With the introduction of AI chatbots and coding assistants, and particularly since the release of ChatGPT in November 2023, there has been significant consideration of the use of Generative AI (GenAI) within education and computing education. Within computing education, considerable attention has focused on the use of GenAI in programming. However, whilst programming is a critical curriculum component, much study of computing at universities and in professional practice also includes writing and secondary research (in the form of essays, reflections, reports, project dissertations, etc). Within the computing education literature, the use of GenAI to support academic writing has been less commonly explored. This paper explores the embedding of GenAI in academic writing for summative assessment in a foundation year of a computing undergraduate programme at a UK university. The approach presented may be extensible and employable in various contexts as a mechanism to encourage students' ethical use of GenAI in academic writing and their appreciation of the related strengths and limitations of this usage.

Across various countries and jurisdictions, we have seen reports of a “graduate skills gap”, with higher-than-desired graduate unemployment and underemployment, as well as reports from employers that there is a mismatch between the competencies desired by employers and those evidenced by graduates. Graduate employment prospects are related to many complex intersecting factors, including human capital, individual attributes, individual career-building behaviours, labour market factors, and social capital. Alongside the graduate skills gap, there are also reports internationally of a “digital skills gap”, with increasing demand for digital skills and a proclaimed shortage of diverse digital skills evidenced by the workforce. These circumstances appear to promote positive employment outcomes for computing graduates. However, there are reports in many jurisdictions, including the UK, of skills-gap-related issues for computing graduates. In response to these concerns, curricula guidance in the computing and engineering disciplines are increasingly promoting competency-based education (CBE) to develop graduates' work readiness better and, hence, reduce the skills gap. Authentic Assessment, i.e. Assessment that addresses important problems or questions that require students to effectively and creatively apply their knowledge and disciplinary and personal skills, mirroring the challenges faced by adults or professionals in the real-world context, has also been advocated to reduce skills gaps between education and professional life. However, the link between CBE and Authentic Assessment in the computing discipline could benefit from further exploration. This paper explores the relationship between CBE and authentic assessment. Based on the guiding research question: “How can authentic assessment be employed to promote competency in computing degree programmes?”, the paper begins by providing theoretical underpinnings in the form of working definitions for competency and authentic assessment and the link between the two. This paper follows a proof-of-concept research approach conducted by evolutionary prototyping to develop a framework for exploring the relationship between authentic assessment and competency. The paper documents the validation of the framework by applying it to examples of practices from UK universities involved in the study. These illustrative examples show the framework in action. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the framework promotes learner competency development by authentic assessment. This approach has implications for enhancing how computing graduates address digital skills gaps and has the potential to be customised and adopted more broadly across STEM disciplines.

Many factors influence computing graduate employment prospects, including human capital, social capital, individual attributes, individual career-building behaviours, perceived employability, and labour market factors. Whilst most computing graduates go on to be beneficially employed, a small minority remain under-employed or unemployed. Computing curricular recommendations increasingly advocate a competency-based approach to bolster graduates' perceived employability. Hence, the discipline is evolving to incorporate competency-based approaches. However, competency-based can mean any of three different types of competency: technical, personal and professional. Technical Competency is the ability to apply acquired content knowledge and skills to develop solutions to unseen problems. Personal Competency is the personal behaviours and interpersonal skills required for success in the modern workplace. Professional Competency is Technical and Personal combined and applied in a real-world context. This position paper provides illustrative examples of how to embed all three kinds of Competency. Based on examples from representative undergraduate computing programmes at UK universities, it provides examples of embedding each kind of competency: Technical Competency (teaching programming through craft computing and approaches for developing cybersecurity competency), Personal Competency (teaching teamwork through project-based learning and creativity via problem-based learning), and Professional Competency (developing work-ready competency using industrial placements, and co-design/co-delivery with industry via degree apprenticeships), providing a valuable foundation and framing for portability and extension in other institutions and jurisdictions. Furthermore, these distinctive types of competency form a helpful taxonomy when considering how to embed competency in computing courses and are candidates for inclusion within future computing curricula guidelines.

