Transcript Blah Blah - University of South Florida

A case study
CSE Volunteers: A Service Learning Program to Provide
IT Support to the Hillsborough County School District
Ken Christensen
Dewey Rundus
Graciela Perera
Computer Science and Engineering
University of South Florida
Tampa, FL 33620
{christen, rundus, gpererao}@cse.usf.edu
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Sharon Zulli
Technology Call Center
School District of Hillsborough County
Tampa, FL 33601
[email protected]
SIGCSE 2006 – March 3, 2006
03/01/06
Acknowledgement
The following students are to be thanked for their contributions to
the community through the CSE Volunteers program
• Long Ngo
• Jennifer Gatza
• Kenneth Shelton
• Camilo Brand
• Oscar Melendez
• Priya Pupala
• Naveen Jayachandran
• Saar Carmel
• Bradford Everett
• Alex Pinzon
• David Kuczynski
• Robert Ivey
• Diana Arteaga
• Nguyen Nguyen
• Duong Tien
• Hung Tran
• Abdullah Aldousari
• Anwar Ghadhanfari
• Patrick Hyatt
• Pat Law
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• David Ware
• James Parker
• Scott Grafton
• Kanesh Patel
• Alan Nelson
• Anhtuan Dang
• Brandy N. Hall
• Adrian Orozco
• Thuha Phan
• Jason Chang
• Paola Gonzalez
• Matt Small
• Johnny Nguyen
• Tim Gould
• Jimmy Jean-Louis
• James Wilson
• John Wiggins
• Andy Wells
• Jaromir Rivera
• Alessandro Buchala
• Anthony Mejia
• Johnathon Pavan
• David Dunn
• Brian Norris
• Charles Gossage
• David Montalvo
• William Klerk
• Eliezel Tellado
• Apostle Barboutis
• Melissa Winfield
• Dhaval Patel
• Tani Abraham
• Esteban Francisco
• Amanda Carrel
• Daniel Lopez
• Cesar Baena
Over 7% of our students
Topics
 Introduction
 The school district
 Program description
 Lessons learned
 Related work
 Conclusions
 New since the paper
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Introduction
Service Learning
 Service learning = community service + active learning
 Students put concepts into practice for the service of community
 Students engage their learning process
 Has been applied successfully to many universities
 Duke University 75% of students involved in community service
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Introduction continued
Our motivations
 Opportunity for students to get hands-on experience
 Both hard and soft skills
 Reach out to the community
 It is our responsibility to serve the community
 Become familiar with “in the field” computing technology
 To improve our teaching
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Introduction continued
Who we are
 University of South Florida
 Founded in Tampa in 1956
 Have 11 colleges and schools
 Enrollment of 42,500
 Department of Computer Science and Engineering
 Founded in 1980
 CS and CpE programs are ABET accredited
 Enrollment of 255 BS, 88 MS, and 62 PhD students
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The school district
School District of Hillsborough County (SDHC)
 Nation’s ninth largest school system
 208 schools and centers
 Total annual budget of $2.1 billion
 43,000 workstations, 500 servers, and 3500 switches
 Technical support for all schools is a monumental task
 Over 37,000 calls for assistance made in 2004
 50% of schools have full-time technical support staff
 Initiatives include upgrades and data migrations
 CSE Volunteers serve in schools w/out technology support units
 Or, in schools with otherwise great need for additional tech support
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Program description
CSE Volunteers provide IT support to SDHC schools
 Goals
1) Provide a community service opportunity to our students
2) Give students meaningful real-world CS-related experience
 Requirements
 Be a student in good standing
 Expected time commitment is four hours per week in a semester
 Credit earned
 Earn one hour of independent study credit
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Program description continued
Summary statistics of the volunteers
Fall 2004
Spring 2005
Number of schools
6
9
Number of students
14
20
about 7
14
Women
3
4
Men
11
16
Undergraduate students
11
12
Graduate students
3
1
NA
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Students earning credit
Repeat students
Larger percentage of women
than in the department
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Program description continued
Organization
 Recruiting
 Flyers on bulletin boards
 Emails to students
 Kick-off meeting
 All interested students and SDHC staff
 Outline expectations
 “Sign-up” schools, times, students
 Students are assigned in pairs
 Maintain a website
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Program description continued
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Program description continued
Assignments and tasks
 Starts with first-day orientation at the school
 Introductions to key people
 Overview of “IT landscape”
 General work is “care and feeding” of Windows computers
 Set-up of new machines
 Refurbishments of old machines
 Installation of new software
 Installation of updates
 Trouble tickets with printers, viruses, etc.
