Background

A number of factors, including sector expansion and competition, increasing student numbers and audit requirements, and development of managerial policies, have led universities worldwide to hire increasing numbers of teaching-focused academics ^{7, 12, 13} . Also known as education-focused, teaching-track, teaching intensive or teaching only, their role includes primarily or solely teaching ^{2, 12} . This distinguishes them from traditional academic profiles.

The above, together with an interest in education/pedagogy, lead some teaching-focused academics to going into educational/pedagogic research. However, such a decision can pose challenges, like retraining from other domains of study ³ and fitting research within an already high workload ^{7, 15} , coupled with little funding for such research from universities ¹⁵ and its under-appreciation ^{8, 15} .

To the authors' knowledge, none of the above topics have been explored in the specific context of teaching-focused academics in Computer Science (CS) going into Computer Science Education (CSEd) research. Panels in the ACM Technical Symposium on CSEd have discussed various topics related to CS teaching-focused academics, including promotion ¹ , but their conclusions were not (and are not usually) published. Some challenges in conducting research have been highlighted for UK early-career CS academics ⁴ , and a small study with teaching and research-focused academics in the United States identified obstacles to conducting CSEd research, notably related to promotion due to institution unfamiliarity with CSEd and inconsistent publication type expectations ¹¹ . However, none of these focused on the particular needs of teaching-focused academics and their promotion. CSEd itself is a relatively young field, e.g., the SIGCSE Technical Symposium has only existed for 50 years ^{6, 9} . The authors are consulted on promotion cases for CS teaching-focused academics in their departments, and some have experienced a slow start in launching CSEd research groups due to the challenges perceived by teaching-focused academics. Moreover, our previous work ¹⁰ has discussed general difficulties in publishing in CSEd, and it would be interesting to study how these resonate with teaching-focused academics.

Research Questions

• RQ1: What are the promotion requirements for CS teaching-focused academics across and between universities, how well do they map T&L professional body requirements, and how is CSEd research considered within them?
• RQ2: What are the barriers to going into CSEd research for CS teaching-focused academics?
• RQ3: How do institutions support CS teaching-focused academics with promotion and in going into CSEd research?

Project Outline

The first goal of this RIPPA is to study the variety of promotion requirements for teaching-focused CS roles, and whether/how educational/pedagogic research is considered in them. Comparison of promotion requirements with requirements from teaching and learning (T&L) professional bodies (e.g., Advance HE in the UK) will help gauge whether promotion meets national teaching quality expectations. A second goal is to explore the barriers that CS teaching-focused academics face when going from a different CS domain into CSEd research, and compare them with our findings from previous work ¹⁰ . Finally, this RIPPA will review CS institution support for both promotion and going into CSEd research. The ultimate aim is to provide recommendations to CS institutions and CS teaching-focused academics towards providing/seeking fairer promotion and improved research support.

The methodology we propose to use is as follows:

1. A survey and interviews with higher education CS teaching-focused academics in a variety of career stages (RQ1, 2, 3).
2. Gathering: a) promotion requirements from their institutions and b) requirements from T&L professional bodies; Extracting mentions of research from promotion requirements; Comparing promotion requirements with each other as well as with professional body requirements; (RQ1)
3. Developing recommendations for HE institutions and CS teaching-focused academics towards better providing/seeking support on promotion and going into CSEd research.

Participants will be involved in the following activities:

• Gathering and comparing CS teaching-focused promotion criteria from their university
• Comparing it with requirements from professional bodies
• Helping design the survey and interviews for RQ1 - 3
• Getting ethical approval to run studies locally
• Distributing survey within their home university
• Assisting with interviews by taking leadership at a university
• Analysing the collected quantitative and qualitative data
• Developing recommendations for institutions and CS teaching-focused academics

Team

• Cristina Alexandru (Organiser)
• Duncan Hull (Organiser)
• Martin Goodfellow (Organiser)