to find and share peer-reviewed open educational resources (OER), including assignments, labs, and classroom activities for computer science courses. In this episode, we discuss what you can find in the collection, how it is expanding beyond introductory courses, and how you can turn an assignment or activity you’ve developed into a peer-reviewed ACM publication. We also explore what the submission process involves and how to prepare your materials for others to use and adapt.
You can also download this episode directly.
Episode Notes
ACM Teaching Materials for Computing (EngageCSEdu)
Association of Computing Machinery Education Advisory Committee
Transcript
Kristin (00:18) Hello and welcome to the CS-Ed Podcast, a podcast where we talk about teaching computer science with computer science educators. I am your host, Kristin Stephens-Martinez, the Lyle Family Associate Professor of the Practice at Duke University. Joining me today is Brian O’Neill, Associate Professor at Quinnipiac University, and Olivier St-Cyr, Associate Professor, Teaching Stream at the University of Toronto. They are here in their capacity as the co-editors-in-chief of EngageCSEdu. Brian and Olivier, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, since there are two of you. Brian, can you please start?
Brian (00:52) Sure. Hi, Kristin. So EngageCSEdu is a repository of open educational resources for computing classes. And so, in my capacity as co-EIC, editor-in-chief, I’m working with Olivier, I’m helping shepherd articles through, I’m working with some of our partner organizations, and just trying to help people have access to new and interesting assignments.
Kristin (01:20) And Olivier.
Olivier (01:20) Yeah, hi Kristin. Thank you for having us on your podcast. So, CS EngageCSEdu is an ACM journal, and and Brian kind of gives you a little bit of background here, and it’s been around for a number of years. Both Brian and I were involved before as authors or guest editors for the journal. In my case, I’ve been involved with the Association of Computing Machinery Education Advisory Committee. So this is essentially a committee. Of the educ, the ACM Education Board. And this committee provides advice on all kinds of CS education matters, like curriculum, all kinds of different projects that the Education Ed Board takes under its umbrella.
And through being involved with the ACM EAC, I was in touch with the previous co-editor-in-chief of EngageCSEdu. And at some point, they had asked me to run. A special issue on human computer interaction. So I did that about four years ago. And so that got me involved with the journal. And is eventually when both of these previous co-editors-in-chief sort sort of stopped, and their term was up, Brian and I were asked to take over. And we’ve been co-editors-in-chief now since November of 2023.
Kristin (02:41) Awesome. So let’s start with Brian. And you gave us a bit of a short summary of what it is. Could you give a little bit of the history of like how it came about? Why did it come about? All those kinds of things.
Brian (02:55) Yeah, so I mentioned that EngageCSEdu is this repository for open educational resources, or OERs. It actually started years ago as a project of NCWIT with Google sponsorship. Over time, Google stepped away. And but because NCWIT thought this was such a valuable project, the ACM Ed Board and NCWIT worked together so that it could fall under the ACM Education Board’s umbrella. And that’s where it’s been for the past few years. But it’s a valuable resource because it is a collection of peer-reviewed open educational resources. Every submission that we get, whether it’s an assignment, a lab, a project, slides, peer instruction questions, POGIL activities, gets reviewed by two computer scientists and one social scientist or learning scientist. And then we act like a any other journal. We have a revise-and-resubmit process that ultimately ends up with. And OER getting posted now, not just to our website, EngageCSEdu.org, but also to the ACM Digital Library. And that includes instructor-facing materials, student-facing materials, anything that we think you need to run the assignment.
Kristin (04:10) So what does OER stand for? I think I know, but for the audience, just in case.
Brian (04:16) Open educational resource.
Kristin (04:18) Okay, so what does that mean, though?
Brian (04:21) So that is a resource that has been made freely available for others to adopt. Everything in EngageCSEdu is under a Creative Commons license or a variation thereof. So it’s available to be adapted, remixed, cited it potentially with citing by name, but it’s out there for anyone to use in their class.
Kristin (04:46) Cool. Yeah. So my next question would be like, who is the intended audience for this? Because for my field, like since I do research in CS education, we have an overemphasis, for example, on Comp Sci 101 kind of material. But like who is the intended audience for all of it? And how about Olivier, you can, you can answer that one.
