February 2010 - Volume 9 Issue 1

Editorial by Alan Poulter
University of Strathclyde

The papers in this issue cover a fascinating range of problems and potential solutions in teaching.  I am sure that programming robots is a powerful learning scenario and papers by Gold and Gandy give examples of this.  Gold reports on a successful attempt to provide students with the motivation to engage in group work by using the scenario of competing programming teams writing software to drive racing robots.  The paper gives a thought provoking list of all the possible pitfalls for the unwary lecturer in this adventure.  A buoyant paper from Gandy covers a prize winning initiative to get students working in groups, competitively programming Mindstorm robots using Java.  While the course was popular with students, it was also a draw for school children visiting the University on Open Days.

Another approach to the thorny problem of a lack of student engagement are small-group tutorials.  While the timetabling of tutorial groups of 10 students from a range of courses proved a headache, McCourt and Carr show that the tutorials provided personal support for students struggling with their initial engagements with algorithms and coding.  Kuzma reports on a project to create a suite of video ‘tutorials’ for a distance learning delivery.  They were intended to save staff time in repeating the same information with a succession of student enquirers and make practical help more flexibly available to distance students.  In practice, neither community found the tutorials as effective as they expected.  Some staff felt that making the tutorials took more time than answering ad hoc questions, while students found it frustrating searching through the video tutorials for the answers they wanted.  Also investigating student motivation, Jeffcoate conducted a deep analysis of student participation and engagement in an online course for working students.  What she reveals in her conclusions are not startling - the need to make course material relevant to the tasks students undertake in their employment and to enable students to pace the course to their own needs – but the process of discovery of these requirements is extremely well researched.

Stefanidis and Fitzgerald lament the fall in recruitment on information systems (IS) courses over the past decade.  Their proposed reason for this was an ossification of the IS curriculum during this period.  The authors have attempted a classification of the modules on IS in order to investigate topic entropy in the discipline.  What they find is certainly ‘muddy’, but a core does appear to be there.  Nelson and Fatimazahra present an in-depth review of papers on the pedagogy issues peculiar to teaching databases: anyone starting out teaching this topic would be well advised to read this paper before planning their instructional design.  Ivanovic and Putnik produce some interesting conclusions from their paper looking at engaging female students in the computer science curriculum.  While the issue of how to attract female applicants is not addressed, the paper makes clear which combinations of curriculum elements serve best to retain and motivate female students.

Finally, Gordon looks at WebPA which is a tool for peer and self assessment within group work.  The paper shows how the tool works in detail and reveals it’s plus and minus points. If you are buried by marking group work, this paper is worth a read.

Download the whole editorial in PDF Document

Download the whole issue in PDF Document