 here today to talk about teaching at the university. And I would like to ask you all if any of you would attend university as a student maybe recently or maybe you shared some experience. Could you put your hands up? Yeah, not many people but yeah I see some. So I hope that our talk would be interesting and maybe inspiring for others. And so in our talk we want to share experience from the courses that each of our panelists today panelists conducted recently. And we would like to share with you experience what went well, what would require some improvements in order to deliver things better. And so we have today Tomasz. He taught his student how to master Git. We have Sharka, she introduced student to fundamental of technical writings. We have Maria, she shared her wisdom about sorry development of intuitive user interface and David was teaching students about software quality. And so we would like to maybe inspire you with our talk today if you are having baggage of knowledge to share this knowledge in an open source way with students or if you are a student maybe you would be looking forward to interact with teachers like us. So the first question will be for me. Yes, I am Alexandra. I was also conducting a course together with Sharka and I see one more other teacher in the audience. So the first question for everybody. I can hear myself now. So tell us about your class and about the motivation. Tomasz, would you like to start? Yeah, I can do that. So this would work. So hey, I'm Tomasz, together with Irina Gulina. Hey Irina, if you are watching, we are teaching as Alex said, mastering Git. And the reason we picked it was because Git is such a core technology in the IT. And if you want to learn how to run, you first need to learn how to walk. And we try to teach the collaborative aspect of Git because that's what we do in our jobs every day, working all together on the software and everything. And every time we had a new people starting, we would need to teach them Git, the basics. So realized like why not just go to the university and teach it like right there. Yeah, thank you. Well, we were teaching a completely new course at the Maserik University with a group of colleagues about the fundamentals of technical writing. And the motivation for that was addressing the lack of widely available courses on this topic. And we thought it would be beneficial to bridge the gap between how the students are normally taught to write during the university or during their school studies and what is required for the technical writing industry. Our course was in English and was open for students with different backgrounds from a bachelor's to PhDs. And we also had attendees, not only from the Faculty of Informatics, but also from the Faculty of Arts. So, okay. I taught a course, Development of Intuitive User Interfaces with my colleagues. Also the motivation was pretty similar because there are not many courses about user experience, about user needs in the Faculty of Informatics. And we wanted to show students how important it is. Also, if you are a developer, you still are not developing your apps for yourself in many cases, majority of cases, but for your users. And we wanted to emphasize it in our course. Yeah, so as it was already stated, I was teaching software quality and my motivation was a little bit different. I'm a PhD student at Masarik University in the second year. And I would like to say that I had no other option, but it's only heavily recommended to help out with teaching. And my supervisor is actually the gardener of this class and she needed help with, hi, Barbara, she needed help with this course in the last two years. We were teaching students how to do testing, how to write good code, manage code, so also a little bit overlap with Tomas's things. Continuous integration, Maya helped us with some UX design as well. So we try to explain students how to write good stuff, good code. Yeah, that's cool. And I know that we all had some challenges during the conducting the course or maybe preparation. So would you like to share those challenges? Yeah, so not this year, but last year, we had 20 students applying to our seminar group and more than half of them, I think like 14 or 13 were already red-haters, either part-time juniors or interns. And we were struggling a little bit with Jakub, our former teacher, that what should we teach them? They already know all the things or we supposed to. And it was a little bit challenging to make it interesting for them. But on the other hand, they were really useful in a way that they could explain things already to the other students. So we created mixed groups of one or two red-haters with other students and they were actually helping us teach the rest of the people. So of course we encountered a lot of smaller or bigger challenges during our time. But what I wanted to mention today is that teachers are people too, so yeah. There is also like challenge for us, maybe some, maybe more for first-time teachers to get in front of people, to not be super stressed out, to be able to speak and actually perform that lesson. So one of my challenges was nervousness and some small anxieties, which can be of course, which can be of course done by some, if I have better preparation, and I will have in next semester, there is a lot of, there is less more stress. Thank you. We also had several challenges, but I would like to pick one specific because as we decided to teach the fundamentals of technical writing as an open source course in an open source way, it does not mean only using the open source tools, but