Image

From Informatics Europe

1 Document
2 Student enrollment and image of the discipline
3 Charter of the working group
4 Conveners
- 4.1 How to participate
5 Links

Document

December 2007: the final report of the Working Group can be downloaded as UU-CS-2007-024.

The report will be released to the general public as an official report of Informatics Europe in February 2008. Informatics Europe members have the opportunity to comment on it using the final report discussion page until January 31, 2008.

The rest of the present page is from earlier stages of the group's work.

[edit]

Student enrollment and image of the discipline

   ... decades of stunningly rapid advances in processing speed, storage and networking, along with the development of increasingly 
    clever software, have brought computing into science, business and culture in ways that were barely imagined years ago.
    The quantitative changes delivered through smart engineering opened the door to qualitative changes. 
    Computing changes what can be seen, simulated and done.  Stephen Lohr (2006)

Despite the fact that Computing/Informatics impacts on everything around us and is an unprecedented source of new qualities in science, in business and in our daily lives, the number of beginning students in informatics has been steadily dropping over the past years in many countries. The `enrollment crisis' is cited as one of the prime reasons why science is not profiting from the achievements of computer science in depth, why industry is not able to recruit even a fraction of the highly skilled IT specialists and software engineers that it needs, and why the information society is deprived of the many beautiful intelligent systems that modern computer science could lead to. Universities in Europe are turning out excellent graduates in Informatics but are doing so in numbers that seem way too small.

[edit]

Charter of the working group

Why is student enrollment a problem in Informatics/Computing, at least in many of the (Western) European countries? Why is enrollment by female students lagging behind? What are the reasons of it, and what can be done about it? Are there best practices in certain countries from which we can all learn and benefit? Do potential students have the right image of Informatics as a field of study, as a science, as a profession? How should the field be positioned so it is "clearly" as attractive and challenging as many other disciplines and perhaps even more so?

This working group is created to collect insights on these issues and to come up with a document that advises the Informatics Europe membership on the state of the problem and on possible measures that could be taken to resolve it.

[edit]