News Archive

Earlier news items

  • May 5, 2023: I was a panelist on the topic of “networked learning” (basically, SPOCs) at the Leveling the Learning Curve event at Columbia University. Lots of great conversations with academic and industry leaders about higher ed, and a chance to articulate ourindustry leaders about higher ed, and a chance to articulate our vision of how digital learning technology can foster mastery learning.

  • May 1, 2023: The final report from our pilot project on mastery learning is available. Our approach combines parameterized randomized question generators (using UIUC’s excellent PrairieLearn authoring system) and a radical approach to flexible deadlines (which we’re developing further in our Flextensions project). A key finding is that while mastery learning benefited all students in CS10, women and minoritized students benefited relatively more, with the performance gap for those students shrinking significantly since adopting our approach.

  • April 1, 2023: Victor Huang and I presented a paper at SIGCSE 2023 on our changes to CS 375, the CS pedagogy course required of all first-time EECS GSIs. From the abstract: “Our view is that there is no meaningful separation between pedagogical and climate skills: rather than `compartmentalizing’ climate into specific workshops or modules of a course, our semester-long required TA preparation course treats classroom climate as a lens through which traditional pedagogical skills are viewed, such as giving presentations that encourage participation, creating equitable assessments, and creating successful student groups by fostering belonging.”

  • January 23, 2023: It’s great to be back at in-person events again, having great discussions about software engineering education at FISEE 2023, where I gave an invited keynote bringing together many of our research efforts over the past few years in teaching both technical and team skills in upper-division project-based software engineering.

  • July 1, 2022: Great article from Inside Higher Ed on how Berkeley Engineering launched three Black college presidents…but also a separate sobering article from Chronicle of Higher Ed profiling five professors of color who left academia because of the poor climate at their institutions.

  • May 24, 2022: The NSF-funded LEAP Alliance is recognized for its efforts to improve diversity & equity in the computing professoriate! Audrey Sillers and I represent Berkeley in this important effort.