Olivier (05:06) So that’s a very interesting question because it does relate to the history piece that Brian alluded to. So, EngageCSEdu was originally started by two teaching-track professors. So the emphasis here was to really encourage people who are in the teaching track to submit publications and give them an opportunity to have assignments available. That they can actually transform into OER, and they can showcase the kind of work they do in their classroom. So one of the issues is we know that teaching track professors sometimes, or sometimes even people in primary undergrad institutions in the United States, have less opportunities to do research. There’s less grants available, or they have a higher teaching load, and therefore they need to focus on teaching and a little less on research.
And so EngageCSEdu was originally conceived to say, well, you know, if you’re a teaching track professor and you have this cool assignment or this cool project or this wonderful lab that you’re using in your classes, you can actually publish those things. And these may, depending on your institution, of course, but they may count for your tenure process or your continuing status process as you go up the rank in your institution. So it was really the the original intent was to give an opportunity for those folks to say, you know, while I may not engage in full full-fledged research like, like a tenure-track professor or a like a professor in an R1 institution, I can still have a project that I’m working on, and I can still publish it and have it submitted to a journal, quote unquote.
So the the emphasis was also to encourage K to 12 teachers to submit into EngageCSEdu as well. So in K to 12, like we we know this, like K to 12 teachers are not asked to do research, and they’re not asked to like apply for grants and things like that. But they may still work on extremely interesting assignments. You know, especially at the grade 12 or grade 11 type of class where there’s like, you know, intro to computer science, and prepping the students to get into a computer science degree is becoming a little more bit more serious because these are electives that students decide to take. So this was a EngageCSEdu was also a venue to to to reach out those K-12 teachers and say, listen, if you do have something interesting that you’re working on for K-12 students, why not publish it with us?
And so this is why we have, and we we can we’ll talk about this later about what the submission process looks like, but we have a way to write those papers and a way to publish those open educational resources that is fairly accessible for folks. Like we do not ask for papers that are like 20 pages long and that are, you know, like that are backed up by grants and and research laboratories and things like that. So the the the intent is really to help those folks.
Now, through the years, it’s we’ve, we’ve kept that goal, of course, but we now say anybody who works on an interesting project and interesting assignments, anybody who develops something that they think could be used by other folks is encouraged to submit their material to EngageCSEdu because we do want to develop a collection of resources that are interesting for others to use, right? So really the intent is it it started with, with like a small intent to capture a very specific need, and it broadened to a larger intent.
You know, we the focus was also originally on CS0, CS1, data structure, and discrete mathematics. So that was kind of the the four core topics that EngageCSEdu was based on. However, with the years, different authors and different folks started contacting us and the previous co-editors-in-chief and said, Well, I’m also doing a very cool project in human computer interaction, or I’m doing something that is really targeting ethics and responsible computing for some of my students. So we started accepting and broadening the scope of what kind of OERs can be published in EngageCSEdu. And we now we accept way more than just CS0, CS1, data structures, and discrete mathematics. And so our collection is growing every year, and there’s all kinds of different topics that gets added year to year.
Kristin (10:08) Cool. So, it sounds like the intended audience is kind of at this point anyone and everyone who’s teaching computer science in some way, shape, or form. I assume that the the the corpus of content you have though, is probably still more focused on the early courses that students are often in. But you are starting to make your way up, I I like to call it the tree. You’re you’re like you’re up the trunk, and now you’re starting to make it up the various branches of computer science. Is there a well-represented or an unrepresented branch in the tree?
Brian (10:45) Well, we actually went digging earlier this week, and we actually found discrete math is not really well represented on the site.
Kristin (10:54) Okay.
Brian (10:56) As we get up the tree, though, I think there are whole branches that haven’t really been touched. Thinking about, like a traditional CS curriculum, there’s no compilers, there’s no systems, there’s no programming languages. Part of the way we’ve been building out these branches is with special issues. So Olivier talked about being a guest editor for an HCI issue. We had an ethics and responsible computing special issue. We have a couple more coming up in the pipeline, but that’s after we do the special issue, that’s when we’ll start to say, okay, we can start accepting these more regularly.
Kristin (11:38) Cool. Okay. So, so, if a person comes to the website, which of course will be in the show notes, if they’re not looking for intro sequence stuff, they should probably just look at the special issues first to get a sense of like is what I’m looking for here? And if I don’t see it, then assume you might not necessarily find what you’re looking for, but you could like submit your own stuff at that point because you can be reasonably confident it’s not there.
