The purpose of the Radgrad Project can be best summarized by looking at the following goals:
To achieve these goals the Radgrad project implements the degree perspective. The degree perspective focuses on giving a first class status to both courses and extracurricular activities.
In order to implement this perspective Radgrad is based on two educational studies: Individualized Learning Plans (ILP) and Communities of Practice (CoP).
ILP can be summarized as basically students selecting their extracurricular activities based on their interests.
CoP can be summarized as joining relevant activities or clubs associated with your interest.
The implementation of ILP can be seen in the Interests, Careers, Courses, and Opportunities pages. These pages allow the student to add interests, careers, courses, and opportunities that they may like into their profile. Not only are students able to add these items to their profile, but they are also able to add these items to a planner to plan their degree path.
The implementation of CoP can also be viewed in the Interests, Careers, Courses, and Opportunities pages. When students view a career or course they are interested in it allows them to see other students who are interested in said topic, thus contributing to a sense of community. This implementation helps to address the diversity issue by promoting a sense of community for students (i.e. it may allow some students to feel more secure by seeing that their peers are interested in the same interest or course).
Another way Radgrad implements the degree perspective is through ICE. ICE stands for Innovation, Competency, and Experience; it is a point system which awards students points for not only completing courses but also extracurricular.
The ICE point system helps to achieve the goal of retention. It does this by giving the student another metric to measure their success by instead of just GPA. Personally, for me I like the idea that I can get a C in one of my courses without it being a huge impact on my academic career. ICE enables me to see value in more than just general CS classes.
Although RadGrad excels at many of its goals I think it lacks in their diversity goal.
Getting underrepresented groups such as women or minorities to pursue and stick with the CS path is a hard goal to achieve for various reasons. As mentioned in Removing the ‘Extra’ from Extracurricular to Improve Student Engagement, Retention, and Diversity, the lack of diversity is often stemmed from various places such as the fact that “… female students are less likely than male students to be told they would be good at computer science”.
One of things I struggled with as a female pursuing the CS field is the lack of female representation, specifically the amount of female professors available for various courses. Unfortunately there isn’t a easy solution for this, but I think that maybe if RadGrad2 could poll female students about their feelings on computer science courses (specifically if they would prefer to have more courses taught by females) then maybe it could help bring the problem to light.
I think it would be a great idea to aim the pilot study at different demographics for example:
The first study could target students/people who have just graduated. The question(s) could be something like this:
Then the study could target the freshmen and sophomores of the CS program. The questions could be something like: