[T]he following are types of uses that Udacity expressly defines as falling outside of the definition of “non-commercial”: … (e) the use of Educational Content by a college, university, school, or other educational institution for instruction where tuition is charged.

You may not take any Online Course offered by Coursera … as part of any tuition-based … program for any college, university, or other academic institution without the express written permission from Coursera.

This seems to forbid the use of a MOOC in a “flipped classroom,” where frontal lectures are replaced by listening to the recorded lectures, and class time is devoted to discussion and problem solving (perhaps of the homework problems posed within the MOOC). Many people consider the flipped classroom to be an effective use of MOOCs, so it is amazing that both companies are putting up obstacles.

At least with Coursera, all the students can write them a letter asking for permission :-).

Assessment in a MOOC is extremely difficult. Automatic assessment can check the output of a program but is useless to evaluate design, the topic of this course. The original intention was to use peer assessment for two projects, and a system of rubrics and training was laid out. This was abandoned in favor of self-assessment (!) because people take vacations in August and peer-assessment must be synchronous.

Aside from the usual problems with the forum (lack of civility), this course faced a problem caused by the openness of the MOOC. The course targets true novices but experienced people also take the course. Kiczales had to request: “Please, please, please don’t reply to beginner requests for help with advanced comments.”

More information is on the CS Ed Week site: http://www.csedweek.org/m/kt1g4rn2/html
including a press release and an overview of the legislation.

If you haven’t already subscribed to the CS Ed Week page (if you received information about this piece of legislation, then you are subscribed), you should do so by scrolling down the page noted above and click on Subscribe.  As you’ll see you’re subscribing to Computing In The Core.  CSEdWeek is an activity of the Computing in the Core coalition.

Please support this legislation and encourage others to do likewise.

There are eight (!) TAs who have experience with the (in-house version of the) course. Kiczales promises: “There are TAs monitoring the forums nearly 24 hours a day, and our goal is to respond to errors you point out within a few hours.” Clearly, MOOCs don’t come for free.

There was some problem with the compatibility of videos (html5 vs. flash?) which shows that running a MOOC requires technical expertise and support.

Turning to educational aspects: In my Inroads article, I complained about the lack of textbooks for the MOOCs I studied. This course is based on a freely available textbook, How to Design Programs 2/e by Felleisen (winner of the 2011 SIGCSE Outstanding Contributions Award), Findler, Flatt and Krishnamurthi. Similarly, programming is done in a educational development environment (DrRacket) which is far superior to using a bare-bones compiler.

I was pleased to see that the first week included introductory lectures on stepping through a program using DrRacket and on using Help. I believe that such “meta-aspects” of programming important and should be explicitly taught.

Next week I’ll write on the homework assignments and quizzes.

Moti

My initiation was innocent enough: studying a course in introductory CS from Udacity. When I finished the course I wrote up my impressions and then I convinced myself to study a similar course from Coursera. My analysis of this experience has just been published in ACM Inroads: MOOCs on Introductory Programming: A Travelogue. ACM Inroads 4(2), 2013, 58–61.

Such a hot educational topic deserves a blog and I’ve decided to start one. While everyone has an opinion, I would prefer that comments and posts be based on experience: people who studied a MOOC, used a MOOC in their teaching or developed learning materials used in MOOCs. I’d even be happy to hear from those who teach MOOCs :-).

Next week, I plan to start studying another MOOC from Coursera: Introduction to Systematic Program Design – Part 1 by Gregor Kiczales. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes.

Moti

Ultimately her teaching experiences have caused her to ask “do the students really have a solid understanding of the mathematics they are using?  And, more importantly, do they understand why they’re using it?”

I think you know where I’m going with this.  Too often in computer science courses (and in fact in other IT courses that are offered in high school and I dare say in post-secondary) are planned so that a certain amount of material is “covered”.  Students get to practice modifying and writing code but often have no clue why they are writing this code.  They get to memorize some syntax but don’t understand what they’re memorizing.  There’s little of no context within which their work in writing code can be placed.  One might call this “context-free content”.  I think the author of the article is saying the same thing, but for mathematics.

Another way to look at this is to relate it to G. Polya’s four-step problem solving approach:

• Understand the problem
• Design a solution
• Solve the problem
• Assess your solution

Too often particularly in my early years of teaching computer science, I would “understand” the problem for them (put it in simplistic terms, over-simplifying), then with them I would “design” a solution (though even these simplistic problems might have had several approaches, we ended up with one).  They’d “solve” the problem (of course the detailed design encouraged almost identical solutions) and I would develop the test cases to see if their program “worked.”

There is little ownership by the students, little opportunity for real insight into any of these steps, little reason to learn and understand the programming techniques  beyond the next test.

I know I had to work hard to get  my students to expand their involvement beyond coding something that either we or I had understood, designed and assessed.  It wasn’t always easy but helping students find a context for their work with more realistic problems and situations always paid off with students being able to apply what they learned later in the course and more importantly in later courses.  Open-ended problems  helps out a lot.

