Speaker: Dr. Keith Cooper, L. John & Ann H. Doerr Chair in Computational Engineering; Professor, Computer Science – ECE; Department Chair, Computational and Applied Mathematics
This monthly event is part of a Teaching and Scholarly Learning series that will feature instructor successes and will be a place for anyone who is teaching to ask questions, give feedback, share success stories, and get advice.
Date: January 22, 2021
Summary: Dr. Cooper described how he changed the format of an undergraduate, 120 student Computer Science course from in-person to fully online instruction for the Fall 2020 semester. The traditional thrice weekly lecture schedule with additional tutorials run by TAs was altered to a two week cycle of five lectures followed by a Q&A session, as well as additional office hours and and 1-on-1 sessions. Canvas LMS and Zoom meetings were used to replace in-person lectures, learning activities and assessments. More detailed and difficult problems were recorded individually and carefully scripted to avoid the mistakes seen in a live session, and to give students opportunity to watch and rewatch the video at their own pace. Some students chose to watch these and lecture recordings instead of attending class meetings; viewer analytics provided insights into see which lectures were watched most often. Dr. Cooper decided to modify his assessments from three high-stakes exams given over the semester to to lower-stakes bi-weekly quizzes designed to help students follow the pace of the course. These quizzes were administered via Canvas in multiple-choice and matching question formats in order to automate grading. As opposed to detailed problems that would require hand-grading, Dr. Cooper found that this format was sufficient to assess if students had an understanding of the “big picture” concepts of the course material. Projects were given greater prominence in the course and grading scheme. Instead of hand-grading project submissions for mastery, Dr. Cooper allowed students could use auto-grading software to check their work before final submission, giving them an opportunity to develop evaluation skills. The Piazza online discussion tool had already been used in past semesters and was frequented more by students and the instructors during this semester. Student achievement and engagement were found to be better or equal to the in-person instruction of the course in the Fall of 2019. If the course were to be offered again in-person, Dr. Cooper intends to keep the quiz and project format, as it increased student’s accountability and focus on current course material. The discussion after the presentation included the topic of the dilemma of student perception of busywork when changing instructional formats; resources and strategies were shared by attendees.