Department-wide Multi-semester Community Engaged Learning Initiative to Overcome Common Barriers to Service-Learning Implementation

Service learning in a Computer Science (CS) setting typically involves students applying their expertise on a project for a community partner. These unique learning opportunities are known to be highly beneficial to students. However, a number of significant barriers exist which prevent wide-spread implementation of service learning in undergraduate CS curricula. We identified three as primary barriers for us: classroom time limitations, project skills alignment, and partnership development.

To overcome these barriers, we created a department-wide multi-semester community engaged learning initiative which integrates service learning throughout our curricula. With a commitment from ALL of our CS faculty to engage in service learning for a two-year timeframe, we chose a collaborative theme and started holding department-wide events that encouraged faculty and students to reflect on the common issue. These events reduce the classroom time burden of service-learning projects while maintaining the best practice of reflection. Additionally, the department-wide commitment allows for projects to travel amongst courses to align course SLOs to project requirements (e.g. a Database course passing a design to the Software Engineering (SE) course) and across semesters (e.g. from a spring SE course to a fall SE course) addressing the issues of mismatched skills and scope. Furthermore, maintaining partnerships became a united effort rather than the sole responsibility of an individual.

The initial results of this experiment are exciting. The enthusiasm from our students indicate that our proposed model can be a successful approach to ensuring that all students can be exposed to multiple meaningful community engaged learning opportunities.