Changing the Online Climate via the Online Students: Effects of Three Curricular Interventions on Online CS Students’ Inclusivity

Abstract

Motivation: Although CS Education researchers and practitioners have found ways to improve CS classroom inclusivity, few researchers have considered inclusivity of online CS education. We are interested in two such improvements in online CS educationbesides being inclusive to each other, online CS students also need to be able to create inclusive technology. Objectives: We have begun developing a new approach that we term "embedded inclusive design" to address both of these goals. The essence of the approach is to integrate elements of inclusive design education into mainstream CS coursework. This paper presents three curricular interventions we have developed in this approach and empirically investigates their efficacy in online CS post-baccalaureate education. Our research questions were: How do these three curricular interventions affect (RQ1) the climate among online CS students and (RQ2) how online CS students honor the diversity of their users in the tech they create?Method: To answer these research questions, we implemented the curricular interventions in four asynchronous online CS classes across two CS courses within Oregon State University's Ecampus and conducted an action research study to investigate the impacts. Results: Online CS students who experienced these interventions reported feeling more included in the major than they had before, reported positive impacts on their team dynamics, increased their interest in accommodating diverse users, and created more inclusive technology designs than they had before. Discussion: These results provide encouraging evidence that embedding elements of inclusive design into mainstream CS coursework, via the interventions presented here, can increase both online CS students' inclusivity toward one another and the inclusivity of the technology these future CS practitioners create.

Intersectionality Goes Analytical: Taming Combinatorial Explosion Through Type Abstraction

“…Some HCI practitioners have also used facet types and values directly as the basis for design heuristics and design examples specialized to one or a few diversity dimensions (e.g., [29,39,45,46]). HCI practitioners can combine such heuristics and design examples as a straightforward union operation of the facet types that define each of the dimensions of interest.…”

“…3. Portions of GenderMag's three personas-Abi (left), Pat (middle), and Tim(right)-as customized by a faculty member who was applying GenderMag to college-level students [39], with each persona's facet value for the GenderMag facet types. (From a type-based perspective, two personas are sufficient to capture the two endpoints of each facet type's range, but more than two personas is useful in emphasizing to other humans the diversity of the target population.…”