makeschool/institutional-plan

A public repository communicating and tracking changes to Make School's vision and institutional plan

Make School Institutional Plan

Staff project owner: Ashu Desai (Founder)

The May 2020 update is v1.1 of our Institutional Plan github. Our intention with this github is to create transparent documentation of Make School's "feature set" and future plans. We will use this repository in conjunction with our release cycle process (see "Institutional Planning Process") to provide regular updates to students and prospective students about how Make School is iterating and adapting.

We hope this creates more transparency and better information communication primarily with the student body and secondarily with the broader community. We also hope the github repository serves as a forum - alongside town-halls and feedback surveys - for students to contribute to the vision and development of our institution, an open-source, collaboratively built university.

It is an experiment for a college to provide documentation and allow for discussion in the format of a software project. We will learn along the way what works, what doesn't, and how to communicate more clearly and more efficiently. We hope by doing this we can hold ourselves to a higher standard of transparency, communication, and collaboration with our students, staff, prospective students, and broader community.

Our next update will be released in late summer. Stay tuned!

Tracking Issues and Updates:

Student council is establishing a way to create and track issues on the institutional plan to allow for discussion of various aspects of Make School. Please review the contributing guidelines here:

https://github.com/MakeSchool/institutional-plan/blob/master/contributing_guidelines.md

May 2020 General Update:

Dear Make School community - 2020 is off to a fast start. We are grateful that California is finding success in the battle against COVID-19 while recognizing that much of the world is not as fortunate.

We are expecting to be back on campus this fall, though will continue to offer a fully remote learning option for students who need it. We're excited to be with you in person again!

Our team has been heads down preparing for the site visit with our accreditor that happened last week (May 5-7th), so our general org updates are a bit lighter this cycle. We will be sharing more information about the accreditation process and general updates soon.

Best, The Make School Team

institutional-plan's Issues

SPD Improvements for Thought

After taking SPD 1.41 this term where we practice technical and behavioral interviewing as well as focus on outcomes, I have come to see SPD in a new light. Before proceeding further, let me say I deeply appreciated the focus on preparing students for the real world. SPD to me is not "Software Product Development". It is more of a "we don't know where else to put this course but it is valuable to all students so let's put it here" course. Yes, SPD does cover some software product development topics such as agile vs waterfall, the sprint process, and user interviews, but SPD is much more than that. Depending on the class, it can focus on interviewing, team building, conflict resolution, email etiquette, and more. Studying where Make School has come from, it seems likely that SPD is an old remnant (much like our vestigial tails), from the period when Make School acted less like a school and more like a product development program. It has adapted and changed over the years to align more with Make School's new goals, however there come certain drawbacks to making small improvements over the alternative of rethinking what SPD can and should be.

I see SPD as a blend between Outcomes Preparation, Product Development, Team Building, and much more. Instead of "Software Product Development" I see it as "Product and Professional Development", PPD. The benefit of this new approach means that PPD can be fit to teach the things we know and love as well as core theory, which is currently lacking in the curriculum, in addition practical skills. Theory such as the OSI model, HTTP (1.0, 1.1, 2, 3), TLS, and NAT. Practical skills such as terminal commands, scripts, and contributing to open source projects. With this new theory and practical skills students will be able to better understand the underlying architecture and protocol that governs the way the internet operates. The practical skills will help improve students day to day operations and push them to integrate into the continuously changing software landscape for both learning and networking purposed.

This implementation will not come easy. Some classes such as SPD 1.2 which spends a whole semester on Bootstrap may be better delivered in a few classes leaving extra space for new topics. I encourage this to be an open conversation on the pros and cons of SPD and how this can be improved to fit the current goals of Make School and the industry in order to serve students better.

Curriculum Update Request - BEW 2.1

Overview

While the overall technologies and concepts taught in this course are very valuable to students seeking a career in Backend Development, the methodology through which these concepts were taught provided little engagement, challenge, or motivation to dive deeper. Additionally, the heavy use of tutorials was quite frustrating to students, and in my opinion, was detrimental to some students' ability to understand the material.