it also means collaborating with a bigger group of people to get the best result possible. So we had a bunch of people preparing the syllabus, the slides, the lectures, and also being at the venue. So managing these multiple teachers in a classroom and also in a hybrid environment because we had some teachers also joining online and we also had one fully online lesson. This was kind of challenging in the aspect of time management and keeping the flow over the lectures and over the course. But I think that we succeeded in this, even though there are some improvements and we will address them in the future. Okay, our challenge, I would say it was kind of typical as everyone facing because so we had capacity 20 people and we got like 60 people who wanted to join. So we tried to make a homogeneous group so that they would be on the same level. We failed, obviously. So that forced us to change the course basically on the fly. So one hour before the lecture, we updated slides or something like that. And I think that worked out pretty well, especially when we started every lecture with a question, no, with a set of questions from the previous ones. So that we would be sure that they still are following and learned from the previous parts. And that worked really well, but at the same time, I mean, we were correcting homeworks in the night and in the morning, five minutes before the lecture, talking to Irina, like what we want to actually do today. Yeah, that was crazy. Yeah, thank you. That were interesting challenges actually. And so I know that in the university sometimes people are giving a lot of things to students which are not actually then usable in the life, in life, in the career. So what do you think, how we can bridge this gap in between academic knowledge and the real IT world? Answer? Yeah, thank you. In my opinion, I would like to stress teaching the real skills that are oftentimes called as the soft skills. What I mean by that is collaboration, communication, feedback, giving and receiving it. Time management, because your overall success in your career depends on so much more than just the student's expert level of knowledge. You also have to have all this package of skills that are needed to, and we as a teachers, we can implement it into our lectures too as we try to do it in the fundamentals of technical writing. And I would like to mention also having real life scenarios, simulating them for the students, showing them a typical workflow so they have a better overview of what's been done and how and they can also bring their inputs on improvements. And I think that working towards something that is really applicable, that has an impact is also a very important thing because imagine all the time and energy that both the students and the teachers put in the lectures. Wouldn't it be great if this time and energy didn't go to waste, but it could be really used for something practical? And I also think that universities should focus on specialized workshop and lifelong learning. Thank you, Sharika. Yeah, that's a very good point, especially with the soft skills because we have these courses in our companies, but this is not being taught in universities which is, I would say, really odd. And I mean, I would really appreciate something like that when I was studying, but I would like to add on top of that, like doing events like this, for example, DefCon, that it's free, it's on the university so students can come here and learn basics of some technologies and reach out to people and also what we were doing, like teaching at the university. I know that one of the feedback we got was when we tried to say what we are doing in our day-to-day job, like how we are using it and how we are solving these complex things, like students really love that and say that that really helped them to understand why they are learning this technology or how it's being used in our jobs. Yeah, great, thank you. We will come back to feedback slightly later, but first I want to ask Sharika Maria, what learning experience did students get from the course? So, our course. So, as Sharika said, we gave them an opportunity to, at the end of our course, to have like real life projects and we somehow guided them from the very beginning from the idea through the entire designing process where they were gathering feedback, they were gathering information about their users that they were creating this app for till the implementation itself. So, we guided them through the entire process and in the end they had this project that they can showcase like in their portfolio and it helped them really stay focused during the entire course. In our course, the students gain some basic knowledge and expertise in technical writing which might be beneficial for them if they want to choose this career path or even if they do not want to, they want to become developers because it might be also they work to write a documentation. But as an enhancement that I would see, especially in our course, was the part that our students were able to create their first small portfolio with which they could apply for their first job or that they could reference as developers to have a look how a proper documentation should be written. And I also think that we gave them a very detailed feedback because all of the reviewers put a lot of effort in giving exact, specific feedback, a lot of suggestions so they can improve. And I especially liked the last part of our course which was delivering the last assignment through Git and GitHub. And the students normally or when I was student, I used to know