 I just joined CDF as an assistant professor. I just want to share with you some things I have learnt in the last few years, some due to practical experience which all of us have, but a lot due to formal research and literature review. And there is this huge field, I should say fields out there in discipline based education research. So, general education research has been around for 50 if not 100 years, but education research groups in physics, in computer science where the technical experts like physicists who have a PhD in physics or computer scientists who have a masters of PhD in computer science are now tackling the problem of how do students learn, how do and how do we effectively use it to teach better. So, let us see what to do. So, the first thing is there is no single prescription for good teaching, we know that right. So, before going on to the next slide, I want to briefly spend a few minutes on what problems are there in class. And I heard some in the last few days from your presentations etcetera, but maybe we can just get started and anybody who wants to raise their hand or even otherwise pick up the mic and say something. Yes. Right. Okay. Sure. So, varying backgrounds of, well maybe lack of preparation and goes with that is another student who has probably done three courses. So, let us discuss this issue a lot that was one of my first points, other problems before I mean I just made up a list, but I want to hear from you before throwing you my list. You have more points you say, okay. Sir. Okay. Okay. So, if there is no motivation or genuine internal inspiration to be a good teacher, a person is not going to put efforts in trying to become a better teacher. So, yes you may be a very very noisy teacher in the beginning, but if you really want to be a good teacher, you will put in your efforts and try to be a better teacher. Okay. So, there will be some focus towards students that yes I want to give my best to the students if that is not present in any amount of effort is not going to be of any use. Okay. Fine. If the faculty is going to give the next day when they get a better face job, then there is no point in making efforts. While I agree with you and this is what I have written in my paper also, but let me give you a brief description because your statement and even my observation in the paper presumes that people who get a job in industry are tremendously motivated, that is absolute nonsense because even in the jobs there are categorization. So, there are for example, I seek a job in the process. Right. Or the pro. I don't get it. I get it in a smaller place. I assure you that the motivation of such people is always much lower than the motivation of people who get the job that they want and consequently just as we claim that many teachers are looking for opportunity elsewhere, most professionals are also looking for opportunity elsewhere. Please understand that. In fact, if you look at the longevity of a person in a job profile, then teachers have a larger longevity than many of the young professionals at this university. That's true. So, please understand that motivation is a generic problem and I would state the problem as motivation to do well whatever you have got to do. So, one thing is you get to know what you like to do. The real life is you have to learn to like to know what you get to do. It is true as much for teaching as it is for any other field in my submission. The motivation is a generic problem and I agree with you. Yeah. And there are again a couple of suggestions. I won't say solutions, suggestions that I have thought about, but let's just elicit a couple of more problems. Anybody else? Student motivation. Student motivation. Okay. Okay. So, you sense motivated and there are students who have to be encouraged. Okay. So, these different styles of students. Right. I think they are varying categories. Right. Let me just show you some things that I put here and it's a lot of them are what you just said. When I say varying levels of students, I include both what you just said as well as varying levels in terms of background preparation what the person right in the beginning said. The second one, I didn't hear this in the last few days. So, maybe you all have really exceptional students, but I've always faced this problem that students at least in the back benches or somewhere that you know, I mean they fall asleep and in the front they just zone out. They're not thinking. Okay. So, what do you do about it? One way is to just say, well, it's their problem or something else. Then the next one is students goals. You might complain that all students want is they want good marks, they want to pass their exams. So, that is a problem. And the fourth one goes to the teacher's motivation in some way that we have all these issues. So, why on earth, in all these slides when I say I or you, I mean teachers, why should we be here? Why should we be doing this job? So, these are just some problems I've listed. And the next slide I want to show you is more of a, yeah. Notice that students sometimes they don't know why they joined a field. Yeah. They just joined because they- It's the hot field. Yeah. Or they didn't get the choice but they opted for and they come, they had students who said I was interested in architecture, I ended up in IT, I don't like IT. Yeah. And so, I'm just here. I don't know what I want to do in life. So, I have no clue. Yeah. So, those students are much more difficult. They are difficult, right. So, the next slide is again- I have one more point. Yes, please. For most of the students, in fact, I mean, as she said, there are students who want to do this or that. But I think large proportion of students are those who really don't know anything about what they like. So, they are just there in the flow, you know, because everybody else in the country wants to be an engineer. So, they want to be an engineer. Then everybody else wants to be in a better institute. So, they want to be in a as better institute as possible and in a better field. So, there is no consideration given to their own liking, you know. This is especially true in first year. By the time they come to their third and fourth year, their ideas are a little better. Again, everybody wants to do management. So, they want to do management. Still, it's true. But in the first year, we see this a lot. Yeah. If they get adapted to whatever they had to do. Okay. So, the next slide I want to show is again a guideline or a framework. And in, okay, I'll just flash this and then I'll put the two slides with each other. So, as teachers, what we have to do is take into account both particular populations. That means a small college is going to be very different than COEP Pune, as well as individual differences in the class between the students. So, this is something we can't get away from and we'll be doing a disservice to students if we just completely ignore the problem. This is again still not, how do I go about doing it? So, that's of course the biggest problem. But in terms of philosophy or what is it that we should be doing, I think it's really essential that we need to take into account. Again, for students falling asleep, I think we need to set our expectations early and just be consistent with them. So, if we want students to be mentally active and preferably even physically active, then we just need to expect that from them. And this is something where I personally am not willing to compromise that. Well, yes, okay, you're tired, you had a long night, but this is the one hour in class, you just have to do it. And I will do my best, I'll help you to do it, but this is my expectation. The third thing is we really need to know what our students goals are. In the sense, do they want to do management after four years? Do they want to go take up a job? Are they here? If they're here only because their parents force them, what is it that they might, they really want? They themselves may not be familiar with it, but maybe