Olivier (12:04) Exactly. Exactly. That’s right. And we have authors sometimes that email us before submitting and say, I have this assignment. It’s in that type of course or this subject. Would it be okay for you to accept it as a submission? And most of the time the answer is yes. Like in our rolling submission process, we do encourage anyone, as you said, to that has like a an interesting assignment, projects, or lab that they’re working on, no matter what the course is. To submit.
Of course, nowadays there’s a lot of interest for Gen AI. So we are seeing quite a bit of rolling submissions, not necessarily a special issue, but rolling submissions of folks that have retransformed assignment, retransformed project in the era of Gen AI. And so we accept those right now as rolling submissions. But if we start seeing many of those coming through in the next few months. We may decide to build a special collection or a special issue on for for these papers because you know we would like to group them together and say to our audience through our website, well, if you’re looking at Gen AI papers, these are here’s a sample, or here’s like seven or eight or ten submissions we’ve been getting in the last year or so that you can consult.
I would say to your, to your questions of underrepresentation, K to twelve is also somewhat underrepresented. Okay. We would like to get more submissions from K to twelve teachers, and we’ll need to work on a little bit more outreach towards those folks. But if any of them are listening right now, please feel free to contact us because the the the idea of submitting a paper to EngageCSEdu has two very attractive components. So the first component is it’s not that large of a paper. And so you can write it up in like a couple of pages, and we’ll talk about that later when we talk about more specifically about the submission process. But you know, the barrier to entry, we’ve made it very, very accessible for people to be able to write this up and not being overwhelmed by thinking, " My God, I have to write a journal article, which is going to be so consuming and take so much of my time."
The other thing, though, as a benefit of that is it is actually a real published paper that has an entry in the Association of Computing Machinery Digital Library. So if your paper gets through and it gets revised, and you know you work through all the revision, the review process, and it gets accepted, you do get an official citation. And you can, you can cite this in your CV, and you can actually say, I have a publication in the ACM DL. And again, this was purposely thought through when the journal was conceived and when the journal was transformed over the last few years to say, well, there are very few K-12 teachers who get to have an official publication in in a journal. And there also are sometimes quite a few teaching-track professors in universities. Who do not have the time to work on like these large publications or these official, sort of big journal publications. So this gives them a chance to list on their CV a publication that is fairly accessible and that has gone through a peer review process. So people can say like, this is a peer-reviewed publication in an ACM collection in journal.
Kristin (15:44) So feel like you my next question was gonna be why should people submit? But I feel like you’ve answered that. Is there anything else to add, though?
Brian (15:52) I think the other reason to submit is there are a lot of CS faculty, I felt this way when I started out as an author, who have one assignment in their class that they love to teach, that is their favorite assignment, the one they’ve poured heart and soul into. It’s classroom-tested; it works, it’s ready for, the for the spotlight. And the rest of my assignments in my class, sometimes I’m like, yeah, that could be better. Or, I wish there was another way to do this. And they’re now we can share those. This is a mechanism for sharing. So I’ve been able to put out assignments that I was proud of, and I’ve adopted other people’s assignments from EngageCSEdu. So stop reinventing the wheel. Or stop other people from having to reinvent the wheel. Give us your best stuff.
Kristin (16:47) Okay. So then what let’s let’s go into what is the submission process like? Like, I’ve never done this, so I am super curious as well. Maybe I’ll have an assignment that I can submit by the end of this.
Olivier (17:02) Yeah, so the submission process, as I explained before, is fairly straightforward. We do have a few requirements, of course, and I’ll go through those. So for any of the audience listening at the moment, I would definitely encourage you to visit our website, which is EngageCSEdu.org. There will be a link for sure with the podcast. And we have a tab at the top of the website that is called contribute. So the contribute tab and web page explains our submission process. So essentially, we have templates that are provided to authors, and we focus on a few required sections. First of all, we want a synopsis. Like we want to know what your assignment is like. What is this assignment about? Like it’s almost like a brief abstract of what you’re trying to submit in your assignments.
