4 ms·

This will never work because it absolutely fails to scale, at a time when we have a complete lack of computing educators. Customized projects for each student?

• FuckButtons 6y ago
  So much this: cs61a at Berkeley for example has almost 2000 students in a single class, the idea of personalized anything with that many students is total unfeasible.
  • Findeton 6y ago
    I thought in the US people paid money for going to university, so that classes are well-funded enough... /sarcasm
    • FuckButtons 6y ago
      Berkeley is a public university, so many students qualify for federal aid and wind up paying very little or nothing at all,the full cost of in state tuition to those who can afford it is about $6000 per semester.
  • LudwigNagasena 6y ago
    This is ridiculous. Why do Americans pay thousands of dollars for a bit fancier version of MOOC? When I studied we had 200 people on a course sitting on lectures, 30 on practical sessions and everyone could have a personal session during the professor’s office hours. There is some kind of a massive waste of money going on.
• unishark 6y ago
  I think it can be automated in the more basic courses at least. But wouldn't solve the problem of students getting someone else to do the project for them anyway.
• gravypod 6y ago
  Most code reviews I've done at work take between 5 minutes to 10 minutes. To assume the worst possible case of 200 students, 20 deliverable per student, and a 10 minutes meeting per MR you'd be at ~28 days (~84 8hr-days). Get 1 TA and you now have 42 days of the semester dedicated to 1:1 time (35%) and the remainder of the semester dedicated to producing learning content. Learning content (lecture videos, etc) can be produced ahead of time and in this case you can replace this with more 1:1 tutoring time effectively allowing you to give each student ~10hr (10 min * 20 sessions * 1/.35) direct 1:1 time over the course. From the students perspective all they need to do is: 1. Write a "project proposal" where they define a project, define goals, schedule a checkin with you to see if that project is large enough (1/20th the grade of the class) 2. Watch lecture videos and go through exercises on their own time. 3. Write code and bring it in to teacher. (18/20th of their grade) 4. Demo their finished project to professor (1/20th their grade) This does work for later classes. I never had the ability to test this workflow out for earlier (100-level) classes as all of those classes I TA'd for followed the same model you're talking about. The 200+ level classes that followed the model I'm talking about had ~10% to 30% pass rate which was in line (~2x) with the pass rate of similarly leveled courses from our college's Math and Physics department which was used as a sanity check. edit: that's not to say you're incorrect that it would be difficult to do at scale, this is just the way I've seen it done at moderate scale (20 to 40 students).
  • quiescant_dodo 6y ago
    Code reviews I have done for unrelated bits of code often take me 90 minutes. And that's for code that fits into the idea of my product space, but not super familiar to my everyday life. I don't think 5-10 minutes is anywhere close to reasonable.
  • a-nikolaev 6y ago
    The hard part is giving the student meaningful feedback. Especially to those who don't understand something important. It takes time to understand what they do and don't understand, and explain it at their level.
  • unishark 6y ago
    It's easy (even a bit fun) to grade and give feedback for good students. Meanwhile it's a huge pain to do for the weak students. You need to first figure out what they heck they're trying to do before you can tell them how to fix it, which may take a lot. I suspect code reviews for professionals is much more like the good student category. If you're asking the students to define unique projects themselves, you run into new problems as students dig up the most obscure blogs they can find on the internet to download and give you. It's a never-ending adversarial struggle.