let's talk to them and find out. So, if you have a class of about even up to 50, it's very easy to get to talk to them right outside class. By the way, what are your class sizes? Just throw me numbers. Around 60. Could be 40 sometimes, no? 60, 70, okay, fine. 60 to 80 is okay. So, then maybe you may not know all of them, but maybe the few, even if 20 students, what happens is right at the end of a lecture, you always see students clustering around the professor. So, come five minutes early, go 10 minutes late. If there's some other class going on there, take your informal discussion outside. But being there a little before time is very crucial. Just 10 minutes before, go and stand outside the class. And you'll invite students to come and talk to you. The moment they know you're approachable. And in those conversations, I find them really invaluable because that's where you get to know their goals, why they're here, and get them to talk. And finally, I've said here, what are your goals as teachers? And I mean two things here. We'll come to that in the end. One is what are your goals for the classroom? And second is what is your personal goals? Why are you in this profession at all? So, if I put these two slides together, the problems as well as the framework, really there is something similar we are talking about. For every problem, we do have another problem really. Even this framework is another engineering problem. Because well, I say it's a guideline, but how do I go about doing it? But there seems to, when I was thinking about this, I just felt that there seems to be a match between these two. Except that the second column of theirs seems to be more constructive. In the sense, we would want to find a solution to the second list of questions. If I reframe the question as to, well, I have all these problems, what on earth am I supposed to do? Versus, what is it that I really want to do? I think I'll be a little more motivated to find an answer. All right. So, this is our main problem. All of this is good in theory, but what do I do? So, I think let's just go through a few exercises. I didn't want to lecture much and sort of have a match between the form and function. So, I'm going to throw out three questions and seventh standard algebra perhaps. Look at, I don't want you to answer this that comes next. But look at the three questions and just tell me your thoughts about it. This is the first one, this is the second one and this is the third one. Take a couple of minutes, read them. Seventh or eighth standard coordinate geometry, maybe six. You don't really have to bother solving it right now, but I want to hear your thoughts and especially similarities and differences, but just general thoughts are also okay. Similarities, what's common between the three? Same topic, same subject content. So, we need to talk about slope of a straight line and we are doing it. So, what's the difference between these? The difficulty is different. Anything else? The third one. So, if you look at the first two, both involve some calculation. So, the difference I saw between the first two, the second one does look a little more difficult than the first one, but the difficulty at the calculational level. Because the first one, it's passing through the origin, I can look at it and without even doing any calculation, I can say, well, this is the answer. The second one, I either have to pull out a pen or a calculator if I'm a seventh standard student, so there is an order of difficulty, but this is in one dimension and the dimension is the calculational dimension. So, at the college level, it could be this problem is harder because the integral is harder or this, I'm not very familiar with computer science examples, so I'll just stick to this. The third, okay, the other difference between the first two is the mode of representation. The first one is visual or graphical. The second one is purely algebraic. So, there is a dimension there that's different and so again, here going back to the different styles of learners that somebody brought up, why not we have a mix of questions, some which have a visual representation, some graphical, some calculational, some verbal also and all of us, all engineers need to know all representations. So, this is a slight aside, but to give a very hard question to an expert, a content expert, maybe a professor in IIT and it's a question which he or she is familiar with, but they don't know how to answer it right away. You give them this question and I've tried this at IIT and other places. Do you know the first thing, and he guesses on the first thing that they'll do? Just take a guess, Professor Fatouk. I don't know. If you've got a very hard question or just think about some things you will do, how will you solve them? So, the very first thing all professors do, whatever they feel, they are not humanities professors. These are engineers and mathematicians. And they draw a picture. They don't write an equation. They don't think of a concept. They just draw a cartoon of the situation. Not all of them. Okay, a lot of them, but we just read this in literature and we just went around asking some 20 people and it was very shocking that this actually happened. So, and engineers and scientists we are trained, we need to be able to deal with different representations. We have to be able to deal with graphs. In small questions. And what to do with these questions we'll talk about later. The third question is harder but in a very different dimension. It's an extremely conceptual question. So, as you just said that you really need to understand what a slope is because a very common answer would be A is different since it has a 6 and the others have a 4. So, when you're teaching a concept, if you want to tackle people of different levels, one thing you could do is try to prepare your lecture so that there is something very challenging as well as something very basic in the same, let's say 20 minute exposition of the concept. It's very, very hard work. I'm not saying that all this is easy. So, in terms, it's hard in terms of the preparation but A, it does pay out and B, it's very easy once you're in the classroom. You don't have to think about, okay, what's... the student is not understanding. You can't do this every concept but whenever possible we need to try to engage the ones who have taken three courses in C programming and are getting bored. So, this third question, even somebody who has done three courses in C programming or the equivalent, this question will be interesting even for them because immediately their wheels will start turning. Okay, next I'm going to throw out a question. This is one of the basic things in C++ programming. Maybe you'll do this the first day and it's a multiple choice question. I want you all to actually think and answer. The first thing I want, the first time what I want you to do is I'll flash it maybe for 30 seconds and as soon as you know the answer, hold out the answer in front of your chest. So, it will be 1, 2, 3, 4. This is going to be 1, 2, 3 and 4. No raised hands, please, just in front because I want to be able to see everybody. 30 seconds. Now what I want you to do is turn to your neighbor and if your answer is different convince them of your answer or be convinced of their answer. If your answer is the same, talk to your next neighbor. Come on. And I'll tell you the distribution. Okay, approximate distribution was this. I think there was two here. Okay, everybody talked to their neighbor. Those of you who had different answers, now you have to converge on one answer. And I would not really be showing you this if you were my students. Okay, so let's vote again. Vote again, please, very quickly. What's the answer to the same question? 