CRA Bulletin

The CRA Bulletin frequently shares news, timely information about CRA initiatives, and items of interest to the general community.
Subscribe to the RSS feed to stay connected.


New Computing Faculty Workshops in Summer 2018


By Beth Simon, Leo Porter, Cynthia Lee, and Mark Guzdial

The fourth (and last NSF-funded) New Computing Faculty Workshops will be held August 5-10, 2018 in San Diego. The goal of the workshops is to help new computing faculty to be better and more efficient teachers. By learning a little about teaching, we will help new faculty (a) make their teaching more efficient and effective and (b) make their teaching more enjoyable. We want students to learn more and teachers to have fun teaching them. The workshops were described in Communications of the ACM in the May 2017 issue (see article here).

This year, we will offer two workshops:

  • August 5-7 will be offered to tenure-track faculty starting at research-intensive institutions.
  • August 8-10 will be offered to faculty starting a teaching-track job at any school and/or a tenure-track faculty line at a primarily undergraduate serving institution where evaluation is heavily based in teaching.

The workshop will be run by Beth Simon (UCSD), Cynthia Bailey Lee (Stanford), Leo Porter (UCSD), and Mark Guzdial (Georgia Tech).

The first three workshops have been resounding successes, with new faculty from U. Washington, UCSD, University of California-Irvine, U. Colorado-Boulder, and Georgia Tech. Our participants report greater confidence in teaching, with a new set of approaches, tools, and techniques to use in the classroom.

“I found the New Faculty Workshop extremely valuable.  Not only did I receive a bunch of pointers and resources about how to teach large undergraduate classes, I also formed relationships with other starting CS faculty.  I’d highly recommend the New Faculty Workshop for any beginning CS faculty member.”

– Prof. Mary Wooters, Stanford University

“The New Faculty Workshop is a great activity, particularly for either brand new faculty or those who have taught a course once before. It’s a smart way to both get ideas for immediate logistics improvements and on teaching methods to implement down the line.”

– Prof. Tamara Denning, University of Utah

Our Keynote speaker at dinner on August 5 will be Charles Isbell (Georgia Institute of Technology). Keynote speaker at dinner on August 8 is To Be Announced.

We are grateful for our supporters who encourage new computing faculty to attend:

Debra J. Richardson is Professor of Informatics and founding dean of the University of California–Irvine’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS):

“We in the David C. Bren School of Information at Irvine have always taken pride in our innovative teaching and our appreciation for research-based methods. I strongly encourage new faculty to hit the ground running by learning state-of-the-art teaching methods.”

Charles Isbell, Senior Associate Dean, College of Computing, Professor, School of Interactive Computing:

“Georgia Tech has always been at the cutting edge of Computing teaching, from Threads to our Online MS (OMS) degree program. Being an innovative professor in the future means being an innovative teacher, too. I’ll encourage all our new faculty in the College of Computing to attend this workshop, and I recommend it to all new CS faculty.”

To apply for registration, please apply at http://bit.ly/ncsfw2018-research or http://bit.ly/ncsfw2018-teaching. Admission will be based on capacity, grant limitations, fit to the workshop goals, and application order, with a maximum of 40 participants. Apply on or before June 21 to ensure eligibility for workshop hotel accommodation. (We will notify respondents by June 30.)

We look forward to seeing many of our new computing faculty in San Diego!

 

New Computing Faculty Workshops in Summer 2018