Goals

• Goals
• What we already knew
• Planning process
• Judging success
• Reflection

Subgoals:

• No compromise on previous outcomes
• Many new generic skills
• Students learn how to learn
• Solid object-oriented programming skills
• Solid software engineering foundation
• Theory foundations
• Problem-solving skills
• Personal responsibility
• Group work skills
• Communication skills

Subgoals:

• Supportive environment for 700 fragile first year students
• Resilient to communications and equipment difficulties
• Staff development and on-going support for tutors
• Divided responsibility for management (sections)
• Shared responsibility (teaching resources)

• Discipline knowledge
• Shortcomings of existing teaching model
• exercises lead to low level learning goals
• and shallow learning
• technocentric
• industry dissatisfaction
• lack of generic skills
• lack of responsibility for learning and performance
• cheating
• Monolithic first year structure problems
• huge cost to coordinators

1995:

• Research
• Assemble team
• Initial department consultation
• Education expertise
• Grants to support innovation

1996:

• Trial (with 40 students)
• Thorough educational evaluation
• Performance
• Affective
• Detailed proposal
• 10 questions
• economics
• staff support
• Effect acceptance by department
• Detailed planning

 

• Complete implementation (700 Students)
• Staff development
• Huge teaching resource development (programming environment)
• Some on-the-fly resource development (PBL)

1998:

• Substantial staff development resources (as we improved our understanding)
• On-going refinement
• Dissemination (CSEd community)

Ongoing:

• Refinement
• Assessment

• Technical skills
• traditional measures (exams, assignments)
• Generic skills
• communication and self-starting
• group-work in projects when cohort reached third year
• Affective
• surveys
• supporters of department (eg open days)
• Staff
• satisfaction

Reflection

• Robustness of PBL
• students help one another
• students have many skills
• Power of the staff team
• complementary skills
• energy level maintenance
• volume of work
• mutual support
• Importance of evaluated trial
• warning of difficulties
• build department acceptance
• build our self-confidence
• Awareness of initial resistance
• students need support to change learning approach
• mid semester trough
• Importance of staff development
• danger of tutor doing too much
• danger of tutor doing too little
• detailed scripts describing activities in tutes
• Assessment must match goals
• criteria for success
• exam questions on learning from resources
• exam questions on reflection
• exam questions on groupwork process
• self-assessment support
• Issues in coexistence (PBL in a unit)
• mixed signals
• tasks must last long
• time management is a major difficulty
• conflicting deadlines
• Personal impact on innovators
• required lots of dedication
• very satisfying