1, 2, 3, go. I still see differences, but okay, excellent. So, what has happened? I'll tell you the new distribution now. So, I'll tell you the old and the new distributions and then we'll talk about what really happened. See, so the old distribution is on the top and the new one is at the bottom. So, two things have happened. Firstly, in fact these results, I think I didn't draw it really well, but they were a little more radical. In the beginning, I saw about four or five ones, about three or four answer fours and one, two, one, three, etc. In the end, I saw two people with four and everybody else has one. So, Professor Fatuk, what is the right answer? Five. Exactly, because it's not a floating point. Right, but when you say five, doesn't C++ automatically take it as an integer? I think in C, it used to be... So, if you don't do... Okay, what about in C? What about in C? I can... See, the answer is going to be 21 because all the values involved are integers. Exactly. So, we haven't written it as five point, or five point zero. So, when you're teaching your students about floating points and integer values, how to declare values. Okay, give them the five minute classification and usually, classifications get really boring if you're sitting and listening and then do this question. So, to do this exercise, to do the voting twice, it took me about four and a half minutes. Which could be... It's a little expensive in a one-hour class. But, so we'll see how to put these in the class later. But, what happened here, a few things happened. You talk to each other, so you started learning from each other. And, most of the research in cognitive science say, and it's also common sense that you don't learn by passively sitting. You learn when you are actively engaging yourself. So, it's called active learning, active engagement, interactive engagement. There are many names by which it goes. And, when I had you to talk to each other, in fact, I was a little disappointed. I usually in a class, well, you have fewer people and you're adults, but in a class of 60 students, the classroom becomes chaotic. And you measure the amount of... I mean, this is a... Somebody was thinking of a research project to measure the amount of learning happening by the decibel in the class. But, it's really fun. It's very chaotic. Be prepared for it. Don't be scared that everybody is talking. It sends the message to students that learning is a cooperative social process, which it is so, at least for the experts in the field. There is a time for exams and individual work, but there is also when you're actually learning, you're learning from each other. Thirdly, when you teach... Well, I'll just say this. One of the best ways to learn is to teach a subject. We all know that as teachers. And, any new thing if you want to learn, there's a class on it and you'll become an expert in it. So, that's the advantage for the people who are teaching. The students who are advanced in the class, who have taken three classes, they're happy because now they are the experts. They immediately are trying to convince their neighbors. And, this is a very low stress friendly way of doing it. These questions, by the way, we don't grade them. And, if you have more expensive equipment, there are these things called clickers. These are the audience response things. So, we have those and we have infrared sensors and this distribution I showed you on the camera, that you can get as a histogram which automatically gets recorded. Usually, I don't show students the pre-distribution. I don't show it to them because I don't want to bias them. So, here if you saw it, most of it were in number one. So, I really don't want to bias you. But, sometimes I do show it to them at the end just to show how dramatic it was that there was a big wide distribution and now it's become narrow. Another point with this is that, yes, as an instructor, even after the second round of voting, I saw two or three hands who had said number four. Which means I know that there is still a problem with this concept. So, it's very valuable feedback for me. If it's only a few, I can target them outside a class. But, let's say 30% of the class still is giving a wrong answer. I know that well, I really can't proceed further unless this point is clear. So, it's feedback for the instructor also. So, this method is called peer instruction and it was popularized by Eric Mazur from Harvard University primarily in a physics class. And it started in a physics class and there's about 10 years worth of research results on how people learn if even you do one of these questions per one hour lecture. So, it turns out that even having one of these in a one hour lecture, it seems it did change the results on a final exam in the similar topic. And there are many papers I gave it to Professor Fart of the other day and if you're interested, maybe I'll just compile these and put it on a website. It's right now, it's very, it's not coherent and focused enough. So, I'll just spend a few minutes doing it. So, is this something you would be willing to try? See two or three heads. Okay. Let's get these questions. Now, if you are a physicist teaching introductory physics, I would say go look at this library, it's online, it's free, take this book from the library. So, because 10 years worth of work has gone into it, people have developed these repositories. In computer science, to be honest, I didn't find anything, so the way I picked up this question and the one after this, I just was looking at multiple choice questions from exams, previous exams all over the world. I only use Google, by the way, for my literature search, I was too lazy to go to the library. But all this is free, open information available. I found Rutgers University, CS 110, semester 1, test 2, something like that. So, people post their exams sometimes online. Yeah, this also, and I'll show you the next two also, and the next two are from some other university. So, one of my personal projects is in the next one year, I'd like to work with Professor Fartik in CS 101, and I'd like to develop a library of these questions, maybe with some content experts, if you think. And, exactly. So, this can be a side project. As soon as you see some questions, send it, test it out, see what the response was. We just need to first develop a library of just questions, and then we can do research on how good is this question versus that question, and things like that. So, things to that detail are available in mathematics and physics, at the introductory college level. For a given topic, you have 10 questions. This one has a success rate of so much. This one is more useful in teaching that versus whatever you want. Questions about this method or if you're lacking in time, do it only once. If it's a you don't have to always vote twice, but if it's challenging and you want students to do it, you can vote twice. Usually, it's good if the instructor spends a few minutes discussing the question afterwards, especially if there's a difference in answers even after the second round of voting. If everybody has gotten the right answer, just move. So, you need to be able to take these decisions on your feet. Other concerns or problems questions? All right, I'll just flash the next one. I don't think we have to do this again. I was expecting this one to be for everybody to get it right the first time, so I had a slightly more difficult one. But this was interesting too. I'll just show you the question. We don't have to bother doing anything. So, in many exams, we give this question. We give a snippet of a code and we say what's the output? I saw that at least in the IIT exams, it was a very common question. So, get students exposed to the things that they will be seeing in the exam. Is this something you would do in your exams? Give them a small code and say what's the output? So, do a couple of these questions in class so that they get used to it. Doing it multiple choice makes the classroom work easier. Even if in the exam it's an open answer. So, I had two questions right next to each other and I don't have it on the same page. But look at this phrase in this question in the next question. So, one was x less than y and the order was x