Alumnae Award for Curriculum Innovation

Sara Owsley Sood

Professor of Instruction and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Education, Department of Computer Science, McCormick School of Engineering

"Embedding Ethics in Computer Science Curriculum"

Sara Owsley Sood’s curricular innovation project was inspired and led by undergraduate student interest in raising awareness about the need to consider the ethical implications of technology. These Northwestern University Tech Ethics fellows have been developing an open-access resource hub with curricular artifacts that encourage both students and instructors to reflect on their power, positionality, and agency from a technology perspective.

Sood will work with the fellows to create ethics modules that can be embedded across the Computer Science curriculum to encourage majors and minors to develop a habit of reflecting on the implications of their code. The fellows will also support the implementation of the modules in a variety of computer science courses.

Sood has been teaching computer science since completing her PhD at Northwestern in 2007, was an assistant and then associate professor at Pomona college until 2014 and has been back at Northwestern as faculty in Computer Science since then. Her teaching interests include introductory programming and artificial intelligence.

Eun Hee Kim

Assistant Professor of Instruction, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

 "Development of Chatbots for Korean and Chinese Classes"

Chin-Hung Chang and Eun Hee Kim's curricular innovation responds to growing student interest in learning Asian languages. They will develop a customized conversational chatbot to create more extensive practice with the target language outside of the classroom. This interactive technology will be a powerful tool for facilitating language learning for second-year Korean and Chinese language students, equipping them with scaffolded practice with newly learned vocabulary, grammar and expressions and laying the foundation for effective engagement in diverse cultural communities.

Chang has been teaching Chinese for 15 years. Her research interests include the intersection of technology and language learning. Her current research focuses on prompting in generative AI and informal language learning using technology.

Kim has been teaching Korean for eight years. Her research interests include the investigation of innovative pedagogical approaches within language education settings. Her current research centers on the effectiveness of the use of collaborative tasks for language learning.