So the second part of the submission, which is very important. Is the engagement practices that your assignment or your project or your lab uses. We have a collection of 11 engagement practices. For example, this assignment incorporates student choice. This assignment is a student-centered assessment, or this assignment makes interdisciplinary connections in different computer science disciplines. So when people submit a paper, they they can they for sure they can visit our website to know what these engagement practices are. And our template points people to a link where these engagement practices are listed with a short description. So we really want people to think through what engagement practices is this assignment using, and give us a short brief and description for why do they think their assignment uses those practices or how their assignment or project or lab uses those practices.
Then we ask people to describe their OER, describe their material. So every submission has a zip file that’s attached to it, which is the actual either assignment handout. This could be broken down into different pieces. So some authors have things in their zip file, such as the assignment handout, the code that is used, the final solution for the lab. Maybe the test cases, like a piece of code that helps a TA or a teacher test for the, for the correct answers. There’s often instructors-facing material that is distributed, student-facing material, et cetera, et cetera. So it’s up to the author to build a package and think through if I want someone in another university and another program to use my assignment. What should I give them so that it’s a ready-to-use package, right? And so they zip that all together. And in the paper, they explain what does that zip file contain and how to use those material.
Kristin (20:08) Sounds like a README.
Olivier (20:09) Yes, exactly. And then they have, like their, their their Creative Common license agreement, which allows people to use the assignment as is or to slightly modify it based on their needs. And a set of recommendations on how to best use that OER. So that paper we recommend about two pages.
Kristin (20:32) Okay, that’s short.
Olivier (20:34) So, it’s as I said, it’s an accessibility entry point in a sense that it is accessible to you know, high school teachers and teaching track professors, et cetera, et cetera. Some people do three pages, four pages, five pages. That’s, you know, like that’s okay. But the the original recommendation was a two-page paper plus a zip file that contains your material. You submit this through our website.
And then we send the paper and the material for review.
Kristin (20:50) Okay.
Olivier (20:51) We have three reviewers that are assigned to each paper: two computer science reviewers, and one social science reviewer. So the social science reviewer is looking at the making sure, first of all that the engagement practice highlights are part of the paper and making sure that you know the the the the assignment and the way that the assignment gets delivered to students and the way that it’s get graded and all that is following like sort of ethical practices and is is is basically looking at the just not the computer science lens but more of an education lens. So often these social science reviewers may come from faculty of education or professors who have done computer science education research per se. And they’re looking at that lens.
So once we get the result back from these three reviewers, then we we determine whether the paper can be accepted, needs minor modifications, or needs major modifications. And if it’s major modification, we return it in a minor modification as well to the authors. And, as any journals, the authors work iteratively with the editors’ teams, the editorial team. To to get the paper to the point where it could be accepted for publication.
Kristin (22:31) So what’s the what’s the timeline? Like, how long does all of that take? Like
Olivier (22:35) So
Kristin (22:35) I’ve submitted to journals. It’s it’s sometimes it’s kinda long.
Olivier (22:39) We we we try to I mean, every journal right now is suffering from the you know, not having enough reviewers and the the difficulties of finding reviewers.
Kristin (22:50) Yes, that too. Like I don’t blame the journals.
Olivier (22:53) But we try to give people an answer back within 45 days if from the time of submission, if possible. Like I would say within a month and a half to two months, normally we’re able to give you back the reviews and let you know what the outcome of the first round of reviews are.
Then you, you know, if you need minor modification or major modification, you’ll be given another 30 to 45 days to resubmit a a revised version. If it’s a minor modification, your revised version will go through straight to the editorial team. And if we judge that all the minor modifications have been done to our satisfaction, we will just push it through. If it’s a major revision, we will send it back. For, to the original three reviewers, just to have them check and make sure that everything’s been done in accordance to their comments and suggestion. So I would say, you know, for a minor, you’re looking at maybe two and a half months-ish to three months. For a major, it could be a little bit more time-consuming, like maybe like three to four months all the way to the publication.
Once it’s gets accepted, then authors, of course, are asked to finalize, polished everything, send their camera ready version. And once we have checked all the details, all the agreement, the publication dates, et cetera, et cetera, then we push it to the DL. So if you visit our website again, you’ll see that the first link on our website at the top is ACM DL Collection. And if you click that link, you can see where the journal papers live on the Association of Computing Machinery Digital Library. Okay. And this is our official collection, essentially.