and y. So, this is cheating. Yeah, but it's for various reasons. I'll move on. A few other things. I don't want to spend too much time again here. But lot of it you might be familiar with. And this is again to get the students to wake up in a way to actually pay attention. Chunk the material. Results from psychology, cognitive science plain old experience and the younger generation. So, that students attention span is no more than 10 minutes. It's just something we have to live with. So, even if you're doing a especially if you're not doing a long derivation, break up your concept even if it's a big concept into smaller chunks of maybe no more than 15 minutes. So, you can do a 15 minute lecture and then maybe even for two minutes do this interactive question after your long derivation. I have a question for the previous example. Let's go one step before. Let's say this person already students had some concept of C. They probably will get one first. That's the answer. I was looking more in terms of I was the one person who got it wrong. So, I was saying 3, 7 I said that was only 21 because everything else mathematically doesn't evaluate 21. So, I'm looking at it as a different answer. Now when I think of C then I say I'm not logically right. But how do you find out that this is a person who is just automatically tuned to finding that this is integer so in C this works or if the person is really thinking. So, you know I would assume that some of the students are just programming very straightforward so immediately think in terms of C. But if you find somebody who is thinking a little differently is it possible to elicit it further to say okay there is some potential because he is thinking little differently but we just have to tune him more into C plus plus. Actually my actually that is something that I was going to discuss with her that I would like to categorize students into different categories based on their responses to multiple questions. And then I will know what are the independent thing that was syntax bound or thinking in C alone or thinking differently but not getting the right answer because of connecting link is missing there is huge amount of things that is possible. The issue is there are 124 hours in a day and that is why the framework could be far more useful because then first of all we teachers learn from each other and secondly that entire knowledge is available as a body of knowledge for our students. So, let us see how it goes. So, the other point is the goal of this question right now is I mean the way I thought of it was not to differentiate it is to point a student who is thinking in a different way in fact that look if you are doing programming you have to pay attention to this you cannot think in terms of regular the ordinary maths. So, even if this person is smart and knows what is going on but has just forgotten that well C syntax is different a question like this will just immediately awaken them. So, this is not going to be an exam question well later you can have it as an exam question but in the classroom the goal of this question is to get students to wake up to the fact that C syntax is important this is for the people who have already done it for the people who are seeing it for the first time it very openly brings out the difference between an integer and a floating point that that is the goal other comments ok chunk the material well ok the rest of it I am just going to say face the class not the board it is such a simple thing but how many teachers have we seen who spend their time with the back to the class right to make this easier when I have the first day when I come to a class even if it is 20 students I have butterflies in my stomach I am just so nervous ok I mean I have only been in this job for 10 years but still I am always nervous and even right now when I first came I had seen you the last few days but there is this degree of nervousness so what I do is I find 2 or 3 friendly faces out of 25 there were 2 or 3 people who immediately smile when they saw me I know the other ones who have a focus on them preferably they should be in the 3 different sections of the room so when I am looking at you I am actually looking at you so in my mind it is just that I am talking to you directly but the rest of the people who are around you again feel that I am making eye contact so find one person in every section there is always somebody who is friendly and do reach out to the back folks also so this I learnt in a public speaking workshop may I get personal and let students know you care again what this means is you are so I will come to these in the next thing ok it is a radical statement what I really mean by this and again this is a you are free to disagree our job is to help students learn there is a very profound difference between teaching and wanting students to learn so again it took me actually all this is there in literature and when I read it and when finally it made sense to me it just shifted the way I approached the classroom so what how do you help students to learn get know what they know their students are not blank slates they are not empty vessels in which we pour in information so that information transfer model is really not true for learning they come with a lot of knowledge, expectations baggage that what their parents told them that CS is going to be about or everything so we have to know how what they know many ways of doing it one is just by personal talking the very first day of class give them a 5 minute survey on whatever you want to know so let's say I always want to know the class I was teaching was an introductory physics class and the majors or the fields of the students were all different this is about 200 students so give them a short survey on what is your major going to be just so that I know and I saw that about 75% of the class was studying biology but they had to take physics or whatever else you want to know have you taken C++ programming before that could be an important question you will at least know the percentages make it I don't make it I mean I don't know it's up to you if you want to make it anonymous that's one thing or have the names so then when that student comes to talk to you you know that well this person has already had three semesters other things let's brainstorm a couple of minutes how do you get to know what maybe in the middle of if you're introducing a new concept you can do a show of hands who has studied this before yeah right so the survey at the beginning has really helped me personally getting to know the students okay the next one is this I just put the bullet points to be a little more provocative because I wanted to wake all of us up it's been 45 minutes so give students what they really want okay which sounds counter intuitive we need to teach them what we know or what is supposed to be done but what does this mean so the way I interpret this is that if I know what their interests or their motivation is can I frame my class can I set the context to make it accessible and interesting to them and this is something professor Ranade mentioned right on the first day he said that when he teaches programming his examples are from electricity from earthquakes and he gave three examples from completely different fields so and programming is a great class where you can bring in any example you want they all want to do management okay let's try to set the context in terms of management they all they have a festival which is starting tomorrow and you know you can always come up with a question where they have to coordinate different classes different kind of people so set the context and again this follows from number one we have to know what they know so this make it personal that I had in the previous slide if your college is having a festival the following week make sure you know it and make sure that students know you're aware of it so bring it into the classroom somehow okay the next one is again it's teaching to the