Paper at CEP’19: “The Institute of Coding: Addressing the UK Digital Skills Crisis”

Today, colleagues from the University of Bath will be presenting our joint paper at the ACM Computing Education Practice Conference (CEP’19), introducing the Institute of Coding — a significant national initiative launched in 2018, bringing together higher education and industry to address some of the challenges surrounding developing a resilient pipeline of digital skills. This paper presents the Institute, its university and industry partners, as well as its priority themes and activities; it also relates to some of our previous work on introductory programming in computer science degree programmes. If you are attending CEP2019 at Durham University, go and listen to the talk today!

The abstract of the paper is below; you can read the full paper online, via my institutional repository, or our GitHub repo:

The Institute of Coding: Addressing the UK Digital Skills Crisis

James H. Davenport, Tom Crick, Alan Hayes and Rachid Hourizi

The Institute of Coding is a new £40m+ initiative by the UK Government to transform the digital skills profile of the country. In the context of significant national and international education and skills policy scrutiny, it responds to the apparently contradictory data that the country has a digital skills shortage across a variety of sectors, yet the university system produces computing graduates every year who end up unemployed, or underemployed.

In this paper, we describe the background and evidence base for the Institute of Coding, its key themes and current activities, as well as reflecting on potential replicability of aspects of the Institute to other nations or regions with similar ambitions.

Keywords: digital skills; programming; computer science education; undergraduate education; graduate education; industry collaboration

https://doi.org/10.1145/3294016.3298736

(also see: Publications)