Kristin (24:49) That’s very fast from my experience with journals, but admittedly I d I don’t work with many journals. So 45 days, I’m like, wow, that’s amazing. But then again, I remembered, I was like, but it’s only two pages. Very different.
Olivier (25:02) And sometimes we get reviewers that take a little longer. And with it’s not 45 days, it’s end up being 60 days or 70 days. I have to say if you submit in a special issue, it will be a longer for sure. Special issues take about six to seven months to get published in total. Yeah. Because we’re dealing with a collection of six papers. So six papers times three reviewers, that’s 18 reviews that we have to coordinate, and some of them will be minor, some of them will be major. So we cannot publish anything in the collection until everything has been solved and resolved.
So if, if a minor paper gets a revision that is accepted, well, they may have to wait to be published because we have another paper in the same special issue that’s a major revision, and that one may take a couple more months to address. So special issues, everybody submits by one date. But we also publish everything together once everything has been finalized. So those papers can take between six to seven months to get published. But rolling submissions, we try to get them out as as as fast as we can.
Kristin (26:18) That’s cool. Is is it anonymous review, double blind? Like how does that work?
Brian (26:24) So the authors are known to the reviewers,
Kristin (26:28) Okay.
Brian (26:28) But not the other way.
Kristin (26:29) Got it. Alrighty. So it’s like the for me it was also partially like when you’re writing the thing, do you have to write it in an anonymous way? Or are you can you, like, this is, you know, this this deals with my school mascot and so just take, you know, Duke Blue Devil out and put your mascot in.
Brian (26:48) No. In fact, what we want you doing instead is in your synopsis or in your write-up, telling us what do you what am I going to need to do to adapt.
Kristin (26:56) Okay. That’s new information.
Brian (26:58) So take out the Blue Devil and put in the Bobcat for Quinnipiac.
Kristin (27:03) So that and that’s part of like the two pager where you’re like things the author recommends to change.
Brian (27:07) It’s not even necessarily recommend to change, but it’s recognition of different contexts. So I know we’ve had assignments that deal with data that comes from the particular city they’re working in and say, we use the data from Chicago, but if you’re in the United States, you can get your city’s data here. Or I don’t know, there’s a couple that we’ve even had go further than that and say, if you’re in Canada, we think you can get it here. Outside of that, we hope you can find it.
Kristin (27:37) Shrug, you want temperature data? Here you go. Here’s the website for every sensor we know of in the US. But that’s it.
Olivier (27:46) Many authors, and we, we it’s part of our template to have many authors will put a recommendation section at the end of their paper before just before the reference. And this is where this kind of context comes from, right? So it’s just like, well, we used it in, you know, this type of program or this type of institution, but we recommend that you look into this if you want to adapt it that way or whatever, right? Like so. Because we do realize that. The one-size-fits-all is not necessarily the case for all the submissions, right? Like, some based on whether your your program is in a large institution or small institution, your class size is 30 versus your class size is 150 students. Is this assignment scalable, etc etc? So this is where the the authors have a chance to kind of talk to their audience and say, well, you know, based on what we’ve done in our institution, this is how we recommend you use it. But here’s some other additional context you may want to take into like.
Kristin (28:50) This this reminds me of for for my TPB teaching practice byte episodes. I asked, like, where will it work, but where will it not work? Like, give me context, which reminds me is, so if someone teaches large classes, like this this more happens to the large class teachers where they’re like, All these practices don’t work in my context that they’re for tiny classes. Is there a way to search through the collection for like class size is not the right thing, but kind of just like scalability.
Brian (29:22) I don’t think scalability is something that’s really in our search capacity right now. But I if I go back and look through who has submitted, we have things from classes where it was probably built for a twenty-person classroom, and I know we have things that have worked in much larger than that. So, it’s it might be a little bit of clicking around, reading the synopsis, feeling like if this is gonna work for you, but it’s in there. We have, we have stuff for every size classroom.
Kristin (29:54) Okay. I 100% believe that you have things that for every size classroom, but like the question is how easy will it be to figure that out?
Brian (30:02) That’s a good question. I think right now that would be a little bit that’s gonna mean some reading, that’s gonna mean some clicking around. We’ve been talking about we want to improve the search on our website, so maybe that’s one one new set of tags that we need to think about, Olivier. Yeah, for sure.
