Conference for Computer Science Education

This month I attended the conference for SIGCSE, that is ACM's Special Interest Group for Computer Science Education in Denver. Thanks go to Jane Ostrander and NSF's "Destination: Problem Based Learning" project for supporting my trip – my first time at this conference. Most of the 1300 attendees are university professors, but there was plenty of talk about lower division courses.

1. MOOCs

I attended both a panel and a keynote on MOOCs. The panel had CS professors from different universities and the keynote was from John Etchemendy, provost at Stanford.

1.a. History

1200 AD: 4 universities in the world

1400 AD: 24 universities in the world

1450 AD: explosion of universites because of the printing press

In 2008 Stanford Engineering released CS 1, 2, 3 videos; they had a 5-10% completion rate.

Fall 2011 start of MOOCs when Stanford put up 3 CS courses

These online courses now follow the pattern where the instructor demos on video, and then provides an opportunity for the student to do it.

1.b. MOOC vs. F2F

MOOCs are bad at: motivation, coaching, help, discussion, evaluation.

MOOCs are good as interactive textbooks.

Face-to-face is the artisanal way to teach and learn.

Weaker learners do not do well online.

MOOC completers are advanced learners.

MOOCs provide info, they don't deliver education.

We should not replace face-to-face courses with MOOCs, because many students need the social structure of in order to do the work required to learn.

1.c. Economics

Cost of higher ed is rising because of faculty pay, legal and dental services have gone up with the cost of higher education also. This is because education hasn't seen an increase in productivity since 1450. We need to raise the student/faculty ratio but keep the same quality and level of assessment/feedback.

One way to be more productive is to not waste faculty time delivering the same lecture over and over again, when the students disengage when they are not active anyway. What if we could take our grading time and/or our lecture time and spend it with students, helping them solve problems?

Etchemendy doesn't think a MOOC will ever substitute for an undergraduate education nor a PhD program. But it could deliver the education required in the middle professional level.

2. Tools and assignments for CS 1

processing.org

zyante.com

problets.org

introcomputing.org

nifty.stanford.edu
http://www.learnstreet.com

3. Ideas for MPICT

EMC Academic Alliance – they are dying to train us!

GitHub - http://teach.github.com/classnotes/2013-03-06-sigcse-2013.html

SLOs for all ICT students: capspace.org

Distinguished Speakers Program from ACM

Summer Institute 2013:

"Facilitating Change that Sticks: Becoming an Effective Educational Change Agent"

June 5-7, Needham, MA

http://i2e2.olin.edu/summer/personal_change.html

4. Inverted Classroom

Paper talk by Kate Lockwood, CSU Monterey Bay

Research shows students flatline in lectures

don't waste faculty time in lectures

easy, comprehension questions after watching video

online interactive workbooks

give credit for completing things

monitor student time spent with CMS

Use bamboo tablets to draw on while creating videos

cs unplugged is a good resource for classroom activities

pair programming in classroom

5. Security Mindset in CS 1A

Paper talk by Vahab Pournaghshband, UCLA

Create ROBUST software that performs as expected

Use a login program as the first few assignments

to learn branches, loops, int, String