Learning opportunity to expand technical skills from the classroom to the real world
This course combines real world experience with a process and methodology resulting in analytical and communication skills. The instructor evaluates your ability to analyze and make meaningful connections between what is taking place in your consulting partnership and what is being taught in class. This evaluation consists primarily of reading reports that you write. In these reports, you provide your analysis and best thinking on the situation. At the end of the class, you will analyze the outcomes accomplished by your Community Partner and make a set of useful recommendations intended to help sustain and improve their efforts.
Service opportunity to work with non-profit organizations, schools, government agencies, and minority-owned businesses in the Pittsburgh region
Small organizations often underinvest in technology. Those without resources, learn as they go. A testament to the process of learning and the power of technology is that many of these centers are accomplishing a lot with a little. Still, the gaps in knowledge and the resulting problems hold these organizations back from exploiting the full power that technology holds for them.
Mentorship opportunity from current and former senior managers
The course’s professional mentors are current or retired senior professionals with extensive careers in fields that provide them with a comprehensive understanding of the impact that technology can have on organizations, staff, and business processes. Their experience renders them very effective in helping students connect their consulting tasks with the organizational "big picture"--the mission of the organization and how technology can enable the organization to carryout its mission.
Consulting opportunity to add experience to your resume and to feature in employment interviews
Individuals who understand the significance of software systems within complex social environments rise to leadership positions. Such an understanding results largely from experiences in which their computer science, information systems, and information technology knowledge is brought to people and organizations. Out of these experiences, these individuals develop their ability to solve problems, analyze complex situations, manage projects and communicate effectively to diverse audiences. This course gives you such an experience.
In more detail, the student learning goals of the course are to:
- Lead a Diverse Working Team
Students seldom get a chance to lead a working team, let alone one that involves anyone other than students. Similarly, “work in interdisciplinary teams” is an oft-stated general education goal, but in practice this most often is reduced to teams of students with different majors. Upon graduation, these students will likely be working in teams that cross many differences, including age, race, gender, language, and technical expertise to name a few.
TCinC has students lead a diverse team of non-technical (and sometimes technical) professionals of diverse backgrounds and experience. With the student, the team always includes someone in a leadership position in the client organization, and often includes additional management and staff. - Assess a Complex Technical Environment
A second challenge students seldom get is the chance to experience how to implement a technical system in an authentic organization. Technical systems live (or die) within social systems. Users needs change with time; companies release new software updates regularly; new hardware is purchased every few years. It is impossible to create a robust system that takes all potential social changes into account. Rather, computing professionals need to understand and account for the social systems in which the technical systems are embedded.
Furthermore, the value of technology is not intrinsic, but is derived from its ability to solve individual, organizational, or societal problems. - Structure a Complex Problem
A third useful challenge for students is to learn from having to wrestle with ambiguity and complexity while structuring an otherwise unstructured problem. All instructors know that problems outside the classroom tend to not be as tidy as those we use for homework assignments.
Students in TCinC do not receive a clear problem statement, because the client often does not have one. Rather, the student consultant has the interesting task of working with their client to investigate problems in the organization, decide which of those problems are important to solve, and what alternatives exist to solve them. - Communicate Professionally
- Use Writing Skills to Maintain Working Documents that Describe, Plan, Persuade, and Coordinate Work With Others
TCinC is a very writing intensive course, but it is writing for which we provide clear guidelines and examples. For students who prefer coding over writing, we joke that TCinC is not a writing course, it is a programming course in which the programming language is English. We model in the class that the same writing can be used for multiple purposes:
- To help the writer clearly understand their own reasoning.
- To allow the client to validate or correct the consultant’s understanding.
- To share thinking and coordinate the work of the project team.
- To inform stakeholders of the progress of a project.
- To provide an archival record for others to refer to in similar situations. - Communicate Technical Ideas to a Non-Technical Audience
Another aspect of communicating professionally is to be able to communicate technical ideas to a non-technical audience. Students are immersed in a sea of technical terms, and may have been their whole lives, so that they might fail to realize that those who are not so immersed may have no idea what they are talking about. Most students have not stopped to think that “semaphore” and “daisy chain” are only metaphors taken from the physical world, and that others may not understand the association. - Document Outcomes Objectively
The final communication challenge for students it to learn to document outcomes clearly and objectively.
- Use Writing Skills to Maintain Working Documents that Describe, Plan, Persuade, and Coordinate Work With Others
More information about the learning goals of TCinC can be found in:
Joseph Mertz and Scott McElfresh. 2010. Teaching communication, leadership, and the social context of computing via a consulting course. In Proceedings of the 41st ACM technical symposium on Computer science education (SIGCSE '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 77-81. DOI=10.1145/1734263.1734291 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1734263.1734291