Kristin (30:19) Feature request.
Olivier (30:21) Yes. And CSE just just so that the audience has context here, EngageCSEdu has grown quite a bit in the last, I would say four or five years. Like, so, since we’ve been an official journal of the ACM DL, we we’ve seen quite, quite the growth. So this is again like our original four core topics were like, what you know, CS1, 0 data structure, and discrete math. And we’ve seen quite an emerging set of topics and, and different types of classes and different types of programs and so yes there the as the journal grows, we will need to adapt our, not only our search capability, but also our instructions for submissions and kind of when we do the call for submissions, outline what are the kinds of papers we’ve been dealing with so far.
And you know like what what are we accepting and all but the, the goal is to build an interesting and diverse collection so we we don’t want to stay just with with you know like the the four core topics and small classes for example. But your point is very valid as we build a strong and diverse collection people will need to search this collection and people will need to kind of navigate it. And we’re just talking about this last week in our sort of editors meeting and says like, well, as people have different requests and search patterns on our website, we’ll need to adapt our collection accordingly and our search engine accordingly.
Kristin (32:03) So any so what what have you published recently or anything you want to highlight in terms of like groups of, of submissions that you’ve recently published?
Brian (32:15) So we’re, we’re always accepting rolling submissions. So we’ve had some CS0, CS1, data structures materials come through in the last few months. We earlier this year released a special issue where games was the emphasis. That was our fourth special issue joining HCI, artificial intelligence, and ethics and responsible computing. We’re always on the hunt for more. Awesome CS0, CS1, and data structures work. Discrete math, I said, is feeling a little thin at the moment. But we’ve got a special issue in the pipeline, in with graphics as the core area. And there’s a call for papers or call for submissions coming out for theory of computation imminently.
Kristin (33:10) Besides topic, what kind of distribution do you have in terms of the type of submission? Like you said assignments, you’ve said labs, you’ve said projects, peer instruction, like what is the variety in terms of types of submissions?
Brian (33:27) I think most of what we have is in the assignment, project, lab sphere. Something that is meant to be take-home, whether it’s take home and come back in forty-eight hours or take home and come back in three to four weeks, there’s a mix of those. But I would say largely what’s in here are assignments and labs of that nature. Some of those come with slides so that you can give background. But we also do have a nice collection of POGIL assignments. That’s materials that’s largely in the classroom. Process Oriented, Guided Inquiry Learning.
Kristin (34:11) Okay. I’m glad you defined it cause I was gonna ask you to define it.
Brian (34:14) I saw it coming. So I had some colleagues who used POGIL as a classroom technique. And we have some materials that go along with that, and that’s, that’s in the classroom. We have peer instruction questions also, and that’s in you know in the classroom approach. But I’d say those are the minority compared to, like, you know, something that you’re doing. Where it’s a homework assignment or even maybe it’s an a lab assignment that you’re probably gonna get through in the class period, but maybe not, maybe you take a little bit home. Some still class active classroom activities, though.
Olivier (34:57) Yeah. We have some lecture slides as well. There’s a few there’s a few papers that where people have published their lecture material, for example, like because they worked on an interesting lecture or something that might be interactive in nature as a lecture and all, and then they’ve published those material.
I think it’s there’s just a clarification I’d like to make for people who are gonna visit the website, like, because EngageCSEdu as Brian alluded in the in the introduction and the history, it’s it’s it’s been a kind of a two-part project. So the first part was when Google and others were kind of involved in putting the website together and building the collection. And at that time, papers and OERs were not part of the ACM DL. They were just published on our website.
Kristin (35:32) Okay.
Olivier (35:33) So then about a two, three, yeah, three and a half, four years ago, there was a formal transition to make it a journal in the ACM DL. So that journal is called the ACM Teaching Materials for Computing Collection. So that is the official name of the journal. And you, you can access it from our website. But if you do search on our website, if you click the search top menu item and you search through our collection, you’ll see that many of the papers that come up are not necessarily in the ACM DL because they were from the phase one of EngageCSEdu, if I could say. Right? They still went through peer review, and they were still checked by the editorial team, but the main container, quote unquote, to, to publish these papers was the EngageCSEdu website.
