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Abstract for Seminar
There is a real danger that current models of curriculum in higher education have reduced curriculum design to a process of assembling modules (or courses), with little regard for the emerging properties. This seminar will outline a curriculum design process that took two full years of intensive effort, resulting in a high-risk curriculum for a BSc in Computer Science that was very different to most programmes in quite fundamental ways. The risk was accepted because the potential gain was also high. The previous programme struggled to improve progression rates between the first two years, and, in spite of this seemingly difficult hurdle, students often failed to progress from the second year as well, suggesting they were to well prepared.
The seminar will focus on the first year of the programme, which is where the real changes were made. It will discuss the approach taken to programming, which involved throwing away modularity and using a single language as the "glue" to bind things together. Lectures were largely replaced with a workshop-based approach. Little attempt was made to keep students synchronised, allowing them to work at their own pace and explore different aspects of problems. Physical computing was introduced, with students constructing hardware and working with systems where the input-output domains were clearly rooted in the physical world. A strand of formalisms and theory ran throughout, but motivated through problems that naturally gave rise to their use. Several a sections of the curriculum were embedded in hardware used to teach the programme, in a way that we term deep-blending.
Perhaps the most radical aspect of the new curriculum is the approach to assessment (in the first year). We wanted to make assessment something that related to what the students were doing - rather than a post-hoc assessment of an artefact produced. We switched attention from "outcomes" to "behaviours", and then assessed these SOBs (student observable behaviours) "live" in workshops. To pass the year, students had to demonstrated a clearly identified subset of these SOBs. This means (we hope!) that those teaching the second year can assume that every student has demonstrated a definite set of behaviours. No student will progress who has not demonstrated these. There were some major risks here - students could pass the year as soon as they had demonstrated the required SOBs (there were, of course, many more SOBs than the required subset): would they stop working? Could staff cope with the challenge of assessing "live" (it was a requirement that all staff teaching on the year could teach every aspect of the year - an implication of dropping modules and passing more control to individual student).
The programme is now reaching the end of the first year, and there have been some very interesting lessons learnt, but overall the approach has exceeded our expectations.
Martin Loomes is a mathematician who has spent more than 30 years teaching mathematics, formal methods, and theoretical computer science topics in various guises, primarily to first year students. He is currently Dean of Science and Technology and PVC at Middlesex University, although he is still teaching first year students in his spare time!