Tag Archives: Alan Hayes

Join us on Monday 4th September at 2pm BST to discuss microcredentials in Higher Education

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Microcredentials are mini-qualifications that allow learners to provide evidence of their broader skills alongside their traditional academic awards. How can these awards be integrated into existing educational qualifications? Join us on Monday 4th September at 2pm BST (UTC+1) to discuss a paper on this topic by Rupert Ward, Tom Crick, James H. Davenport, Paul Hanna, Alan Hayes, Alastair Irons, Keith Miller, Faron Moller, Tom Prickett and Julie Walters. From the abstract:

Employers are increasingly selecting and developing employees based on skills rather than qualifications. Governments now have a growing focus on skilling, reskilling and upskilling the workforce through skills-based development rather than qualifications as a way of improving productivity. Both these changes are leading to a much stronger interest in digital badging and micro-credentialing that enables a more granular, skills-based development of learner-earners. This paper explores the use of an online skills profiling tool that can be used by designers, educators, researchers, employers and governments to understand how badges and micro-credentials can be incorporated within existing qualifications and how skills developed within learning can be compared and aligned to those sought in job roles. This work, and lessons learnt from the case study examples of computing-related degree programmes in the UK, also highlights exciting opportunities for educational providers to develop and accommodate personalised learning into existing formal education structures across a range of settings and contexts.

We’ll be joined by Rupert Ward and some of the other co-authors of the paper who will give a five-minute lightning talk to kick-off our discussion. All welcome, as usual we’ll be meeting on Zoom, details at  sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us. 

References

  1. Ward, Rupert; Crick, Tom; Davenport, James H.; Hanna, Paul; Hayes, Alan; Irons, Alastair; Miller, Keith; Moller, Faron; Prickett, Tom; Walters, Julie (2023). “Using Skills Profiling to Enable Badges and Micro-Credentials to be Incorporated into Higher Education Courses”. Journal of Interactive Media in Education. Ubiquity Press, Ltd. 2023 (1). DOI:10.5334/jime.807

Join us to discuss graduate skills for Computer Science students on Monday 3rd October at 2pm BST

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What do employers want from Computer Science students and how good are Universities in producing graduates with what employers need? Join us to discuss via a paper by Roseanne English and Alan Hayes from UKICER 2022. [1] From the abstract:

In preparing computing science students for industry, degree content often focuses on technical skills such as programming. Such skills are essential for a successful post-study career in industry and is popular with students. However, industry notes that students are often limited in what can be referred to as graduate attributes or transferable skills. Such skills include effective teamwork, communication, and critical thinking amongst others. Similar gaps have also been demonstrated for computing science students more specifically, resulting in industry developing their own training programmes for graduates. To address this issue, graduate attributes could be incorporated more readily into computing curricula. Within the UK this is discussed in accreditation requirements as well as higher education frameworks. However, research which aims to explore how to achieve this is still comparatively limited. Building on existing work in this area, this paper presents a thematic analysis of graduate attributes at Russell Group Universities in the UK to identify the most common attribute themes, and uses the most frequent themes to begin to consider how these could be more readily embedded in CS curricula.

All welcome, as usual we’ll be meeting on zoom, details at sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us

References

  1. Rosanne English and Alan Hayes (2022) Towards Integrated Graduate Skills for UK Computing Science Students in UKICER ’22: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on United Kingdom & Ireland Computing Education Research Pages 1–7 DOI:10.1145/3555009.3555018 (free version via https://pureportal.strath.ac.uk… )