test really has a very bad connotation this phrase is common in the US I don't know what this is phrase makes sense or what would you call it it's like if you have a syllabus right and if you know that the final exam is going to be set by the university and this is what it is teachers are discouraged teachers who really want the learning to happen are discouraged to teach to the exam because what's the point if you just teach them the questions that are going to be on the exam so this is a practice that is actually not a good practice if you take it very literally I want students to learn to see programming I don't want the I mean I do want them to pass the exam but if I only teach the questions that will be on the exam I really haven't taught them how to do other things so the reason so I guess if this phrase doesn't make sense then that's my fault but what I mean here by teach to the test is whatever you want them to learn really if possible or not if possible ok let me make my first statement the exam should match what's going on in the class so if you want students to think conceptually the exam must be conceptual those of you who have freedom in setting your test you have to follow this so this is true for all IIT professors if we always keep saying we want students to do problem solving to learn problem solving to think conceptually then why is the test a set of derivations the test also must have an error what we want them to know those of you who don't have that much freedom try to get your colleagues to start thinking this way I mean if it's you and one more person who have to write the final and you can write two questions try to sneak one or two of these conceptual questions into it if possible I know this is a problem in the university system so this is all I can say about how you would do it but I do know a couple of people who year after year they would give a very conceptual question and the other people will say no no no this is not good and our students will fail it comes back they change it but after five years it becomes more familiar and the second person says you know this is actually a good question why don't we put one of them so there's a lot of brainwashing or psychology also going on here but again it depends on what you want your students to know if you want them to learn problem solving problems and if you've seen all these few sentences I have not mentioned any content phrases it's all about the other phrase used is called hidden curriculum it could be any content but what skills do I want my students to learn okay how do you have students to learn facilitate note taking so students are notoriously bad at taking notes from the blackboard it seems it's something to do with 18 year olds so how do you facilitate it there's the chunking is one good example of facilitating it you can do handouts what I do is I don't give them full handouts I give them a skeleton handout and they actually have to write on it so that's one way of doing it but just help them to take better notes asking authentic questions is again so a lot of professors do ask questions but they're rhetoric in the sense we don't really expect the student to give an answer and whatever the student says it doesn't matter so those rhetoric questions again are not very in fact they're really a waste of time authentic question is somewhere where maybe you don't know the answer or maybe there's a set of answers and when a student says something the process is as important the way they arrived at the answer is as important as the final answer itself this is again in let's say you have a small tutorial class or if you do have a question in the session this is where you want to focus if it's a straight lecture and there's no room for questions well I don't know if you can skip it if you want so finally your goals and I've spoken a little bit about this earlier we need to be very very clear on what the learning objectives for the class is for that particular class why have I chosen this derivation and not that because you can't do everything that's in the textbook if you have three textbooks you again have to pick and choose if you want to do an example problem why do you pick example one versus example two so what is it that you want students to learn from the specific problem the derivation the whole class the unit and the whole semester so it's varying levels in that excruciating detail we need to have this learning objective so for one class again this is this is very time consuming so what I would suggest is if you are teaching the same class for three years spend the first summer doing it it might take you a couple of weeks actually it took me and a professor two months to do it for a very very large class but we were going into extreme detail but do spend a couple of weeks right in the beginning your life during the semester will become so easy because you know exactly what you want to teach all then you have to do is open the textbook and say well I'm looking for a question that does this go through the question say well question 16 helps pick it up so the night before you don't have to plan so this I try to make this document called learning objectives it can be as small as big but for the whole unit and then day by day is useful some of these are mixed in order explicitly teach reasoning so if you want them to learn how to actually write an algorithm or a program you have to teach them not just the content but reasoning is not something they automatically get this is a misconception among teachers that I show them how to do a problem which means they learn how to do a problem I do teach them the content but I only demonstrate problem solving unfortunately it doesn't work so problem solving or building an algorithm has to be explicitly modeled and taught and they have to do it not here the last one I did mention a little bit again keep talking to them as to the point of doing any I am going to shift any questions at this point as in if you feel that well this is all something great but I won't be able to do it because of time limitations or my university does not allow me I think this is a good time to talk about it and come up with some collective ideas that is the problem right for average average class or first time learners in teachers adopting this will be very difficult I mean maybe now down the line we get it and this common understanding should be throughout so all the threads of the management of the curriculum syllabus setters and so on I mean university even within the college and so on and the teacher should be really committed for this also so as coordinators maybe that could be one of your goals if you are going to train 30 teachers the problem is a lot of people even a lot of well-intentioned people are not aware of this and it is not their fault as you said this comes out of 30 years of practice sometimes but when if you have this valuable knowledge share it with the other 30 people who are going to come to your workshop now you don't have to again when I am throwing all this at you one person will not take all these and do all these of course there is restrictions and constraints I think among this which sort of clicked in your brain and said aha that is something I can try I think it is worthwhile so keep looking scanning you say ok that I can't do that I can't do but maybe this is something I can try other comments and by the way this problem is not only for university teachers I gave a similar talk in IIT last year and same problems so I was in the US for the last 10 years I did my PhD and was working in physics education research there is the same issues there take MIT, take Berkeley you talk to a group of discipline experts these are exactly what they say now one comment I have is what they say is that well if you do all this you won't be able to cover the syllabus right ok so now our goal if you have again if you have even that's ok but in our university there is a different thinking now we will fix the