The Online Student Showcase for CCSC:MW 2020

This year's CCSC Midwest conference ran on September 25-26 as scheduled, although we moved the whole event to be online. (No, not "virtual." It was a real conference, and it was online.) This was the right move to make, given the pandemic, although I found that it took away from me the things I enjoy most about the conference, namely, traveling with students and visiting with friends from the region. 

Once again, I was in charge of the Student Showcase, and so I had to spend some time this past summer trying to determine how to transition the event from in-person to online. Usually, the Student Showcase starts between sessions, with poster presentations and demos given near the refreshments area, and then the Showcase continues through the next session. During that time, I find volunteer judges, explain the criteria to them, and then later collect and collate their results. 

It is worth noting that the Student Showcase is more than just a research poster presentation. Indeed, it had been the tradition at CCSC:MW—like most conferences—that presentable student work was framed strictly as “research.” When the previous session chair retired from the region and I volunteered to take over the event, I was able to expand the scope. Part of the reason for this is my dissatisfaction with the word “research” that derives from my reading of Boyer's classic, Scholarship Reconsidered. This led to my creation of two tracks in the Showcase, named the discovery track and the applications track after Boyer's identified scholarships of discovery and of application.

I had two major goals in the design of the online student showcase. The primary goal was to give the students an authentic experience in showing their work to others, knowing that it would necessarily be a lesser experience than in-person. The second goal was to keep it as simple as possible so as to avoid failures. This second goal imposed a particular constraint on the format: it led me to abandon any plans for online, synchronous presentations. Multiple teams of students across multiple sites presenting in real-time to a distributed audience just meant too many opportunities for failure. In the absence of synchronous communication, I knew that I would need a way for anyone—not just judges—to give formative feedback to the students. Such discussion is certainly the best part of the in-person event, and I wanted to try to capture that as much as I could.

Based on these goals, I decided to allow the students to submit their work in one of three formats: a plain text abstract not to exceed 750 words; a 3–5-minute video presentation; or a research poster or one-page brochure. Each of these are authentic scholarly artifacts, and I have had to make each at different times in my own career. They are asymmetric in that each mode affords different expression, and it was my hope that students would be able to choose the mode most amenable to their work. A theoretical work may be best expressed in an abstract while a capstone software project might show best in a recorded talk, for example. I specifically excluded informational websites from the list because they can easily combine all the other forms together, and I wanted a semblance of balance between forms. I also excluded traditional research papers because students can already submit such work to the conference; it is rare, but I know of at least one student whose original research results were presented right alongside the faculty research in recent years.

The judging criteria remained the same as in previous years, and these criteria were shared with the students in the call for participation. The six criteria are taken from Glassick's Scholarship Assessed. 

One of the impacts of the pandemic is that I have been spending a lot more time writing policies than in the past, when I could easily explain things in person and answer questions. The CCSC:MW website maintainers tend to reuse the conference URL each year, but I want to archive the presentation of the call for participation. Below, then, is the entire text of the call from the 2020 conference page.

CALL FOR STUDENT SHOWCASE PROJECTS

One of the highlights of the annual CCSC Midwest Conference is the Student Showcase, which is an opportunity for students to demonstrate their best work to faculty and other students from around the region. Moving the conference online necessitates shifting our traditional face-to-face showcase to an online mode.

To qualify for submission to the Student Showcase:

• The entry must be original work of an undergraduate student or team of undergraduates.
• The work was supervised by one or more faculty members.
• The work was completed in the last twelve months at one of the colleges within the CCSC Midwest region.
• The student, or at least one member of the student team, is registered for the CCSC:MW 2020 Conference. (We recommend participating in the Programming Competition as well!)
• The entry must be received by 11:59PM EDT on September 11, 2020.

Interested students will classify their work into one of two categories. The Applications Track is for interesting, novel, or noteworthy applications of computing science. This track is usually selected for work that is best displayed as a demonstration of a working system. The Discovery Track is for projects that contributed new understanding to the body of computing science knowledge. This track is usually selected for work that is displayed on a poster or in a research paper. In either case, projects can be completed individually or as part of a team.

Regardless of track, all work is judged on the same six criteria. These criteria are adapted from Scholarship Assessed (Glassick et al. 1997) and provide guidance for evaluating any form of scholarship. Sample reflective questions are provided for each criterion.

