The Carrick vision and computing education: four case studies in multi-institutional collaboration

Abstract

The Carrick Institute is an initiative of the Australia federal government. It is aimed at generating strategic change in Australian University education, via grants and other awards to approximately $20 million annually. By previous Australian standards, the potential funding for projects is large. However, the Carrick Institute has a well focused vision, and grant applications need to be aligned with that vision. This paper first describes some key aspects of the Carrick vision, before describing four multi-institutional computing education projects that successfully attracted funding from the Carrick Institute in 2006. Three of the projects are funded under Carrick’s Priority Program, and are concerned with different aspects of automated assessment: (1) assessing Unix scripting skills, (2) self and peer assessment in groupwork, and (3) the assessment of novice programmers. The fourth project is funded under Carrick’s Disciplinary-Based Initiatives Scheme. Commonalities in the structure of these three projects are observed.