We Need Community Effort to Achieve PDC Adoption!

Abstract

The Center for Parallel and Distributed Computing Curriculum Development and Educational Resources (CDER) released a PDC guideline in 2012 and soon after IEEE/ACM included PDC topics in their CS curriculum guidelines in 2013. CDER is currently working to update the PDC guidelines. The primary strategy to achieve adoption of PDC in early CS course is the courseware approach where pedagogical materials are developed and made available for instructors to integrate PDC content into their courses. content. Despite the creation of many new materials, adoption of PDC content has been fairly slow. In this position paper, we present a framework to classify the marks one need to hit to develop courseware that is adoptable, portable, engaging, and easy to find. We review some of the efforts to improve PDC adoption in the US and we hypothesize that these efforts have not consistently exhibited the attributes necessary for wide adoption. Our position is that while the courseware that have been developed by the community are essential stepping stones, we will not see PDC adoption until a larger community can be brought to bear on the problem. We need to enable composing and remixing the existing materials and develop new materials to cover the needs of a diverse range of institutions.