• Clear Goals: What is the goal of this work? What problem are you solving
• Adequate Preparation: How did you get ready to do this work?
• Appropriate Methods: How did you solve your problem? Why did you approach the problem this way?
• Significant Results: What was the result of this work? Who is affected by this work?
• Effective Presentation: How well does this poster, demonstration, or presentation communicate what is important about this work?
• Reflective Critique: What would you do differently? What does this mean for you and your future?

For the CCSC:MW 2020 Online Student Showcase, student entrants can choose one of the following three options for their submission.

• Submit a three- to five-minute video presentation that summarizes the project. This must be submitted as a URL that any conference attendee can access.
• Submit a 750 word abstract that explains the project. This must be submitted in plain text.
• Submit a research poster or brochure that can be downloaded as a PDF and viewed online. This is a conventional way of expressing research findings at an academic conference, but keep in mind that in an online showcase, you cannot control the medium by which people will read your work: smartphone, laptop, large monitor.

This year, every conference attendee will have the opportunity to judge the Student Showcase entries. We value all attendees’ participation, and faculty and professional attendees will be given a 3X weight to their scores to reflect their expertise. The results and feedback will be tallied, and we hope to get you the results soon after the conference.

To submit your work to the CCSC Midwest 2020 Online Student Showcase, go to [form url].

I collected the submissions through Google Forms as I usually do. We had eight student teams submit their work to the Showcase. It is worth recording here that more than half of them categorized themselves into the wrong track, which tells me that (1) Boyer's model has not had the impact I would prefer in higher education, and (2) my description presumed too much prior understanding about the philosophy of scholarship. I need to be more blunt and say that the Discovery Track is what your faculty call "research". Baby steps.

After a short experiment with Google Forms, I decided to present the students' work and collect the judging results using my university's licensed version of Qualtrics. My intention was to have the form available throughout the conference, and so at any time, an attendee could follow the link to the online showcase, read or view the students' work. Furthermore, anyone then could volunteer as a judge. The only demographic information I collected was whether the participant identified as a student or as a faculty or professional, which information I collected for the purpose of weighting scores as described in the call. 

The form itself included the student submission and the following form. Neither portion of the form were required, and Qualtrics made it easy to show all eight students' work in an arbitrary but balanced order. This way, even if some participants only viewed some students' work, everyone's work should be viewed by someone.

Sample Judging Form

There were no technical problems during the conference, although I had to put tighter reins on the availability of the survey because I had not accounted for the need to announce the winner's at Saturday's closing session. We ended up making the Online Showcase available from 9am (the time of the first pre-conference workshop) until 11:59pm on Friday.

We had a total of 22 views to the Student Showcase. In a normal year, almost everybody would at least see that the students were showing their work, and a few might approach those that looked interesting or in their areas of interest. Still, I think 22 out of the roughly 100 conference participants was very good, given that they really had to go out of their way to see what students had to show. In retrospect, I should have asked for the names, universities, and submission titles to be included in the conference schedule along with the Qualtrics link; this might have grabbed more viewers. 

I was surprised at the low number of written comments. I made sure to write comments for each one so that they would at least have some feedback from a researcher/practitioner on their work.

I think that the Showcase went well, and I have already identified some easy steps I could take to improve it for next year. Indeed, improving the description of the tracks is something I can do regardless of the format of the 2021 conference. The question of submission format sticks in my mind, however. I certainly found the video presentations to be the easiest to watch during my own judging, and I found the posters predictably to be the worst. Making a good poster is hard, and most faculty fail at it; students making posters that I have to view on a screen is like double jeopardy. Some of the students who submitted text could have benefited from some kind of visuals—the sort one might include in a recorded presentation, for example. This makes me think that if I had to run an online showcase again, I would simplify the submission process to allow only recorded presentations.

Another aspect that was missing from the online instantiation of the Showcase was that student presenters could not chat with each other. During the in-person event, there's a lull at the end when the judging is done and students are tired, and this leads to a more casual, less stressful social time. I like keeping the online showcase asynchronous to prevent technical problems from ruining the experience, but I wonder if there would be an opportunity for a breakout-room style Q&A session in another year. For example, if everyone who viewed their presentations could drop into something like student office hours. This has a weakness that any synchronous event does: if no one actually comes, then you feel devalued.

Thanks for reading. I hope that this post is useful to you. I am planning on exploring this problem a bit this semester with my HCI students, and so I expect to write about that at least in my end-of-semester reflection post.