And, and that was kind of the downside to it, because people would publish a paper and then they would put it on their CV, but then people would look at their CV and say, well, this is not really an Association of Computing Machinery paper. It’s just some paper that’s published on a website like that, like even though it’s peer-reviewed. So when, when Google kind of said we’re we’re done with this project and, and we want to phase it out, when it was picked up by the Association of Computing Machinery Education Board, they’re like, well. One of the things that we need to do to strengthen EngageCSEdu is to make sure that these publications are official. So they, they then had a process to merge towards the ACM DL. So our ACM DL collection has 34 papers in it. But our entire collection has way more than 34 papers. Like our entire collection has like, you know.
Brian (37:46) Almost three hundred, I think.
Olivier (37:47) Probably over, over three hundred papers, exactly. It’s just that the majority of those papers were published on our website in phase one. And we’ve closed that. We don’t do this anymore. Like, we only now accept papers that are gonna go through the the the the ACM review process and are gonna be published on the DL. So, so just a note for as you search our website, you’ll see some older papers and some newer papers that
Kristin (38:16) Okay, so, so if people go, they wanna go to the website and search. They don’t necessarily want to go to the DL. They might not find everything.
Olivier (38:23) Well the, the DL will have the most thirty-four recent papers that are published, including all of our special issues and all of our rolling issues for the past four years.
Kristin (38:33) Do you have any favorites that you want to highlight? Or can you not pick ‘cause it’s like picking between your children.
Brian (38:39) It’s picking between our children and
Kristin (38:42) Ha ha.
Brian (38:43) Everyone needs to go find their own favorite. So Olivier and I teach in two very different universities. A big class for me is 30 students, and I think Olivier would dream of a class of 30 students. And so what works for me isn’t gonna work for him. Even if we’re teaching both CS1, what’s gonna work in my classroom may not work for you. So find the, find the assignment that works for you, or find the gap that you have, the the the part of your class that you want to improve, and go looking. And I think the nice thing about everything on EngageCSEdu is that they have suggestions and recommendations for if you were going to adapt this to your classroom, how would you adapt it? How do you adapt to your context? What, what pieces of this OER are necessary? What pieces could come out if the background isn’t there?
Kristin (39:40) Got it. Okay.
Olivier (39:42) And sometimes we’ll have you might not be able to find the recommendation that you’re looking for. And this is where you need to do a little bit of thinking on your own and say, okay, well, I found this OER. Clearly, the author states it’s been done in a class of 50 students. My class is 450 students. The authors do not talk about scalability.
But then you can still ask yourself, like, is this a scalable thing that I could adapt and I can modify for my class? And to be honest, if it is and you run with it, it might make a very good submission in EngageCSEdu and say, how did you adapt this OER to scale it to a large class of 450 students? Right. And we would be very we would be welcoming of such a submission. Because it would be new innovation, and it would show that you’ve used some things that we’ve published in the past, you’ve modified it, you’ve innovated on it, and now here’s the result. And now here’s a brand new paper that could be used by all kinds of profs now who are teaching four to five hundred students in in their program.
Kristin (40:51) I love it. So I want to be careful of time. So let’s do our last segment. Too long, didn’t listen. What would you say is the most important thing you want our listeners to get out of our conversation?
Brian (41:02) If you have put together an innovative and engaging assignment or activity in your class, there is a place for you to publish it, have it become an official part of the ACM Digital Library, and you don’t have to write 10,000 words to do it. EngageCSEdu is the place for you. And if you need an engaging assignment or activity in your class, EngageCSEdu is the place to come looking for it.
Kristin (41:33) Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Brian and Olivier.
Brian (41:36) Thank you for having us, Kristin.
Olivier (41:37) Yeah, thank you for having us.
Kristin (41:39) And thank you for listening. I am sure you know someone who would find this episode helpful. Please consider sharing it with them. That is a great way to support the podcast. And if you’re looking for other ways to help us out, join us on Patreon at patreon.com/csedpodcast. Particular shout-out to patrons Jacqueline Smith, Daniel Manesh, and Shao-Heng Ko for helping to keep the podcast ad-free and supporting production.
For episodes past and present, transcripts, and links, visit csedpodcast.org and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode! And otherwise, this was the CS-Ed Podcast. I am your host, Kristin Stephens-Martinez, and our producer is Chris Martinez. And remember, teaching computer science is more than just knowing computer science. I hope you found something useful for your teaching today.