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Rationale Traditional mass lectures feature a broadcasting situation where knowledge is transmitted mostly in one direction, from the teacher to the students. Students may ask questions, however, in practice this has serious limitations. In addition to seating and acoustical problems, the large numbers of students does not allow many one-to-one communications - which is the desired situation - between teacher and student. Moreover, many students actually don't dare to ask questions in such a setting. Different speeds of learning can also not be addressed in a broadcast scenario. No matter what the level of difficulty of the lecture is, some students are bored, others are overwhelmed.
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Implementation (pedagogy) The original course is taught in traditional lecture style. The teacher uses a blackboard or Powerpoint to transmit the knowledge to the class in a broadcast. He tries to answer the occasional question, but has to move on quickly in order not to fall behind the curriculum. Student questions and practical skill training are being addressed in a separate exercise. In the redesigned course, we try to leverage the knowledge of students to answer their peers' questions. Students solve design pattern exercises in small groups in the lecture, not in separate exercise lessons. The UML models solving these exercises are then reviewed by other students. We plan to implement a rating system for reviewers to increase the accuracy.
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Implementation (technology) Our basic building blocks are UML modeling, problem solving and peer review. To increase bandwidth but not distract the lecture, students discuss online. They use notebooks to write and read messages in a public forum. A pen-based input method allows students to draw conceptual UML models as solutions to the design pattern exercises. Those UML models are randomly distributed for peer review by a backend server. All notebooks and the backend server are connected by a wireless network infrastructure. The software allowing UML modeling, online discussion, problem solving and peer reviews of solutions is currently under development.
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Impact on Teaching Teachers face a higher organizational effort for designing classes using our methods. But if successful, this will be a change in the way we teach courses to large audiences. We hope to bring a high level of student involvement which has been successful in classes with small enrollments into large lectures with 300 to 400 students. Experiments will show if it's possible to reduce the workload of giving feedback on exercise solutions to students by relying on the vote of student reviewers. We hope that our proposed rating system for reviewers and reviews will enable a peer review process similar to academic conferences, where only those submissions that receive disagreeing votes by reviewers (in our case, students) have to be examined by an authority (here, the teacher).
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Impact on Student Learning We want to encourage communication between students. Active discussion of lecture content enables knowledge transfer from more skilled to less skilled students. It has been shown that this form of cooperative learning brings improvements for all involved participants. We aim to actively involve students in the lecture by handing out design pattern problems during the class to the students. Requiring students to actively solve problems during the class using knowledge they have just been exposed to increases their problem solving skills, which is fundamental for software development. Individual lectures have given us anecdotal evidence about the effectivity of our concept. In particular, we have observed that students exposed to these techniques have been better modelers in subsequent courses. We are currently defining a measurement environment and metrics to evaluate the success of this method using techniques from social sciences and empirical software engineering. In summer 2006, a complete and complex lecture will use the entire concept. We will evaluate the impact on student learning in this lecture.
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Preliminary Data We conducted a survey among all students that attend one of our Software Engineering lectures regularly. In this survey, we asked them if they think the exercise lesson should be combined with the lecture. 57% support this idea, only 15% oppose it. Another question we asked was if they would like to solve problems on a notebook in the lecture. 45% support this idea, 23% oppose it, and nobody opposed it strongly.
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Traditional mass lectures are outdated. Our concept encourages communication among students in the lecture hall without distraction. Thinking about other students' solutions increases their problem solving capabilities and soft skills. Prof. Bernd Bruegge, Ph.D.
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Quick Facts Dept: Computer Science Courses Impacted: 1, 3 planned # Students Impacted: 20, up to 500 planned # Faculty Involved: 4, up to 10 planned This project is funded in part by a 2005 HP Technology for Teaching grant.
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