Course Details

Back End Web 2.1, Advanced Web Patterns in Node.js

Taken Term 4, 2021

This concern or request:

[] 1. Has to do with a learning outcome or tool I don't see in this class but would like to
[x] 2. Has to do with a learning outcome or tool I see in this class but would like to see improved
[x] 3. Has to do with the course itself (i.e: pacing, format, etc.)

IF about a learning outcome or tool that you don't see in this class but would like to, please provide an explanation about why this would be valuable:

N/A

IF about a learning outcome or tool you see but that should be improved, please provide a brief outline about what improvements you'd like to see and why:

I would most definitely like to see the integration of the skills taught in this course into a project that students create themselves. While tutorials are a great starting ground to introduce new skills or technologies, I don't believe that they should be used as the sole avenue for teaching these skills.

I see this class greatly benefiting from deeper dives into the course material, with less tutorials, and potentially one application students concept, design, and integrate new skills into as they go throughout the course. This would likely require key checkpoints with solid due dates, and maybe a way to schedule 15 minute 1:1s with the instructor during lab time should students need help considering how to design their application architecture or get de-bugged.

An accountability buddy would be a great way to keep students motivated and working on their project, and have one other student as the go-to voice for simple problems. Making students each other's "first line of defense" when stuck is a great way for students to learn and help each other learn through teaching and solving problems together.

Additionally, having students build their own applications provides them with a full portfolio piece at the end of the term, as well as a better understanding of how to design systems, and the "why" of many of these technologies (web sockets, serverless architectures, and node modules).

IF about the course itself (pacing, format, etc.) please describe what you'd like to see changed and why:

I was quite disappointed in the overall structure of the course this term. While we're a project based school and I know we don't want to focus solely on lecture, this course had virtually no lecture, and no hands on experience outside of tutorials. The tutorials used as materials in this course provided all of the code, leaving little reason for students to do anything but copy and paste code. This kind of a course structure was highly demotivating to me as a student.

I am:

[] Willing to help staff work on this, and have resources in mind to provide direction
[x] Willing to provide resources, but don't have the time to help at the moment
[] Don't know where to start

General feedback on the visioin and institional plan.

First and foremost, all feedback given in this PR is my opinion and doesn't reflect the thoughts and opinions that the rest of Student council may have. With that said, here is my feedback on each section.

Mission and objectives.

Feedback

I love the long term 3-5 year objective, however, with caution. I want Make School to become the largest and sustainable computer science bachelors program so long as it doesn't mean Make School doesn't have to sacrifice it's core values. While I assume growth is necessary for larger outreach and more sustainability, I believe that a solid foundation that's constantly improving will support to some extent this growth naturally.

For 2020 key metrics, I think every stat at face value appears good aside from the 250 incoming students one. I think more context as to where this number is coming from and how it was determined would be good for the rest of the students. (The target percentages don't need any explanation, as it's pretty obvious we need and could always use more representation in tech ✊)

Overall, really solid outline that I think realistically portrays what is planned to be done based off of what we currently know. :)

Questions

• For the Our 2020 key metrics, would it be possible to phrase it as "Desired 2020 key metrics"?
• Would it be possible to explicitly express that growth beyond 2020 will be constantly reassessed as data and constraints change over time? I am able to interpret it implicitly, but feel like that is due to more context that I have.

Academics

Feedback

I agree that students should be able to take up to 5 courses if they are succeeding in them and like the removal of this restriction.

I also like the decision to revert the junior fall curriculum to start with all of the tracks. I think that the placement exams we took at the beginning of last year really helped determine which classes students should be placed in.

For coaching and mentorship, I feel like setting students up with local alumni for remote coaching/mentorship could be feasible as we get more alumni with jobs and would be super relevant to students for not only how to navigate through their career, but through Make school.

Questions

• Would it be possible for the SNL courses to be more project oriented like Make school courses? It would be really cool to integrate optional coding into these courses for students to integrate what these courses teach through technology. Obviously this would need to be made more concretely described, but I think that this would increase engagement and follow suite with Make Schools curriculum style.