 Increasing focus on image servers
 Altiris servers to download images to PCs
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Program description continued
Student performance
 Students establish their own schedules
 If going to miss a week, must email school and us
 Students send status emails every Friday to entire group
 Informal and chatty, but helpful
 We visit students at their schools
 To learn about student performance and school IT needs
 We talk to teachers and tech support staff
 How are our students doing?
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Program description continued
Student comments
“Overall this has been a great learning
experience for Jen and I as we discover where
educational knowledge meets real world
experience. Perhaps most importantly, we have
had the opportunity to work with all kinds of
people with different skill levels,
backgrounds, and personalities.”
- Long and Jen
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Program description continued
Student comments continued
“In the future, along with the usual tech
requests we might tune-up the Clark web
homepage or enable more TVs to become computer
displays.”
- David and Robert
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Program description continued
Student comments continued
“Also we created 10 presentation carts which
each contain a digital camera, a Ken-a-vision
Video Flex (which can be used in conjunction
with LCD to function as an overhead), an LCD
projector, a DVD/VCR player, and a computer.
These machines will be shared among the
teachers and used to help facilitate material
in the classrooms.”
- Kenneth, Camilo, and Oscar
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Lessons learned
Benefits to students
 Opportunity to experience a real IT environment
 Could feel good about contribution made
 Able to add this experience to their resumes
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Lessons learned continued
Benefits to school system
 Improved the school environment
 Freed-up paid staff for other work
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Lessons learned continued
Future directions
 Need a more formal quantitative assessment
 Of both learning and service contribution
 Use surveys?
 Seeking outside financial support to “scale-up”
 Hire a part-time staff or TA
 Support transportation costs
 Purchase IT supplies as needed (e.g., CD-ROM drives)
 Expand complexity and duration of projects
 Explore use of CSE Volunteers as a recruiting/retention tool
 Attract students with a community focus to the major
 Pair-up senior students with “newbie” (freshmen?) students
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Related work
We are not the first to experiment with service learning
 EPICS in Purdue is the “model program”
 Started in 1995 (NSF funded)
 Engineering teams support community needs
 Has been ported to other universities
 Smaller colleges also have service learning and CS
 Franklin and Marshall teach CS1 to prisoners
 Saint Anselm College teach CS application to citizens
 Southwest Missouri State work with social service agencies
 All program have different models for credit and evaluation
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Conclusions
A success in the first year…
 Met goals of providing a service learning experience
 Work was often unchallenging, but was of value to the schools
 Students very happy with response they got (liked feeling wanted)
 Possible future directions in using service learning for
recruitment and retention
 School districts throughput the country are under-resourced
 Thus, this program can probably port very well
 Need funds/time/partners to do the porting
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New since the paper
We now have two more semesters of experience
 Our student numbers…
Fall 2004 Spring 2005
Fall 2005
Spring 2006
Number of schools
6
9
7
10
Number of students
14
20
12
18
Women
3
4
1
3
Men
11
16
11
15
In two years have provided 1.8 person years of service
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New since the paper continued
Seeking new challenges and scalability
 Now have a special focus on East Tampa
 A very poor inner-city neighborhood
• Schools see our volunteers as male role models!
 Actively seeking external funding
 To fund a TA to allow for scale-up
• More volunteers and more schools
 Idea to use CSE Volunteers for recruiting to the profession
 Pairing-up freshmen (non-CSE) with senior CSE students
 Broaden scope beyond just our majors
 Thinking about how to port this to other universities
 Want to experiment with pilot programs elsewhere
 Any interest here?
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