Industry Fellows
Bridging the Industry-Academic Divide
Josh Tenenberg
Computing and Software Systems
University of Washington, Tacoma
SIGCSE 2010
SIGCSE 2010
The Industry Fellows
Model
SIGCSE 2010
Outline
• The Video
• What does pairing a teacher and industry
professional enable?
• Impact on students
• Design Principles
SIGCSE 2010
What is enabled?
SIGCSE 2010
Supervised Sandbox:
Requirements interview with
“client”
SIGCSE 2010
“When you talk with clients, you cannot
design ... talking about the design of the
system will lead you to not ask things you
should.”
“No one else will write the requirements.”
“Document everything you talk about with
[the client]”
“What they say and what they want are two
different things.”
SIGCSE 2010
Example Critique
By Jake Knapp, an Interaction Designer at
Google, commenting on a student design
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MywEsEizTg
Impact on students
Indicate how the participation of
the Industry Fellow impacted your:
++
+
0
-
--
6
3
1
0
0
7
1
2
0
0
engagement in the course
5
activities inside and out of
class
learning of the material in this 7
course
2
3
0
0
3
0
0
0
motivation to do coursework
motivation to attend class
SIGCSE 2010
1. “Compared to other courses in the
Institute of Technology at UW Tacoma,
what difference did it make having the
industry fellow as part of the teaching
team?”
2. “How has interaction with the industry
fellow affected the design and execution
of your final project?”
SIGCSE 2010
• Legitimization of the course
“[The industry fellow's] presence helped us to think of our project as serious
work rather than a practice exercise that simply simulated the real work.”
• Connecting classroom to world
“The industry fellow ... helped tie in some of the key concepts that we
would need to learn and be conscious of for work outside of an
academic setting.”
• A higher standard of performance
“The feedback he was able to give us on our milestones was well-grounded, and
the fact that he didn't hold his punches made us more determined to work
hard.”
“I feel that since we were going to be presenting our project to an industry
professional, we wanted to increase the quality of the project.”
• Students value academic and practical knowledge
“Having a representative from the industry provides a much needed alternate
perspective. We have been able to get both the research and
experimentation view alongside the practical hands on perspective.”
SIGCSE 2010
Design Principles
• Working together on curriculum review,
planning and enactment of a course related to
the professional's expertise
• Regular interaction between industry fellow,
students, and teacher during academic term
• Division of labor to exploit what each does best
• Flexible to adapt to different contexts
• Sustainable time commitment for both faculty
member and industry fellow
SIGCSE 2010
Photo references
• Google Kirkland office photo:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/ABPub/20
08/05/05/2004393664.jpg
• UW Tacoma photo:
www.djc.com/special/construct99/10d.jpg
• “Shop” photo:
http://grcimagenet.grc.nasa.gov/grcdigital
images/1998/1998_02798L.JPG
SIGCSE 2010
Thanks to …
• The IF’s: Adam Barker, Jake Knapp, Beth
Whitezel
• Students in TCSS 452, winter 2009 and 2010
and students in TCSS 360 winter 2010
• Orlando Baiocchi, Director of the Institute of
Tech@UWT
• UWT Institute of Technology Advisory Board
• UWT Chancellor’s Fund: for replication and
external eval
SIGCSE 2010
This work is licensed under the Creative
Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No
Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-ncnd/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative
Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300,
San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
SIGCSE 2010
Professional practitioners moonlighting as
part-time teachers
• Assumes the transmission model: domain
knowledge is all that matters
• Discounts educator expertise: pedagogical
knowledge, pedagogical content
knowledge, local knowledge, ...
SIGCSE 2010
Guest speakers from industry
• As above: the transmission model and
discounting educator expertise
• Most practice is tacit, so only a fraction can be
verbalized in a talk
• No feedback to students on their work
• Decontextualized from the classroom: does not
bridge the gap from university to industry
• Little to no understanding of the pragmatics of
specific higher education institutions
SIGCSE 2010
Team teaching
• Discounts professional practitioner
expertise
• Socializes students into a community of
academics
SIGCSE 2010
Student coops/internships
• Assumes the socio-cultural model
• Difficult to instantiate at a number of
institutions
• Experience varies considerably from one
student to next
• Few opportunities to integrate academic
knowledge, including reflection on
experience
SIGCSE 2010
Industry advisory boards
• Industry input is at the wrong “level”:
– On programs as wholes, not individual
courses
– No feedback to students on their work
• Decontextualized from the classroom:
does not bridge the gap from university to
industry
SIGCSE 2010
In a recent large-school study of engineering programs sponsored by the Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the authors propose that professional
practice shoud be at the center of engineering curricula. “[I]f students are to be
prepared to enter new-century engineering, the center of engineering education
should be professional practice, integrating technical knowledge and skills of
practice. ... “faculty need to make clear what expert practice looks like, modeling or
otherwise making visible both thinking and doing.”
Both the National Research Council, in their report How People Learn and the
Carnegie Foundation's Preparation for the Professions Program “stress the need for
... teachers to workwith practicing professionals as they create robust strategies for
teaching and learning in the various professional disciplines“ [8], with similar
sentiments echoed by the National Academy of Engineering.
SIGCSE 2010
Design Brainstorm
SIGCSE 2010
SIGCSE 2010
SIGCSE 2010
Why is Industry Fellows novel?
compared to ...
• Student coops/internships
• Guest speakers from industry
• Professional practitioners moonlighting as
part-time teachers
• Industry advisory boards
SIGCSE 2010
• Student coops/internships
• Guest speakers from industry
• Professional practitioners moonlighting as
part-time teachers
• Industry advisory boards
SIGCSE 2010
Folk pegagogy, not learning research
“[In this model] what is important about
education is the corpus of facts that has been
collected about a particular subject. ... For
learning to occur, knowledge has to enter
learners’ minds, which requires that it be
transmitted from the outside world (e.g. from a
teacher or book). ...”
Bruce Torff, “Tacit Knowledge in Teaching” in Sternberg and
Horvath (eds.) Tacit Knowledge in Professional Practice,
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999.
SIGCSE 2010
Learning research, not folk
pedagogy
“ ‘to learn’ means to participate more successfully in
the collective practices that define particular ways
of knowing as recognized by various communities.”
Hickey and Anderson, “Situative approaches to student assessment”, 2007
“the mastery of knowledge and skill requires
newcomers to move toward full participation in the
sociocultural practices of a community.”
Lave and Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, 1991
SIGCSE 2010
SIGCSE 2010
What are the philosophical assumptions
built into Industry Fellows?
Replaces a transmission model of learning with
a sociocultural model.
SIGCSE 2010
The Transmission model of learning
SIGCSE 2010
The sociocultural model of learning
SIGCSE 2010
Different social and material worlds
SIGCSE 2010
Practitioners and higher-ed faculty
inhabit different worlds
SIGCSE 2010
The Industry Fellows program bridges the gap
SIGCSE 2010