Finding professional employment continues to challenge a minority of computing graduates, with graduate unemployment and underemployment being higher than ideal in many jurisdictions worldwide. Exploring the viewpoints of recently appointed Computing Graduates and their Employers is the focus of a UK Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) Collaborative Enhancement project, in which seven UK Universities are employing workshops with graduates and employers to explore the idealised learner-earner journey. This poster presents preliminary findings from one university, providing insights into effective current practices, challenges, and opportunities for improvement. The insights emerging from this study can help inform future sector practice.

The ITiCSE '23 final keynote raised teaching soft skills, or professional dispositions, to help students face challenges in modern programming. This project addresses helping computing students develop professional dispositions through collaborative learning (CL) since some in the industry observe entry-level engineers struggling due to their fragile professional dispositions. We are motivated to understand professional expectations from entry-level engineers and present the academia-industry gap to support practitioners and researchers in advancing CL in Computing Education, encouraging positive curricula and policy changes that promote DEIA. We will present CL practices alongside their supported professional dispositions to assist practitioners in adoption. We will present the academia-industry gap in CL for future research opportunities, helping researchers advance CL practices to integrate professional dispositions the industry expects from entry-level engineers.

Competency-based education is the recommended paradigm of the ACM/IEEE-CS Computing Curricula 2020 (CC2020) and the Computer Science Curricula 2023 (CS2023) guidelines. Learners apply knowledge, dispositions and skills in a task context as an integral part of their studies is the competency model advocated. While it would be highly unusual to deliver computing-related degree programmes without considering programming in some manner, competency in programming extends beyond simply writing code; indeed, teaching programming is more akin to teaching craft skills than a traditional academic discipline.

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.

Both the Computing Curricula 2020 (CC2020) and emerging Computer Science Curricula 2023 (CS2023) guidelines indicate a shift towards competency-based education, where learners apply their knowledge, dispositions and skills in tasks as part of their studies. This approach aims to further enhance graduates’ work-readiness and tackle global issues of unemployment and underemployment among computing graduates. Peer assessment is increasingly used in team software engineering and capstone projects to ensure fair recognition of individual contributions. As competency-based learning becomes more prevalent, peer assessment needs to not only consider project outcomes, but also aspects of knowledge, dispositions and skills. This poster presents preliminary work on how one UK university’s computer science undergraduate degree employs the Team-Q metric to address this challenge.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced extensive experimentation in how education has been – and may be – delivered worldwide. The increasing use of and dependency on educational technology for diverse aspects of learning, teaching and assessment has been felt across all disciplines, including computing. Similarly, we have seen an explosion in the use and application of AI tools in education, potentially being as significant a disruptor and a catalyst for change as the pandemic itself. This single UK institutional pilot study critically explores how technology may be employed to support computing students in the face of this emerging ongoing disruption.

Computing comprises a broad spectrum of subjects and specialisms, with a rich variety of undergraduate courses (including Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Cybersecurity, Information Systems, Information Technology and Software Engineering) offered by universities worldwide. This breadth presents challenges for employers considering employing computing graduates and hence desiring to know both the topics studied and the skills/competencies accumulated by graduates to be able to make appropriate job offers. Small to medium enterprises (SMEs) may not have the resources to provide graduate training programmes, and therefore need ‘work-ready’ graduates. This paper explores and evaluates the feasibility of benchmarking students’ achievements against an industry-led skills framework, Skills for the Information Age (SFIA), to distinguish between what graduates know, have done or are competent in. The approach taken was evolutionary prototyping, informed by expert review. The work generated an accreditation standard that could be implemented or used as a model to enhance an existing accreditation standard. In contrast to academic approaches to competency-based education, or abstract notions of generic skills, this work focused on defining an output standard expressed in terms of employer needs and expectations captured in the SFIA skills framework. We show how a course meeting the proposed standard would satisfy the UK benchmarks for an undergraduate computing degree. By badging SFIA knowledge and competencies, such a course would enhance its learning outcomes, offering clarity for employers and career benefits to students.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused both significant disruption and catalysed extensive experimentation in how education has been and may be delivered worldwide. The discipline of computing has been part of this experimentation, and significant innovations have been implemented and disseminated. Furthermore, educational provision and learner expectations may have evolved in response to the experiences during the pandemic; whilst still subject to disruption, higher education in many jurisdictions is still returning to a new (ab)normal. In the UK, whilst there has been a return to traditional face-to-face delivery, one estimate suggests that nearly a third of courses continue to involve some hybrid learning as opposed to about 5% before the pandemic. Learners' preferences for delivery approach remains critical and has been explored in previous work predominately by survey-based approach. This single UK institutional case study explores learner preferences by using workshops (N=45 students across ten workshops) which aspires to co-create an understanding of issues and benefits of the learning, teaching and assessment approaches adopted in the pandemic and identify preferences for future directions. The workshops employed the sailboat retrospective template; they suggest that the preferences are varied but commonly include some face-to-face study and that digital exclusion, social engagement, and motivation/distraction are vital factors to be addressed for further adoption of hybrid or online learning.

