Education Projects
I have led several projects during many years of teaching. Some of these projects are listed below:
1. Exam database: This is crucial to effectively, efficiently and fairly evaluate student skills. I developed approximately 85 multiple-choice questions, 30 of which are typically chosen for the semester’s final exam. A great deal of effort was exerted to ensure that questions were comprehensive and based on lecture notes and tutorials.
2. Course delivery: I have adopted a student centered approach in delivering the lectures. Students reacted favorably to this approach and actively participated in all discussions. Tutors were requested to act as facilitators rather than act out the traditional teacher-student class scenario where the student is the recipient and not an active participant. As such, students were given an opportunity to explore their understanding and evaluate the degree of understanding.
3. Introducing peer assessment and role playing: This form of assessment helps to develop students’ analytical skills, reflect on their understanding and develop the ability of both understanding and evaluating other people’s work. Blackboard was adapted in a novel way to allow student groups to submit their deliverables and for the peer groups to “pick-up” the deliverable and subsequently submit their evaluation of the submission. The students thus had the opportunity to play the role of developer and inspector which reflects the role they may have to take in industry.
4. Developing criteria based assessment: All submissions are assessed on set criteria and these criteria were made available to students within the first few teaching weeks. This meant developing criteria for the each of the roles students played, namely: customers, developers and inspectors. While I developed the criteria, they were further refined by the academic team who assisted in clarifying the criteria. This improved the quality of the identified criteria in addition to increasing the teams’ commitment and understanding.
5. Developing games as tutorial exercises: Students form team and compete to "win" the most points and ultimately the prize (chocolate) by developing the best software engineering artifact (e.g. elicitation questions, negotiation plan...etc).
6. Developing a FAQ sheet: Blackboard was utilized to create a discussion forum students are encouraged to not only post questions but also respond to each others postings. The head tutor was responsible for collating the questions and answers making sure that they were categorized in a meaningful way.
The primary purpose of these projects is to support coordination and lecturing small (up to 40) and large undergraduate (up to 360 students enrolled) and graduate (up to 120 students enrolled) courses.