Service-learning

Draft

Introduction

“A pedagogical approach grounded in active learning and one that aims to provide students with meaningful learning experiences is service-learning. As explored in [3], service- learning is a high-impact educational practice that provides students direct experiences with discipline specific concepts and with ongoing efforts to analyze and solve problems within the broader community. Pedagogically, service-learning begins with the assumption that experience is the foundation for learning and considers community service as an experiential basis for such learning (Morton and Troppe, 1996)” (Thoms and Erylmaz, 2018:497)

“While often above and beyond the demands of traditional classes, students are challenged with real-world problems and needs and are required to collaborate with classmates and partner organizations. These partnerships often result in rich relationships with community organizations. In reflective essays at the end of the semester, students indicated a strong bond with partners. [..] From the perspective of the computing field, interdisciplinary, service-learning courses present students with a perspective to organizational problem solving that they would rarely, if ever, experience in other courses. More so, many students did not realize the scope of the computing field and how it requires thinking and strategies from numerous disciplines to help solve real-world organizational problems.” (Thoms and Erylmaz, 2018:502)

Software

Any kind of open and flexible platform could be used, e.g. a wiki or a social platform like ELGG.

Bibliography

• Kuh, GD. (2008). High-impact educational practices: What they are, who has access to them, and why they matter. Washington, DC: Association of

American Colleges and Universities.

• Morton, K., Troppe, M. (1996). “From the Margin to the mainstream: Campus

compact's project on integrating service with academic study,” Journal of Business Ethics, 15(1).

• Thoms, B., & Eryilmaz, E. (2018). Social Software Design To Facilitate Service-learning In Interdisciplinary Computer Science Courses. In Proceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education - SIGCSE ’18 (pp. 497–502). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/3159450.3159572 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3159450.3159572

• Thoms, B., Eryilmaz, E. (2014). “How Media Choice Affects Learner Interactions in Distance Learning Classes,” Computers & Education, v75.