What a strange year it has been. The pandemic and more took a lot of the steam out of what I had hoped to dig deeply into in 2020. Surviving is success in these times I guess. I taught online for the winter/spring semester of 2020 and then retired. Teaching online was not so bad but it didn’t leave me with much time to improve on things. Running as fast as possible to stay in the same place seems to have been the norm for most teachers.
But this is time to look forward not back. One thing that seems to have grown among the teachers I see on social media is cybersecurity. While we have seen cyber security at the CSTA conference the last several years is feels like 2020 was the year teachers started teaching it in larger numbers. I think that is only going to continue.
I see a lot of teachers looking for new courses that are relevant to students and cybersecurity certainly counts as that. We can also fit more of it into other CS courses. Students love it. Well, mostly.
CYBER.ORG (formerly NICERC) is one of several organizations supplying curriculum and professional development. And it is all free.I love that team. Teach Cyber is another group as is TryHackMe There is a pretty active Cybersecurity Educators group on Facebook where a lot of teachers are sharing ideas and resources. I highly recommend that group.
Other than cybersecurity what am I looking to see more of in 2021? Well, online IDEs which really came into their own in 2020 are going to only get better. We’ll probably see more competition there as well. In fact, any option for teaching online will see growth even if, as we all hope, schools all return to in-person learning. Giving access to students outside of computer labs is just too powerful a tool to avoid.
I expect computer science, indeed most, conferences to retain a virtual component in 2021. Will they be mixed with both in-person and virtual aspects? I’m not sure but I see more and more conferences having the ability for people to attend virtually. The cost of that is coming down for the conferences and the ability of teachers to spend money for airfare and hotels is not growing as fast as the need for more teachers. There is also a growing interest in reducing carbon footprints on that part of many people.
Computer science education research has been gaining traction in universities. That’s pretty exciting to me as I think there is still a lot we can learn about how to teach CS more effectively. I am hoping that learning about the results of this research will be more available to teachers as well. We can’t all go to conferences or afford expensive peer reviewed journals. The real value of CS Ed research is getting the knowledge to actual teachers.
I see reason to be optimistic about CS education in 2021. We made it through 2020 and it is all going to get better. I can’t wait to see what happens!
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