Program accreditation in medical or religious professions has existed since the 1800s while accreditation of business and engineering programs started in the early twentieth century. With this long history, these disciplines have focused on ensuring the competence of their graduates, as modern society demands appropriate expertise from doctors and engineers before letting them practice their profession. In computing, however, professional accreditation started in the last decades of the twentieth century only after computer science, informatics, and information systems programs became widespread. At the same time, although competency-based learning has existed for centuries, its growth in computing is relatively new, resulting from recent curricular reports such as Computing Curricula 2020, which have defined competency comprising knowledge, skills, and dispositions. In addition, demands are being placed on university programs to ensure their graduates are ready to enter and sustain employment in the computing profession. This work explores the role of accreditation in forming and developing professional competency in non-computing disciplines worldwide, building on this understanding to see how computing accreditation bodies could play a similar role in computing. This work explores the role of accreditation in forming and developing professional competency in non-computing disciplines worldwide, building on this understanding to see how computing accreditation bodies could play a similar role in computing. Its recommendations are to incorporate competencies in all computing programs and future curricular guidelines; create competency-based models for computing programs; involve industry in identifying workplace competencies, and ensure accreditation bodies include competencies and the assessment in their standards.

In the UK, a thriving computer science education community of practice is emerging, supported by national and international professional body/learned society specialist interest groups, and being developed through relevant research and practice conferences. A key group within this emerging community of practice are early career academics who are required to overcome significant obstacles in the early stages of their academic career, from developing an independent research career, delivering high quality learning and teaching, continuing their own professional development, alongside wider academic service commitments. Institutional-level, but generally subject-agnostic, support for early career colleagues in the UK is supplemented by nationwide developmental sessions and initiatives such as journal clubs. This poster reports on a developing pilot scheme to support early career CS academics through cross-institutional mentoring from experienced academics, as well as buddying groups of similar career stage colleagues.

Professional accreditation in medicine and religious organizations started in the 1800s; business and engineering followed in the early 1900s. Program accreditation in computing commenced in the 1980s after computer science, informatics, and information systems programs had become widespread. In 2008, accrediting bodies in eight countries signed the Seoul Accord to set up mutual recognition of professional computing degrees. Although competency-based learning has existed for centuries, it has only made headway in computing in the last dozen years. Computing Curricula 2020 defined competency as the amalgamation of knowledge, skills, and dispositions. This working group report examines professional accreditation in computing, exploring aspects of professional accreditation criteria that support competency-based learning. The report will help educators understand professional accreditation and competency-based learning worldwide. Finally, it will also guide future efforts contributing to competency-based accreditation.

Team-based software development projects where teams of learners design and develop software artefacts are common in computing-related degree programmes in the UK and other jurisdictions. Peer assessment is a commonly used approach to ensure learners are fairly recognised and rewarded for their contributions to such projects. This poster presents a preliminary study analysing the relationship between peer marking using the Team-Q rubric and peer feedback from one cohort using open coding and sentiment analysis. The preliminary results from a UK institutional study (N=124) illustrate how learner behaviours within teams appear to impact upon peer scores and the sentiment and intensity of emotion expressed in peer feedback. Additionally, the results provide valuable insights into common behaviours within teams. Given the prominence of team projects in computing curricula, the insights offered from this UK institutional study can shape and inform future learning, teaching and assessment practice.

