SIGCSE 2010

Industry Fellows

Bridging the Industry-Academic Divide
Josh Tenenberg
Computing and Software Systems
University of Washington, Tacoma
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The Industry Fellows
Model
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Outline
The Video
What does pairing a teacher and industry
professional enable?
Impact on students
Design Principles
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What is enabled?
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Supervised Sandbox:
Requirements interview with
client
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When you talk with clients, you cannot
design ... talking about the design of the
system will lead you to not ask things you
should.
No one else will write the requirements.
Document everything you talk about with
[the client]
What they say and what they want are two
different things.
Example Critique
By Jake Knapp, an Interaction Designer at
Google, commenting on a student design

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MywEsEizTg
Impact on students
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Indicate how the participation of
the Industry Fellow impacted your:
++ + 0 - --
motivation to do coursework
6 3 1 0 0
motivation to attend class
7 1 2 0 0
engagement in the course
activities inside and out of
class
5 2 3 0 0
learning of the material in this
course
7 3 0 0 0
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1. Compared to other courses in the
Institute of Technology at UW Tacoma,
what difference did it make having the
industry fellow as part of the teaching
team?
2. How has interaction with the industry
fellow affected the design and execution
of your final project?
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Legitimization of the course
[The industry fellow's] presence helped us to think of our project as serious
work rather than a practice exercise that simply simulated the real work.
Connecting classroom to world
The industry fellow ... helped tie in some of the key concepts that we
would need to learn and be conscious of for work outside of an
academic setting.
A higher standard of performance
The feedback he was able to give us on our milestones was well-grounded, and
the fact that he didn't hold his punches made us more determined to work
hard.
I feel that since we were going to be presenting our project to an industry
professional, we wanted to increase the quality of the project.
Students value academic and practical knowledge
Having a representative from the industry provides a much needed alternate
perspective. We have been able to get both the research and
experimentation view alongside the practical hands on perspective.
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Design Principles
Working together on curriculum review,
planning and enactment of a course related to
the professional's expertise
Regular interaction between industry fellow,
students, and teacher during academic term
Division of labor to exploit what each does best
Flexible to adapt to different contexts
Sustainable time commitment for both faculty
member and industry fellow
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Photo references
Google Kirkland office photo:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/ABPub/20
08/05/05/2004393664.jpg
UW Tacoma photo:
www.djc.com/special/construct99/10d.jpg
Shop photo:
http://grcimagenet.grc.nasa.gov/grcdigital
images/1998/1998_02798L.JPG

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Thanks to
The IFs: Adam Barker, Jake Knapp, Beth
Whitezel
Students in TCSS 452, winter 2009 and 2010
and students in TCSS 360 winter 2010
Orlando Baiocchi, Director of the Institute of
Tech@UWT
UWT Institute of Technology Advisory Board
UWT Chancellors Fund: for replication and
external eval
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This work is licensed under the Creative
Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No
Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-
nd/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative
Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300,
San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
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Professional practitioners moonlighting as
part-time teachers
Assumes the transmission model: domain
knowledge is all that matters
Discounts educator expertise: pedagogical
knowledge, pedagogical content
knowledge, local knowledge, ...
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Guest speakers from industry
As above: the transmission model and
discounting educator expertise
Most practice is tacit, so only a fraction can be
verbalized in a talk
No feedback to students on their work
Decontextualized from the classroom: does not
bridge the gap from university to industry
Little to no understanding of the pragmatics of
specific higher education institutions
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Team teaching
Discounts professional practitioner
expertise
Socializes students into a community of
academics
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Student coops/internships
Assumes the socio-cultural model
Difficult to instantiate at a number of
institutions
Experience varies considerably from one
student to next
Few opportunities to integrate academic
knowledge, including reflection on
experience
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Industry advisory boards
Industry input is at the wrong level:
On programs as wholes, not individual
courses
No feedback to students on their work
Decontextualized from the classroom:
does not bridge the gap from university to
industry
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In a recent large-school study of engineering programs sponsored by the Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the authors propose that professional
practice shoud be at the center of engineering curricula. [I]f students are to be
prepared to enter new-century engineering, the center of engineering education
should be professional practice, integrating technical knowledge and skills of
practice. ... faculty need to make clear what expert practice looks like, modeling or
otherwise making visible both thinking and doing.
Both the National Research Council, in their report How People Learn and the
Carnegie Foundation's Preparation for the Professions Program stress the need for
... teachers to workwith practicing professionals as they create robust strategies for
teaching and learning in the various professional disciplines [8], with similar
sentiments echoed by the National Academy of Engineering.
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Design Brainstorm
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Why is Industry Fellows novel?
compared to ...
Student coops/internships
Guest speakers from industry
Professional practitioners moonlighting as
part-time teachers
Industry advisory boards
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Student coops/internships
Guest speakers from industry
Professional practitioners moonlighting as
part-time teachers
Industry advisory boards

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[In this model] what is important about
education is the corpus of facts that has been
collected about a particular subject. ... For
learning to occur, knowledge has to enter
learners minds, which requires that it be
transmitted from the outside world (e.g. from a
teacher or book). ...
Bruce Torff, Tacit Knowledge in Teaching in Sternberg and
Horvath (eds.) Tacit Knowledge in Professional Practice,
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999.
Folk pegagogy, not learning research
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Learning research, not folk
pedagogy
to learn means to participate more successfully in
the collective practices that define particular ways
of knowing as recognized by various communities.
Hickey and Anderson, Situative approaches to student assessment, 2007
the mastery of knowledge and skill requires
newcomers to move toward full participation in the
sociocultural practices of a community.
Lave and Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, 1991

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What are the philosophical assumptions
built into Industry Fellows?
Replaces a transmission model of learning with
a sociocultural model.
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The Transmission model of learning
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The sociocultural model of learning
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Different social and material worlds
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Practitioners and higher-ed faculty
inhabit different worlds
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The Industry Fellows program bridges the gap