Student services

Feedback

I would love for Demo night to be an opt in competitive event in which Make school students create projects that are to be evaluated by their peers/instructors to determine which students get to present. I think this will not only increase the quality of all of the projects that are to be demoed, but also increase the passion behind the projects. As for the smaller events, I think you could create rotation schedule in which students and instructors are rotated. The instructors would serve as advisors for the projects being hosted at these events and obviously the students would be the ones presenting.

As Make School grows, I would love to see more underrepresented communities being brought into tech. As someone who comes from a relatively privileged family and community, I never witnessed the adversity that these communities and the people within them have experienced until moving to such a diverse place like San Francisco. I would love to know if there is any role in which myself or other students could take to help these communities out so that they're not only supported, but thriving here at Make School.

Questions

There are no questions for this section.

Facilities plan

Feedback

I think this section is really clearly defined and like the fact that both the ideal and contingency plans are listed for students. The only thing I can't really envision is the shoe storage scaling well with the number of students we plan to take in. Not saying that this isn't possible, but, it would be interesting to know the max amount of students that will be concurrently in the building at once in order to better gauge what kind of solution would be needed for handling the shoe storage.

Questions

• I think housing will remain an interesting problem as the school scales up. Given that finding affordable renting is already problematic in San Francisco and most likely beyond the scope of Make School, would it be possible to collaborate with some sort of agency that deals with relocation/housing that could aid students in finding long term housing while at school? Do these types of agencies even exist?

Community

Feedback

I think everything listed is a really awesome approach to creating an awesome community. I like the fact that the main focus is about connecting the community together and making all groups of people, regardless of their background, feel whole.

Questions

• What have been the biggest struggles so far in building/maintaining the community from your perspective? I would love for students to be able to be aware of these issues and potentially help Make School in tackling these problems together!

Overall

This is such an amazing start to open sourcing Make School's plans and intentions. Reading through all of the key points, I felt like I learned more about Make School as I progressed through each section and understood more of the rational to both actions that were previously taken and ones that will be taken in the future. It is so awesome to finally have something like in writing and I can't wait to see this document evolve as Make School does. I hope my feedback is useful and gives you a students perspective into how I perceived everything as I read through it. Again, really appreciate everyone for getting this document established and also in done in such a timely manner.

Feedback for Feedback

Overview

Please provide a brief sentence or two explaining what this is about
After seeing the short yet complete feedback form that I filled out in the #students-only Slack channel. I feel like the low rates of completion for the end of term feedback forms can be mitigated by shortening the feedback forms to get to the core essence of the questions we need answered in order in improve the class.

What problem are you trying to solve?

Too many feedback forms and low rates of feedback completion

Is this a problem personal to you, or do you think this impacts a large portion of the student body?

Both. I myself do not like the numerous feedback forms every term - one for each class then one for the school as a whole. I would much rather give feedback as I see fit. I know that this is a problem that effects the student body as a whole since we get constantly nagged to complete our feedback forms and I've heard the rate of completion is less than 50%

What ways have you reached out to your peers to ensure that this is an organization-wide problem?

i.e: 'polled students on Slack, and 43% responded yes'
See above.

What are some ways we could tackle this problem?

i.e: 'more town halls to answer ISA questions
A concise feedback form which can be quickly analyzed. It would be good to have scales for things (1-5) so that the data can be complied and analyzed easier than having too many things be open-ended questions, which can take up time both for the feedback giver and the feedback analyzer. Some questions could be open-ended but those should be kept to a minimum. We not only need to think about the students but also the instructors who are in charge of teaching, curriculum, reading feedback, and more. This is not a dis against feedback, moreso an improvement to ensure we are getting the most output out of the least effort.

Additionally, I think opening up the GH issues to address problems was a good move to help get more valuable feedback.

Are you willing to help us implement this change, should it be possible?

[] Yes, and I have the time
[x] Yes, but I don't have the time right now
[] I wouldn't know how to start or don't feel comfortable