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UW/Beihang Algorithms Course Project Description |
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Overview
This project is to offer a UW Undergraduate Algorithms course (CSE
421) at Beihang University in Beijing. The course will be a
Beihang University course, and will use University of Washington
materials in a Tutored Video format.
Project Goals There are a number of goals for this project. First of all, we want to offer a quality Algorithms course, giving students at Beihang a comparable experience to that of students at University of Washington. The lecture material, homework assignments, and exams will be identical, the only difference will be in the mode of delivery. We also want to gain experience and understand issues in international offerings of courses. There are several aspects of this that are important.
Educational Approach The goal is to use recorded lecture materials to offer a class that is "as good" as a live class. This requires having a way to add value to the recorded material, by having discussion and activities around the lecture materials take place locally. The methodology that has been developed to support this is Tutored Video Instruction, which was developed at Stanford University in the 1970's, and has been deployed in a range of different educational settings. The educational approach has also been designed to support the instructor's style of teaching in a setting where the instructor is not present in the classroom. One of the instructor's classroom goals is the active involvement of all students during lecture. In the traditional classroom, this is supported by a style of teaching where students are asked to respond to questions and make verbal contributions to the class, or specific activities are given to the students during the class. This will be supported both by having the facilitators encourage verbal discussion, and by using Classroom Presenter to embed activities into the lecture. Parallel Course Offerings The Beihang course will be offered in parallel with the UW course taught by Professor Anderson. In practice, the Beihang course will be a few days behind the UW course. Lectures will be recorded at UW, and will be ready for download by Beihang shortly afterwards. UW homework and exams will be used by the Beihang students. Homework will be due once a week, and there will be a midterm and a final exam. The advantage of having the two courses run in parallel is that this will allow the UW course staff to have some involvement with the Beihang Teaching Assistants and students while the course material is still current. In addition to transferring the video materials from UW to Beihang, there will be other resources made available, such as the classroom activities and guidelines on use of the video materials. We anticipate that there will be some form of remote office hours between UW and Beihang. To account for the 9 hour time difference, these will be held in the morning in China. Tutored Video Instruction The basic idea behind tutored video instruction is to use pre-recorded class material, but stop the materials at periodic intervals to allow for in-class discussion. The class discussion promotes peer learning between the students. This method of instruction was pioneered by Gibbons at Stanford in the 1970's (see the linked article from Journal of Science). Through careful evaluation studies, Gibbons demonstrated that the remote students using TVI actually out performed the in-class Stanford students. In contrast, the students who have just watched the recorded materials, but without facilitation, did not perform as well. We have conducted a number of TVI projects at University of Washington. Our longest running project involved teaching our Introductory Programming classes at Community Colleges. Some classes were successful, and others were less successful. One of the interesting positive results is that through the use of TVI materials several institutions were able to improve their own programs. We view one of the potential benefits of these remote offerings as facilitating the transfer of teaching experience and methodology. One of the things that came out of the earlier TVI experiments was the importance of understanding the relationship between the remote site and the local site, and giving the facilitators a central role. We will use our distance learning technology (ConferenceXP) for recording the lectures. After the lectures are recorded, they will be placed on the course website for download. The Beihang teaching assistants will download the lectures to a local machine and show them to the class using Webviewer. The Webviewer controls allow the standard operations for lecture viewing, including pausing a lecture, and skipping to a desired lecture slide. The required classroom setup for viewing the lectures is a Windows XP machine with adequate speakers and a data projector. The lectures will also be available for individual student download. It may be desirable to copy these lectures to a Beihang university server. Classroom Interaction Our past experience with TVI has shown us that it is important to provide active learning opportunities with the course materials. This allows the students and the facilitators to assess their level of understanding of the course materials. We will include these activities through the Student Submission mechanism which we have developed for Classroom Presenter - an instructional technology we have developed at University of Washington, and have used in several classes. This is a technology which is being used in the UW Algorithms class, so it is natural to extend the use of the technology to the remote offerings of the class. The basic idea for Classroom Presenter is to conduct classroom activities by having the students write (or type) on the lecture slides, and then have the students send their solutions back to the instructor in real time in class. The instructor can then view their solutions to assess their understanding, and then show selected solutions to the class. By showing the student solutions to the class, classroom discussion can take place around student work. The Tablet PC has been an ideal platform for the system, since it allows answers to be expressed in digital ink. This is important for many of the types of activities that come up in an Algorithms class. Several years ago, we received a grant from HP of a classroom set of TC1100 Tablet PCs, so we are able to deploy Tablets for the students to use in CSE 421. For the class at Beihang, we will have some Tablet PCs available - these can be shared in the classroom, with students working together on the activities. The newest version of the Classroom Presenter software also allows text based input, so laptops may also be used for student input. The UW CSE421 class will have some lectures where students use Tablet PCs for activities, and other lectures which are taught in a more traditional manner. For lectures where the UW used Tablet PCs for activities, the Beihang facilitator will stop the lecture when an activity is reached, and have the Beihang students do the activity, and submit it to the facilitator. The facilitator will then be able to show both solutions from Beihang, and selected solutions from the UW class. For lectures in the UW class that do not include student activities - there will be additional activity slides included for the Beihang class to do. This is because the UW instructor will ask students questions for verbal response, while in the Beihang class a similar effect can be achieved by having students submit electronic responses. This will increase the level of interaction in the Beihang class (and will also present a record that can be sent back to the UW instructor).
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Computer Science & Engineering University of Washington Box 352350 Seattle, WA 98195-2350 (206) 543-1695 voice, (206) 543-2969 FAX [comments to anderson] |