This paper presents the findings from a research project exploring the impact of learner resilience as part of the shift to online delivery of learning, teaching and assessment amidst national "lockdown" measures as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This exploration of resilience was undertaken as part of the delivery of a first-year undergraduate computer science degree programme in a UK higher education institution over two academic years. Resilience was measured by the Nicholson McBride Resilience Questionnaire (NMRQ). The responses from the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 student cohorts (N=214) illustrate that overall learner resilience as measured by NMRQ does not appear to have had a significant impact upon learner success as measured by the mean overall first-year performance. This is an outcome that differs from previous work and may be a consequence of the disruptive (and ongoing) circumstances arising from the pandemic. However, this work identifies that the factor "I try to control events rather than being a victim of my circumstances" appears to promote success and the factor "I trust my intuition" may have been slightly detrimental to overall success. As we start to consider the post-pandemic new (ab)normal, learners will continue to face significant personal challenges that will impact upon their engagement with their studies and their performance and progression; thus the insights offered from this UK university study can help to inform emerging academic and pastoral practice for undergraduate computer science education.

The early career of a computer science academic in the United Kingdom (UK) – as with most other disciplines – is challenging in terms of balancing research aspirations, learning and teaching responsibilities, wider academic service commitments, as well as their own professional development. In terms of learning and teaching development, this commonly involves working towards Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (now known as Advance HE), either by direct application or via successful completion of an accredited institutional taught postgraduate course. Typically, if a course is required (often as part of their academic probation), the focus will be general higher education learning and teaching pedagogy rather than specifically focused on computer science and cognate areas. The formal institutional course requirements are normally supplemented by mentoring from within their department from experienced academic colleagues. Thus, the quality of development for an early-career academic will be enhanced in part by the strength of the community of practice operating within the department and the communities of practice that exist at a national and international level, often through professional bodies, learned societies and sub-disciplinary groupings. This paper presents the work-in-progress to address some of these structural, cultural and community challenges at both the institutional and national level in the UK, based on empirical themes collected from a workshop held at UKICER’20. We identify a number of specific actions and recommendations to supplement the current formal institutional requirements with enhanced national-level academic practice support and professional development, alongside local and regional professional mentoring.

This poster presents the preliminary findings from a research project exploring the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on learner resilience from the shift to online delivery of learning and teaching amidst national social "lockdown" measures. This exploration of resilience was undertaken as part of the delivery of the first-year undergraduate computer science degree programme in a UK university. Resilience was measured by the Nicholson McBride Resilience Questionnaire (NMRQ) and three open-ended questions exploring what has supported their study most during the COVID-19 pandemic, what had been the greatest challenge, and how that challenge was resolved. The preliminary results of this survey (N=103) illustrate how learner responses differed to the delivery depending upon their measured resilience level. Additionally, the results provide valuable insight into learners' perceptions of the challenges of online learning, teaching and assessment. Given the continued impact on educational settings from COVID-19, online/blended learning is likely to remain a significant feature of future delivery; hence the insights offered from this UK institutional study can inform future sector practice.

This paper discusses an enhancement project completed at two Universities in the United Kingdom (UK). It is an example of contributing student pedagogy [9], exploring why whilst teamworking is valued by employers, its inclusion is less well received by learners themselves [2, 14, 25]. The work began as part of the Cardiff University Student Education Innovation Projects (CUSEIP) Scheme which provides opportunities for staff and placement students to work collaboratively on learning and teaching projects. The work explores learners’ perceptions and experiences of teamworking before and as part of taught courses which are then intercalated into an evolving set of guidelines and used to inform further enhancements. The original guidelines were developed by the CUSEIP student. The approach and outcomes will be of interest to others engaged in the delivery and enhancement of student teamwork within computing related programmes and potentially other disciplines.