Download - Course Mentoring: Toward Achieving Consistency in the Curriculum

Course Mentoring: Toward Achieving

Consistency in the Curriculum

Lucia DettoriSchool of CTI – DePaul University

Joint work with Amber Settle

ISECON November 4, 2004

Lucia Dettori DePaul -CTI 2

Outline

CTI 101 Who are we? Why do we need course mentors? The mentor’s responsibilities The technology Did it work? Where do we go from here?


C T I 101: some faCToIds

Computer Science Telecommunication Information Systems

Founded 1996

30 FT faculty20 PT faculty

1800 students

80 sections/quarter

Currently 2004

80 FT faculty100 PT faculty

3500+ students

250 sections/quarter

Fall 02: 22 sections of Java 1

CTI’s degrees at a glance

13 BA/BS

14 MS/MA


Content consistency : a must

Vertical nature of IT degreesJava 2 builds on Java 1 …

Shared introductory coursesDB1 serves CS, IS, NT …

Evolution of course content


Content consistency: a challenge

Multiple sections

Use of part time instructors in introductory courses

First time instructor of the specific course

Propagating content changes


Who is in charge? CTI structure

Faculty

1 Dean4 Associate Deans

UndergraduateCurriculumCommittee

GraduateCurriculumCommittee

Program CommitteesCS,IS,NT,IT,ECT,CGA,GAM,DC

“Cloud 9”


Rules for a successful solution

Scalable Easily extendable to many courses

Distributed/decentralized One person can’t do it all Multi-campus school

Flexible 5/13 BS degrees were introduced in the last

year, one more this year. New courses will need monitoring

Rewards/incentives


Course Mentors : the idea

Critical courses are assigned a course mentor

The course mentor is a fulltime faculty who has taught the course recently

Course mentor serves for a year for the purpose of continuity


The mentor’s responsibilities

Hold a pre and post-quarter meeting with all instructors

Populate and maintain a SharePoint website for the course

Be a proactive contact person for tech-staff

Give feedback about the course to the appropriate committees

IS315 Analysis & Design


The Share Point Course sites

The basics• Syllabus, week-by-week course coverage• Course guidelines, positioning of the course

Course material• Lecture notes, PPT, tutorials, links• Case studies, good examples• Assessment material, GAE

Discussion board

CSC211 Java Programming 1


If you build it will they come?

Over 60 course sites with the bare minimum were created

50% of the courses identified as needing a mentors got one

Active mentors made a difference First time instructor Spotting problems early (Codelab)

Relying on volunteers alone will not work in the long run


Cost neutral incentives

Fat bullet points (->money): the personnel committee has agreed to recognize mentoring as “going beyond the call of duty”

Teach what you want (->time): you are guaranteed to teach the course you are mentoring or any other you want


Where do we go from here

Improve functionalities of the site Add search tools Go beyond the “lecture” view, tied

material to learning goals instead Move to a database driven system

Improve usability to facilitate use by other departments (Math, PSY, …)

Develop a metric of incentives agreeable to the administration.