syllabus in the beginning let's do this way let's see that students learn what they are supposed to learn and the end of the semester we will fix the syllabus what is covered now when we talk about content again we need to focus more on depth not just depth but this if a person knows tell me a field from your CS 101 course just throw out a content area just give me an example pointers ok so if a student wants to teach students pointers what is it that we want them to do with pointers so it should be a skill skill based syllabus that is we want them to be able to demonstrate a. write a program using pointers b. use pointers in arrays or whatever it is I don't know your subject very well but think of your syllabus in terms of the skills that the students must be able to demonstrate at the end of the semester and then tailor your lecture accordingly so yes great in your university if you have this freedom we don't have it ok but it's a thinking excellent then there is yeah because a lot of teachers we have right that would take 50 minutes for me but because some other teachers we have this kind of class we have in C and then we go on but when I go teaching in a semester they would have learnt a lot of technology but then other people would have gone with more units or chapters right but then finally it goes like this but I think this coming semester I will insist on that my students would have different questions based on my teaching and so on let them take it as an experiment now if you don't have freedom let's say your syllabus is fixed so I will throw you another radical idea ok yes let me just finish my point so the idea is some topics or concepts which are really hard in which you think students absolutely have to do spend more time on it spend time on the conceptual issues and then if there is a topic which you think students can learn using self study assign them a homework and spend maybe much shorter time than you normally would going over all the topic so if it's a descriptive topic for example conceptual again this students might not like it what is the self study no student trees in US or in India anywhere but if you expect it so you can spend more time on one and less time on the other so long as you don't get into trouble especially if you are senior or something you don't want your boss or your head of the department to say what are you doing yes sir very good absolutely and the problem is from the property of pre-election for other courses that will be key for example if I am teaching a subject for a special program in languages where in I am supposing each time how subroutines are implemented and that forms like a pre-election for a course on compiling so by teaching some topics in detail if I fail over that particular topic then they have a problem in taking a prior course of course they will register because of the reasons but see there are so I am going to respond to that with another question again so I know I do sound a little provocative but let's say you do cover the syllabus going back to pointers you have spent 4 days on describing pointers you have talked about pointers but you haven't done any of these so yes on paper students have studied pointers which means they are capable of going to the next course and they register for the next course but what they really don't know how to apply pointers have you really have they really learned how to apply pointers in a new situation on paper yes you are ticking the check mark that's the ideal solution which usually doesn't happen in real life because of the bigger constraints so the two things which the two parts people follow one is to keep talking to make this issue to make people aware of this issue the head of your department, your colleagues if more people start becoming aware of something about this it could go somewhere the second part you follow is think very very very hard on what are the topics that you can do fast and students will still learn and what it is that you really need to spend time on that was what I was saying earlier so if they haven't done the example that you gave and if that's really crucial for the next course you are fine do spend time but then don't spend time on another huge chapter which will be there for the exam but that's something which can be done quickly so that's sort of the easiest or the least path of least resistance it's not the most effective it's not the most efficient either for the teacher or the student but at least it's one step than straight lecturing of all the 15 chapters in the textbook do you have a comment? yes especially I find that with frankly I'm a new teacher to India so I've seen students in US in terms of the programming course I was in California so I was doing Java one-on-one for students but the challenges are different here what happens is there is this one aspect of training that goes on in companies so the moment they are selected they get trained so what happens is even if we miss concepts my goal is to get a good GPA cram in the last minute and finish get selected into a company this seems to be at least what from what I have seen in students that I have talked to that seems to be the motivation I want to get into a company and get placed that's very true of IIT students so the question so trying to push them for a little bit of more learning and more deep understanding sometimes just seems to go above their heads because they are like even sometimes if you have some limited time restrictions for say pointers you can motivate them to say go home do try it in your computers that would be a good way of learning but they don't seem to be that interested because they know that at some point of time these colleges they have very good placement they will end up in the industry and they will also get trained even if they don't know it so the two schools of thought here and research professors in big universities say that well in my class of 30 students even if 5 are really interested in the subject I feel I am satisfied my job is done I have heard a lot of research faculty IIT, MIT other places say this the other school of thought and I am sort of more towards the latter camp is that through the content we are teaching through CS101 or something even more abstract like physics there is always some skills that I can teach to a student who is not interested in the content so it could be for example it could be one of these soft skills like teamwork everybody who is going out in the industry needs to do teamwork okay so in my class pretty much whenever we have a tutorial or a problem solving session so here we have tutorials have students work in groups of three or four solving the problems instead of the TA going on the board and solving problems so if we can identify what is it that they really industry is a very good example because most of them I will come to you in a second most of them are going to go there so teamwork is one thing communication is the other so many of our students they are excellent in technical aspects but they are lousy at talking communicating not just in front of an audience but even to a small group so I feel a lot of 18 and 20 year olds don't know the real world out there don't know how harsh it is and don't know that they will be judged on communication and teamwork and not so much on technical skills once they go through four years of education they will all pick up technical aspects fairly easily so can we I mean this is more of a question thinking I I am bringing into it a lot of personal philosophy here but can we teach them something through our content and it's very much possible in the general first year courses yes ma'am now you said that you can make the students work in a group okay so that even if in case a person the student who is not interested would start working but like if in case I make a group of five if in case there is a 25 K batch and if in case I tell them to work in five groups then also it is seen that the person who is not having interest