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What if “regular” CS faculty each taught elements of inclusive design in “regular” CS courses across an undergraduate curriculum? Would it affect the CS program's climate and inclusiveness to diverse students? Would it improve retention? Would students learn less CS? Would they actually learn any inclusive design? To answer these questions, we conducted a year-long Action Research investigation, in which 13 CS faculty integrated elements of inclusive design into 44 CS/IT offerings across a 4-year curriculum. The 613 affected students’ educational work products, grades, and/or climate questionnaire responses revealed significant improvements in students’ course outcomes (higher course grades and fewer course fails/incompletes/withdrawals), especially for marginalized groups; revealed that most students did learn and apply inclusive design concepts to their CS activities; and revealed that inclusion and teamwork in the courses significantly improved. These results suggest a new pathway for significantly improving students’ retention, their knowledge and usage of inclusive design, and their experiences across CS education—for marginalized groups and for all students. 

Motivation: Although CS Education researchers and practitioners have found ways to improve CS classroom inclusivity, few researchers have considered inclusivity of online CS education. We are interested in two such improvements in online CS education—besides being inclusive to each other, online CS students also need to be able to create inclusive technology. Objectives: We have begun developing a new approach that we term “embedded inclusive design” to address both of these goals. The essence of the approach is to integrate elements of inclusive design education into mainstream CS coursework. This paper presents three curricular interventions we have developed in this approach and empirically investigates their efficacy in online CS post-baccalaureate education. Our research questions were: How do these three curricular interventions affect (RQ1) the climate among online CS students and (RQ2) how online CS students honor the diversity of their users in the tech they create? Method: To answer these research questions, we implemented the curricular interventions in four asynchronous online CS classes across two CS courses within Oregon State University’s Ecampus and conducted an action research study to investigate the impacts. Results: Online CS students who experienced these interventions reported feeling more included in the major than they had before, reported positive impacts on their team dynamics, increased their interest in accommodating diverse users, and created more inclusive technology designs than they had before. Discussion: These results provide encouraging evidence that embedding elements of inclusive design into mainstream CS coursework, via the interventions presented here, can increase both online CS students’ inclusivity toward one another and the inclusivity of the technology these future CS practitioners create. 

Although the need for gender-inclusivity in software is gaining attention among SE researchers and SE practitioners, and at least one method (GenderMag) has been published to help, little has been reported on how to make such methods work in real-world settings. Real-world teams are ever-mindful of the practicalities of adding new methods on top of their existing processes. For example, how can they keep the time costs viable? How can they maximize impacts of using it? What about controversies that can arise in talking about gender? To find out how software teams "in the trenches" handle these and similar questions, we collected the GenderMag-based processes of 10 real-world software teams---more than 50 people---for periods ranging from 5 months to 3.5 years. We present these teams' insights and experiences in the form of 9 practices, 2 potential pitfalls, and 2 open issues, so as to provide their insights to other real-world software teams trying to engineer gender-inclusivity into their software products. 

How can software practitioners assess whether their software supports diverse users? Although there are empirical processes that can be used to find “inclusivity bugs” piecemeal, what is often needed is a systematic inspection method to assess software's support for diverse populations. To help fill this gap, this paper introduces InclusiveMag, a generalization of GenderMag that can be used to generate systematic inclusiveness methods for a particular dimension of diversity. We then present a multicase study covering eight diversity dimensions, of eight teams' experiences applying InclusiveMag to eight under-served populations and their “mainstream” counterparts.