The challenges faced by academia preparing students for industry:
What we teach and what we do.

A workshop at BCS HCI 2008
2nd September, 2008

Workshop organisers

• Dr Lidia Oshlyansky, Reading Room
• Dr Paul Cairns, University of York
• Prof. Angela Sasse, UCL
• Chandra Harrison, University of York

Aims

The aims of this workshop are three fold. First, it is to take stock of where we stand as both an academic and industry discipline on what we teach, what we research and what we do / apply in the real world. Second, it is to rejuvenate the dialogue between the two segments of our discipline about the needs and goals of each for learning and practice. Finally it is to develop a framework and suggestions in order to redress the gaps that exist on an ongoing basis. These aims can be summed up in the following two questions:

1. Where is the field of HCI now in terms of incorporating the needs of industry to have well trained professionals and the needs of academia to move the field forward and have well rounded researchers?
2. What is our ideal and do we reach it?

There are a lot more details in our Workshop Proposal

Participants

The participants on the day, linked to their position statements, were:

• Phil Bonhard
• Lorraine Catwell
• Chandra Harrison
• Tom McEwan
• William Newman
• Natalie Webb
• Lidia Oshlyansky, lead organiser
• Paul Cairns, opinionated facilitator

Workshop summary

We had a healthy and wide-ranging discussion for most of the day. Many items emerged as problematic but probably a key idea we kept coming back to was one of communication between commercial practitioners and university researchers/teachers. The many points are summarised in:

• Summary of points raised and possible solutions
• Presentation in HCI 2008 conference