won't work will contribute to the work the three who are interested will only write the code so that two problems one is the person who slacks off and not interested there are two answers to this question can you absolutely change the situation the answer is no no I agree but do you make sure that three who are interested are putting in more efforts than what they would otherwise and the sleeping member is concerned to put in at least some efforts for example how early do we locate a sleeping member of a team in my earlier course offerings I used to locate such people only in the final five hour of the project subsequently we started having for the course projects also five hours through TAs much earlier and I would personally request all the names and all numbers of people who are not participating strongly and then I would have personal meeting with them even a ten minute group meeting or a sleeping member from each project made a definite difference the day that sleeping partner knows that the teacher cares the student behavior changes the only problem is that student comes to know that the teacher cares only at the final level that has been my solution but in absolute terms you may not be able to do much but can we do something answer is yes do we do that so some suggestions are right in the beginning get the group members to talk to each other and come up with a contract that's a formal name but come up with a list of rules by which your team will operate have everybody sign that it could be just two things that everybody shall be present for all meetings every and let's say it's a project so every week when they're supposed to meet give a short survey to every group saying is your group working well yes no if not why why not that's what I think sir is saying just now again if you're interested there's a lot of research on how to get groups working well I didn't talk about that at all because I wasn't sure if it would be relevant but I must have references somewhere so if you're interested send me let me know or send me an email I would like you to improve any material on group formation and group work for a different reason the same students although we are discussing with the committee of this course exactly similar grouping is required in their final year project that's a year long project and most of the places if I'm not mistaken 3 to 5 students follow the group work so let me think a little bit they are trained to do this group work in the first course doesn't matter whether other courses do similar things or not some of the learning and pressure and hopefully it will help them in their final years so going back to community other things we can teach so one of the maths professors I know she used to do a very theoretical course with proves and proves and proves what she did is that I think once a week she'd keep 15 minutes and one student would have to actually come and do the proof on the board and instead of one it could be 5 students together so if you have 14 weeks in the semester that's 14 times 5 students so every student gets a chance or whatever numbers you can do but you are helping them pick up communication skills you are making them holding them responsible for one topic in the whole curriculum and this is something you can be assured of that one topic they would have learned so well they would have ac exam on that because they learnt it and they taught it so these are small things again 15 minutes per week can you afford that time? make a choice if you can why not maybe once every 2 weeks I think you had a question actually I want to ask about a theoretical class only if I want to teach a subject like software engineering total 40 hours are there you try any trick on that only the 20 hours we can catch up with the students but rest of the 20 they are not going to turn up for anything do you have can you make classroom participation can you keep at least 2 marks for that my question is the same with her because I teach for information technology so there is a topic which is subject which is called as project management in the last year and since software engineering is already done by the students half of the things are same like how to draw charts and how to have the output and the things are very easy what does the team leader does what does each participant does but the topic is very important the subject is very important because you have a waiver for it and it is very difficult to catch up with the students can you skip those easy topics can you not talk about it at all in class but there are hardly one or two chapters initially and later on the things are like with software engineering as well as project management how to do a total project how to bring it to the end like reliability and things which are mostly taken care of in the industry for a project actually it is very important but at that time the students they won't focus on all these issues so how much freedom do you have and how to take these so please I will see because it is not so much but it is important I will tell you a trick which Professor Shashikar can person of which is which is here left here there is a quiz after every lecture and that this question is based entirely on what is thought to be like there is 100% attendance and there is almost 90% attention and these quizzes come for the semester end this is one simple trick which was it takes exactly 5 minutes to conduct that quiz the simple quiz paper papers are distributed people answer those questions they are still not using these electronic gadgets and not all these these questions are multiple choice there are some multiple choice but this ensures attention nothing ensures attention of the students as good as an examination of the values and if they are knowing that there is going to be a phase at the end in fact there are people he says he has seen some people coming up in the class just about 20 minutes before the end of the class they want to quiz that question is it because it is a the theory is boring not boring it is very important but what is the theoretical no I am a software which is is not at all theoretical this is absolutely I have taught software in myself I am supposed to be an expert in software the kind of problem that you can ask them to give in my information system course which is also in open source much of it is software in me people actually write software requirements specifically what is theoretical about it you can dwell upon a single evolution of software requirements specification of a problem for as many as 4 to 5 hours very many no no no in the class in the class force the schools to work on it in the class give actual problems you take a Kokoma model so it is not just this here a Kokoma model give them description of 5 different things and ask them to do the analysis you teach function point analysis you give 20 problems and for each one ask them to work on function point that is what they are required to do in the right later but if you don't teach them and I will tell you the reason why we don't teach because we have never learned ours that is the type of life I have seen in my hands 100,000 lines of software then I have learnt what it means what documentation means what SRS means there is no shortcut to that we have to do it and we have to get it done and the supply is as much as to see a Kokoma model I cannot give 40 problems in my pieces or something like that unless I have solved each one myself unless I have written each program myself and the example that professor ranade gave he is teaching programming but throughout the semester there is this theme of the turtle making pictures right so especially in a project management course et cetera so the theory has to be taught but professor Fatuk said it very beautifully I don't know the terminology but if you take a long example or a project and in the context of that develop the theory for example first and theory later as opposed to what we usually do where we do theory first