Artifact

1. Staffing and Content

In 2001/2002 the teaching team comprised two lecturers, a teaching associate, and a handful of postgraduate demonstrators. The lecturers managed course content and instructional design and the associate managed the running of practical classes with demonstrator assistance.

The lecturers divided the course into two, the midpoint being a few weeks into the second term in January. One took responsibility for the first half and the other took responsibility for the second.

The lecturer for the first half used an objects-late design, starting with structured programming concepts and moving to defining data types (objects) by the end of term one. The lecturer for the second half presented something of a review of the first while broadening the scope to discuss the software engineering lifecycle, file input and output, exceptions, recursion, collections, GUIs, IDEs (JBuilder).

Just to shed light on comments in the student interviews and feedback questionnaires for 2001/2002 . The example used in the first half to motivate the utility of type definition concerned "bin packing". It did not sit well with some.

2. Instructional Design

The design of the course was such that lectures served as the driver for direction, content and pace of learning. Particularly in the first term it would be through lectures that students were introduced to the topics for study for the week. Weekly lectures would be followed up with weekly lab class exercises, the content dictated by the lectures. Web pages were (as now) used to distribute teaching materials.

2.1 Lectures

In lectures the focus would generally on the lecturer either "transmitting knowledge" with the aid of slides or leading the class through a worked example.

The first lecturer would frequently use the solving of problems with programs as a driver for new ideas and technology. It was felt that seeing the lecturer engaged in problem solving and programming would demystify the process - particulary when they made mistakes.

The approach also has the attraction of offering interaction, engaging the students in the problem solving activity by asking questions and inviting comment. However such interactions tended to be limited to the more confident students.

The lecturer for the first half the module did not tend to provide handouts. Students were required to take notes and materials would be added to the web pages afterwards. These would usually consist of the program code used in the lectures accompanied by occasional notes.

The lecturer for the second half made all the lecture notes available in advance.

2.2 Practical Work

The dominant form of practical work at Durham - at least at level one - has tended to be sets of exercises assigned on a weekly basis. A student must complete the exercises issued in one week before the start of their practical class in the following week. Practical work for the programming module largely followed form in 2001/2002.

During the first term it involved working through sets of exercises devised by the lecturer (rather than say obtained from a book) and based on the material presented in lectures. The exercises in a set tended to be discrete by which we mean they were not interrelated except in as much as they might share a focus on say constructing a class declaration or using a while loop.

During the second term the content was devised by the lecturer and teaching associate. The students had opportunities to work on small projects spanning a number of weeks. By application of divide and conquer, in many cases these projects were actually presented as week by week sets of exercises. Projects included the construction of part of a crossword solver, a spell checker and a computerised version of the popular 'Countdown' game show - the latter serving as a piece for summative assessment.

2.3 Assessment

Summative assessment in the second term was performed using small project work (Countdown).

Assessment in the first term took a novel approach based on a martial arts belt scheme - a belt has a colour and represents a particular level of attainment. The belt colours used were red, white, yellow, orange, green. There were insufficient resources to carry the scheme through blue, brown and black.

The intention was that students should be able to progress at their own pace and avoid being discouraged by a poor assessment result. Programming exercises were used to determine level of attainment. Time permitting, students were allowed to sit gradings for white, yellow and orange as many times as required. The green grading was conducted as an open book bench test in early January (a bench test is an open book exam conducted during practical class time).

Throughout the year program writing was the dominant form of practical class work for assessment or otherwise. The lecturer for the first half of the course devised some notable exceptions in the form of exercises in program reasoning and debugging.

2.4 Practical Classes

The teaching associate was responsible for running practical classes assisted by postgraduate demonstrators. Demonstrators tended to be restrict themselves to providing help on request.

Registers were used in practical classes to record attendance and the completion of exercises. Exercises were awarded a mark out of three. This was (i) to ensure that demonstrators looked at the students' work and provide an assessment, and (ii) to provide a small incentive to do the work. Marks contributed in an extremely small way to the students' final grades so strictly speaking the weekly exercises were not purely formative.

In 2001/2002 students were required for the first time to electronically submit work on completion. The system that manages submission also provides the students with facilities for electronic learning logs. The students used the logs to comment on their experiences of the work.

Information from the practical registers was transferred to a departmental database system (Arcade) once a week. The system issues warnings to the students if they have been absent without leave or if there is work outstanding.

2.4 Learning support

Students could obtain additional teaching support outside of lectures and practicals. Optional 'drop-in' practical class and problem surgeries were offered. A booking system was used for surgeries to manage anticipated numbers and to elicit from the students information that would allow preparation (evidence appendices 6). The numbers making use of these facilities was small.

Students enrolled on courses with the department were (are) also allocated an advisor to assist them with general advice about such matters as module choices rather than technical help with module content. Advisors were (are) also available to offer some support and guidance on non-academic matters.