Redesigning a Computer Science Capstone Course with Micro-credentials

Abstract

This Innovate Practice work-in-progress paper investigates micro-credentials as an approach to redesign a course taught by several different instructors in our department. The course involved in this research is a 100-level Computer Science capstone course in Python programming language. This course is mainly designed for freshmen in Computer Science major, but is also available to all the students in other majors. Because of the increasing number of students who are interested in learning programming, the department has to provide at least half a dozen of sessions each semester. Those sessions are usually taught by several faculty members, and in our case, the department has no guidelines on the course design other than a set of student learning outcomes. The instructors of each session can make course design decisions by themselves, including the textbook to use, the material to cover, etc. In this project, we present a course design methodology based on a common set of micro-credentials for this course. Micro-credentials are a set of academic competencies which the instructors expect the students to develop in the course. This paper presents one instructor’s course evaluation and redesigning process, showing micro-credentials can help instructors identify the topics which are not covered sufficiently. The process presented in this project could also be used to align the course designs of different instructors on the same course.