The Connected Learner project at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte is a re-orientation of undergraduate computing and informatics education to focus on student learning that connects to peers, the profession, and the community. The project vision is to transform the student entering an undergraduate computing and informatics program from a person with an interest in computing - to a person with an identity as a computing professional. The project will transform faculty attitude towards education, shifting their attitudes and behaviors away from knowledge transmission and lecturing toward a refreshed approach of developing educational activities that scaffold the computing knowledge and skills to build successful computing professionals.

The project will catalyze and sustain this transition with the identification of pedagogical design patterns to guide all faculty teaching courses in the undergraduate computing and informatics curriculum. Innovative teaching and assessment practices will be implemented across an entire undergraduate computing and informatics curriculum, demonstrating the applicability and efficacy of these practices across a student body; which is diverse in terms of socio-economic status and demographics. The project will develop taxonomies and design patterns for knowledge and assessment to facilitate scaling and disseminating educational innovation in computing. Additionally, the project will examine the key factors in building a sustainable practice of educational innovation, which includes faculty attitudinal shifts and infrastructures to support and sustain learning practices. The project will evaluate and disseminate pedagogical practices and lessons learned.

The broader impacts of this project are: educational impact on a diverse student population (first time college students, ethnic diversity, GPA diversity); community impact on high schools and other partners in STARSComputingCorps.org; and professional impact on providing the talent pool for the region and the country in IT (including: data science, cyber security, visual analytics, and human centered design). Key outcomes from the Connected Learner project are anticipated to be: an increase in the quality of education provided to a diverse population of computing students, improved retention and graduation rates, the provision of a regional and national talent pool in computing, and the integration of pedagogical research with faculty development and advancement. The project will disseminate educational design patterns, best practice examples, and scholarly publications for educational change and faculty development through a publicly available online resource, as well as through journals, conferences, blogs, and social network publications.