that I have this only one chance to be successful to deliver some papers and work and we made it more agile way as we are used to when we are working at Red Hat or any other companies. When the students submitted their poll request, reviewers took a look at this, they gave them some feedback, push it back to the students so they can implement it and this cycle could go on and on until the students actually reached the level we wanted from them. So it was like, oh, your work sucks and F, goodbye. It was like, oh yeah, it would be better to implement this and this and I think that's the good point. Yeah, that actually was like that. And getting back to feedbacks, if you are student, please fill in this form and we also received a feedback from student and what was actually the feedback from the students? So thankfully, overall feedback for our course was very positive. They actually enjoyed that our lessons were interactive but of course everything can be like more interactive always. So that was something that they enjoyed and they learned a lot during those activities. What's more, also that our course was project based so they actually had think at the end that they can showcase. That was also a really great thing for them and some of them also mentioned that us giving them feedback and actually leading them or guiding them through the entire process. Not just, okay, this is better, just do something else or maybe next homework will be better but giving them detailed feedback the way Sharca said that helped them a lot and kind of opened their eyes in some ways because these people were software engineers that they were in designers. Before that they didn't really think about users, about usability of their apps and during, for example, user testing, they realized, okay, my lecturer said it's not good because of that and that but when their peers tested their app, they realized, okay, that makes sense. And yeah, sorry, I'm like. Go ahead. Yeah, we also conducted a survey for our students to ask how the lessons were and after finishing the course, we invited them to an informal session to get even more feedback and we were happy that it was overall positive, that the course was engaging and inspiring but what was the important part of the feedback for us is that almost 90% of the students want to be more involved during the lectures to have more activity, which means for us for the next run to cut down the content and extend more meaningful exercises. Yeah, thank you. I know we received more feedback but we don't have much time left so I will continue with the questions, sorry. So what was the actual lesson learned and what would we do better next time? Yeah, so in my opinion, what we learned is to be more interesting for the students and again, it relies back to the feedback part to read your feedback and learn from it and the other thing is regarding technology that you shouldn't give your students assignments that can be sold by chat GPT. Throwing technical writers more under the bus right now, sorry for that. So we need to try these things out if our lessons are solvable by chat GPT or other AI services and try to make it more interactive and interesting for the students. Sharpa also wanted to say something. Well actually, chat GPT was not the issue in our course because it was not able to solve our homework assignments but we learned a lot about giving the homework assignments as a group of reviewers. Every week we had to review almost 18 assignments which was a huge work to do and we know that for the next time we have to be more specific on what the reviewers should focus on because as technical writers we are used to be focused on detail when conducting peer reviews so for us it's normal but for the students it's the first time writing something like that or technical documentation so we have to probably lower our expectations or adjust more to the students' needs maybe prepare them with a set of small exercises throughout the lecture so that they are able afterwards to make the homework assignment and also we have to and I think we succeed in this to grant a fair grading within various reviewers and also throughout the course but I think it was not the issue. Yeah, thank you. So and getting back to bridging the gap between knowledge and IT, real IT world what skills teachers should focus on to give the students, to teach students yeah. Yeah, so we were programming so I'm gonna talk about the programming part I'm not sure about the technical writing regarding languages I guess it's English but in our case I think universities are trying to focus on more like teaching the language than the logic behind it and I think it is a bad thing the way we are hiring people at Red Hat interns going through intern reviews intern reviews it's getting more focused on one language one specific technology and I feel like we are teaching students to work with one technology instead of having a broad perspective and trying to work with multiple technologies trying to find the right tools for the right context. Well, I will repeat myself but I would definitely stick to giving and getting feedback because it's a very valuable skill and also maybe that the students are not that fixed on the outcome more like on the way to getting there. I would add also implement that feedback. So and the next question how well we were talking about that how we taught how we but we did not touch how we get involved so how can other IT experts can be involved in teaching? I know Tomas would like to answer. Okay, IT experts involved in teaching so yeah, participate in