Building Common Ground: An Inter-Institutional Computing Engineering Education Transfer Learning Community

ABSTRACT

This experience report addresses one of five goals in a National Science Foundation project aligned to the research question How does the implementation of a collaborative, multi-institutional learning community of faculty, staff, and administrators change the perceptions, attitudes and knowledge about the transfer process in undergraduate computing and engineering education? The transfer learning community (TLC) created to answer this question was composed of faculty and staff from a mid-sized research university and six partner community colleges. Over four years, members of the TLC participated in meetings and activities focused on articulation and curriculum alignment, cross-institutional advising, and interventions to support long-term, data-driven change to improve transfer student success, especially for women and underrepresented groups in undergraduate computing and engineering. Building common ground among faculty and staff across diverse computing and engineering departments at different institutions required time, trust, and intentional planning. Benefits of the TLC were particularly salient in the last project year (2019-20), when TLC leaders applied feedback from participants requesting more synergistic meetings and relevant activities and addressed shared concerns around transitioning to a fully remote educational model due to COVID-19 campus closures. Using data from surveys, interviews, and meeting transcripts, this paper will discuss lessons learned from this experience in the context of undergraduate computing and engineering education;how to use these lessons to support inclusive excellence in our post-pandemic higher education realities;and recommendations for adapting the TLC model for inter- and intra-institutional collaborations and partnerships for broadening successful transfer pathways in computing and engineering education. © 2021 IEEE.