and example again it is a lot of work but it is fun work for teachers fairly challenging intellectually to come up with this long project so it is like a theme that keeps running moving on a little bit the second one is why should you be here this was about the profession and people moving out to industry et cetera so I would like to put a couple of other points because I didn't thought about it so one interesting thing to academic folks is research so the first one in the research here research in technical areas I am not going to talk about it at all you know much more than me some of you might be doing a masters and PhD in it but whatever you learn there can you bring even a little snip of it into your classroom so if your research is on material which is being developed and it is a superconductor et cetera and you are teaching electricity in magnetism bring in the semiconductors bring it in there if students know that you are talking about cutting edge forefront work in the CS101 classroom it sounds very hot to them so that is all about the technical thing the next thing is there is a huge field where there are researchers in computer science education so what they do is the following these are the different areas so this is again what I found in the last one week student understanding and misconceptions so your research paper could be on in this field this is how students understand these are the misconceptions the methods you would use for CS education research the actual research methods are borrowed from social sciences so they are qualitative methods like interviews and surveys and qualitative analysis so your research methods are not the same as science or engineering research methods but you do not need to know the science or engineering content in order to understand what students do not understand so you must be an expert in the subject of say pointers if you want to try to find out what it is specifically students do not understand about pointers then animation, visualization and simulations how do you develop these what are the roles, how can you use these in different parts of the class assignments, classroom exams what do each of them help teach classroom teaching methods assessment and this is a huge field out there as in what is the role of assessment so if I ask you the question why do we assess I mean not why do we but what are possible roles of assessment ok so feedback feedback for the instructor the most common one is you want to test how much students know that is the most common one feedback for instructors is a good one there is another concept I am throwing some technical terms but it is just it is ok if you do not if you have not heard of them it is called formative assessment and formative assessment means you give assessment right away to the student and the idea is to use the assessment in order to improve so for example the clicker question we did earlier that is a great example of formative assessment because it was an assessment you said 1 2 3 4 then you talk to each other you found out the right answer and the feedback was immediate but you use the knowledge to improve so assessment has various roles and again that is a big research field educational technology I am going to just look at the last one which is important for us transferring from campus based teaching to distance education so this is becoming more and more useful that is probably going to be my job description for the next few years at least so these are all different fields and all this again I have references I can I will put it up on that website so if you are interested in doing a research paper a PhD or something in this around the world there are about 15 at least I found 15 universities with an online presence that does this kind of work which means I am sure there is at least twice as many without an online presence in India I am not sure so far at least there are not any with significant online presence but probably IITB might start one yes sir something like that yeah we should right so if you are interested the way it works in the US for discipline based education research big universities what 10 or 15 have them but the data points are the students the lab is the classroom so researchers are always looking for labs to test out things so we contact people in smaller universities or high schools saying you know we have this new technology or this new teaching method we would like to try it out would you be a participant so that way we get this teachers from smaller local colleges involved so if you are interested in doing this I think we should start by talking to one of us here and then we will see if we can develop something or if you know of any other university in India which is doing it lot of places do education research in general where they have B.Ed and M.Ed but that is not what I am talking about here this is more discipline focused so again this is an area for personal growth you know all the complaints that we talk about each of them really is a research topic what you have to learn for this again is in the references how do you learn the qualitative methods how do you learn the quantitative methods etc so I am also a transplant my background is in critical physics and then yes ma'am just because you told this I am discussing that topic that happens in our college Don Bosco the research director in our college is planning for a research related to these topics as to how the classroom teaching should happen and a few colleagues of mine are involved with him so I think Bombay university should have something the other place in Bombay is Homiwawa Centre for Science Education focus more on high school and middle school but there is no reason why we we cannot get involved with them for college education also this is just a model I found I like this exactly what does research mean so if you are doing curriculum development you have a model of the learner so you have to know about student misconceptions and student understanding so that goes into the research and evaluation so you are finding out then you develop your curriculum next step you do your instruction and then you do more research on seeing whether that instruction worked or not so this is it is a cycle this is one of the models as to how research can be used in curriculum development you know I think that I do not have a good ending but that is all I really had to say yes please so the focus of this is yes one on one so is there something that we as faculty for example I have been teaching a lot of ME students that I can do something in ME students to influence them so then they can become managers yes not all ME students would like to work in education research as their project topic because they are in diversified fields but if you initiate education research as Sehan has said and as Don Bosco trying to do and if you ensure that ME students participate in presentations on a weekly or a fortnightly basis from the group of education research even giving such a talk would be very useful there is no doubt about it the fact of life is that teaching has never been taught to us we are expected to automatically teach us the moment we get a degree which is nonsense everything has to be taught now whatever she said I was like since I also immediately joined APTA I had done my B I came to teaching because I had an interest in teaching always but I started my teaching with this concept like I was taught in the college and which ever served or ma'am I never used to like what she is doing I always tried to correct myself and ask whether we have understood or not I cannot assume that one five heads not I cannot assume that the rest 55 are also understood yes the point is you just extend her logic only we still teach from the way we learn but from some people we have learnt how to teach from some people we have learnt how not to teach and we use both of them it's a very sobering thought to remember that our students are also judging us exactly like that