Home
--- Introduction
--- Content Summary
--- Acknowledgements

Context
--- Teaching Philosophy
--- Institutional Context

Course Structure
--- Aims, Objectives, Content
--- Delivery Methods
--- Assessment

Reflection
--- Commenting on Content
--- Use of Voting Handsets
--- Laboratory Examination
--- Written Examination
--- Continuous Assessment
--- Overcoming Blocks

Outcomes
--- New course rationale
--- Personal learning

Why use handsets?

Learning to program is as much about skill-development as it is about the acquisition of knowledge and understanding – skills such as reading code, identifying and eliminating errors, developing algorithms, and then coding them in a programming language. In this sense, developing skills is a major content element of the course. Skill development requires active engagement by each student – and real understanding comes after these activities, when reflecting on the activities. During their skill development, students will get it wrong, frequently. At this point, they need feedback and encouragement to maintain enthusiasm and to try again.

Lectures are typically places where ideas are introduced, knowledge is transferred, and skills are demonstrated. Students are relatively passive bystanders, and there is little to no interaction. I view this as a problem in my programming course, where there are four hours of lectures for every three hours of labs/tutorials. Due to constraints within the University, the structure of the course is fixed, and so I have been working to make the best use of the lecture time to develop skills rather than simply convey ideas and demonstrate skills.

The use of an EVS aims to address the two key elements of skill development – early engagement and swift provision of individualised feedback

Question styles used in the course

This Powerpoint presentation contains artefacts from the course – EVS questions that I have asked in various different lectures. I have given some idea of the context of their use, and explained how I think they fit this idea of skill development as part of the content of a programming course. To review the artefacts and my comments, view the presentation in edit mode - the slides contain the questions, and the lecturer's notes pane contains my commmentary.

Re-considering my use of the handsets

Originally, I thought that voting questions would test whether the students were learning the material that I was lecturing. Answering questions was their opportunity to see if they had grasped what I had just talked about - by having a go at it. I have often been dissappointed by how few questions the students did get correct, ascribing this variously to poor lecturing, poor questions, or poor students (obviously the latter being the most comfortable for me). Increasingly though, I see that I've been expecting a bit much of the students... they have only just heard about the new concepts and they have a short time to consider and submit their answer - hence it is hardly surprising that they often answer incorrectly. A student comment in a questoinnaire corroborates this new viewpoint:

"... Personally I never judged my performance on the basis of the answers to questions that I gave in class using the handsets, as I quite often found that I didnt properly grasp the material during the lecture, because for me most of the ideas were totally new, so until I had taken some time to study over the material myself I didnt fully understand it, hence, an incorrect answer in class cannot be used as an accurate judge of performance. This is not to say that I didnt find the handsets in class useful, because they were, in the sense that they keep people "on the ball" so to speak..."

This speaks volumes about my particular style of use. They keep the students awake and engaged, which I both observed, and understood from student feedback, but the fact that they weren't getting the questions correct shouldn't be a cause for concern.

The key question now is - how to get more students to be like this student and study over the material outside the lecture? I had hoped that the lecture and handset work would really help embed some of the concepts - but I see now that in this form, the students' own work outside the lecture must be supported.