Think about helping students understand the “why” along with the “how” of computer programming, especially when you’re given a course and a text to “cover” with a group of students.

Find a context for the content.

(full URL for the article:  http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/03/27/26crowley.h32.html?tkn=LNSFw%2FMoqekT4IEeYBSFfusZ4rOHVCeJYo%2F0&cmp=ENL-EU-VIEWS1 )

And chocolate, inevitably, reminds me of how hard it can be to conduct education research.

A few years back, I submitted a paper to SIGCSE and one of the comments I received back from a reviewer has stuck with me ever since. I’ve completely forgotten the details of the paper, but it presented some kind of teaching approach that could be used in the classroom. I had collected student survey data and reported that students enjoyed the experience. The reviewer dismissed the evaluation as largely irrelevant and stated: “If I gave out chocolate in my class then students would enjoy that too!”

Enjoyment is an important consideration, since the more that students enjoy something, the more likely they are to actually do it! But what they *do* has to be shown to be beneficial.

The more time that passes since I received that comment, the more I value it. With the perspective of distance, I’ve even come to use it as a yard-stick to measure my own research and that of others. Sure students enjoyed it – but is there evidence of some deeper and more significant benefit, or is it just chocolate? Students enjoy chocolate, but it isn’t a healthy option – too much of a good thing leaves no room for vegetables. What evidence do we have that the learning activity / software tool actually helps learning?

I recently pitched an experiment to a colleague of mine. I suggested that we could show that chocolate helped people learn how to program. In our classes, we have a big attendance problem, with less than 50% of students attending most of the time. I suggested that a free chocolate bar to each person might be sufficient motivation to get them into the class. If indeed, the chocolate was enough of a motivator to attend, and if lectures actually help students learn anything, then the class average might be higher than in previous years. In other words, offering students chocolate might produce a significant improvement in learning – perhaps a greater positive impact on learning than anything else I’ve tried recently. Unfortunately, getting the project funded is proving difficult.

I see a lot of papers that show how much student enjoy a given approach / tool. Some of them even show how it improves learning. They always make me think of chocolate.

Andrew

I became acutely aware of how many other researchers were struggling with the Ethics approval process when I was presenting a paper at ICER in 2008.  During question time, the topic of Ethics approval was raised and I mentioned that we had obtained “blanket” approval to look at exam scripts (and any other exam data, such as results) of any student within our department.  We could use this data to answer any interesting research question that might arise, without having to seek consent from individual students.  I explained that it was considered to be archival data that we (as teachers in the department) already had access to, so no special consent was required.

That got a round of applause.  Not for the research, but for the ethics approval we obtained.  I must admit to being somewhat surprised at the time, but having had numerous discussions about various Ethics Committees since, I am no longer surprised.  Feelings about the Ethics approval process run deep.  And they are not positive feelings.

I continued to complain to my colleagues about why the Ethics committee held up my research for petty, inconsequential reasons.  I lamented the fact that the committee obviously consisted of idiots!

Then I became one of them.  I joined the University of Auckland Human Participants Ethics Committee in the middle of 2012.

I still complain to my colleagues.  But now I complain about why researchers can’t follow simple instructions, and why they submit incomplete and inconsistent applications. I lament the fact that so many researchers are idiots!

That is not entirely true.  The statistics produced by the Ethics committee in my institution show approximately a third of applications are approved immediately, a third are approved on condition that minor changes are made, and a third have major issues that require resubmission.  The majority of applications have no major problems.  But there are also some very poorly thought out proposals.

I’ve come to think of the Ethics approval process as being essential.  It acts (in part) as a gatekeeper to make sure researchers are not likely to do something that has serious unanticipated consequences.  No doubt that doesn’t apply to your research – it certainly doesn’t apply to my research, which is always without risk to anyone involved.  But it does apply to some of the research.

I haven’t been on the committee very long, and I have already seen some applications that make me wonder.  For example, one researcher (from Fine Arts) wanted to take photographs of children for a photographic study on identity.  The photographs were to be taken in the researchers own home and required the children to undergo numerous costume changes.  Once taken, the photographs were to become the property of the researcher, to edit/modify as they desired and could be sold at a later date.  Another researcher wanted to interview workers that had been injured on building sites (and would assure the workers of confidentiality), but then intended to show the interview transcripts to the company health and safety officer for editing and approval before they were used in research.

Could anything go wrong in either of these projects?  Would you approve them?

Andrew Luxton-Reilly

Given that politicians can have such an influence on policy that impacts computing educators, it seems important that we try to influence their actions.  The ACM recognizes this and has several sub-organizations that work on public policy.  But as an individual computing educator, it’s interesting to think about what we can do to influence policy makers.  The answer to that question will likely differ by country, but it seems like it’s worth the time and effort.