conferences and then maybe when you realize that you know something that other people should know or other people are coming to you and want to learn about it maybe think about approaching universities and start teaching there and you can really just start small like if you are working on some open-source software as service or library tool make sure that your readme is very good you have contributing MD so that even beginners can come there and try to contribute and use your software and what really also works for us in our project is make sure that we have chat so that anyone can ask questions can create issues saying I don't understand this, please explain and you can even set up video calls with these people and start there and maybe approach the next part like speaking at conferences and then teaching at universities. Just a quick thing so right now if you are a UX designer or a UX researcher I'm looking for a person to teach UX part of my course for next semester so how to get involved? Come to me and tell me you want to teach. Thank you. So and we don't have much time and the last question would be actually about how what is the future of the curriculum design at the university? I know David has a lot to say. Yeah so I already mentioned the language agnostic thing so I would add that here as well also we need to teach students how to learn continuously and never stop learning because I think there are multiple IT experts in the room imagine that you would stop learning today how long could you stay in your current job without losing it? Also so continuous learning that's the second one and maybe the third one is soft skills as Sharika mentioned already we need them a lot, even me. That's kind of what we have for you today I hope you got inspired maybe you have some questions. Yes? So do I understand correctly you are asking if we are trying to inspire students if the students inspire us who went to answer Sharika? Yeah we actually had this because for our assignments we had for example some idea how it could look like but one or two people delivered a solution that was like wow that's even better I would implement it right away so it was a big surprise for us but I actually think those people were able at the end of the course to apply for a job so I think we both the teachers and the students did great job because after this half semester course they got some fundamentals and they were able to expand them. Thank you. Any more questions? Yes please. So the question basically is if the AI influence in a negative way for computer science future right? Yeah AI will not take away your jobs in my belief so if you have a hammer that you use for coding right now you're gonna have a jackhammer for the same job in the future you still need that person who operates the jackhammer and you can actually you don't have the robot I mean you might have the robot in the future but it's a tool that helps us and if you ever tried it for coding I'm not sure if anybody tried coding with AI any hands no? Okay how easy was to debug the code if it was bad? Was it easier than a person's or not? Because in my opinion it was much much harder because you can talk to the person and the person actually sometimes gives you wild answers you can have a discussion with it AI can explain it to you but not always understands what it's saying. Did I answer your question? Thank you. I don't know do we have more time? No? If we have any more question. Yeah. Yeah so the question basically was if the students are not learning but giving all the let's say homeworks or to the AI? Is it correct? Yeah basically if students will stay motivated I guess yeah I can have a one word answer for it, money. If you understand these technologies and you can look into the stack lower it's always valued better in my opinion. So if somebody will just try to go around the things they will they will struggle with finding jobs because AI already taken it over but if you actually understand those technologies and you can utilize it better we can supersede the AI in this always at least for now. Okay maybe say it in different words like coding is just one part of the job like when I'm doing my work coding is I know 10% I still need to go to meetings talk to people write emails like create diagrams and all these things yeah maybe AI will do that in 10 years everything and I can just chill out in Malibu somewhere but right now we still need these people to do all the work and just the coding is the AI can do like yeah it can help us but it's not replacing us at all. Did that answer the question? Well those students not passing so that's it who just cutting the corners and not doing the job. I saw one more question, yes. It's not about these meta tools that software developers use. So it's kind of an impact because it goes into a lot of these tools and it stretches the surface but people at least know that this is important and they get these sources and where to find more information. Yeah so the comment was that the MIT University created a course which is consists of missing meta tools, yes. So yeah that's I also think that's neat and last comment. Yeah so thank you for this comment. Actually on this faculty where I studied before my PhD there was a course called IVS Practical Aspects in Software Development where they were teaching exactly these things. UNIX Philosophy, Git and all the sugar around. Yeah I think we agree with you and that made me apply to Red Hat. And I think we are out of time but we are still here around a little bit longer and if you see us please talk to us. Thank you.