Goals

• Make it easier for me to give and maintain lectures.
• make it easier for students to get and manipulate course material.
• Improve quality of materials and presentation, in both content and visual appearance.
• Improve quality and accuracy of assessment.

Topics

• Electronic submission and testing of assignments
• Use of the World Wide Web for lecture delivery

Evaluating programming assignments

• This part of my work has to do with assessment of programming assignments.
• Students should be exposed to what will happen to them in real-life, but in a sheltered way.
• Student assignments should be treated in a similar way to how their programs will be outside.

What happens to real programs

• Professional programmers produce computer programs, not program listings.
• Users will do things with programs never expected by their authors.
• Programs have to satisfy specifications covering a range of features.

What I do to student programs

• Produce a specification, which in practice may be incomplete.
• Take a copy out of their reach.
• Subject it to tests that they are not told about in advance.
• Run a suite of tests in batch mode.

Electronic submission

• A student runs a command to give their assignment.
• This makes a copy of their program in a place accessible by the lecturer, but not by students, which is owned by the lecturer.
• The copy is organised by tutorial for easy dissemination back to tutors.
  

Testing assignments

• A set of ``unseen'' tests may be run in batch mode on these.
• The tests mark an assignment as having ``passed'' or ``differed'' on a test. ------------------------------------- Test 1 DIFFERENT RESULTS ------------------------------------- diagnostics... total 1 -rw-rw-r-- 1 ostutes 0 Aug 24 17:30 a
• Tutors use this to pinpoint errors.
• Tutors use their own judgement on marking.

Software for electronic submission

• Unix has the necessary security to handle multiple users.
• The Unix setuid allows for copying to another account.
• A pair of C programs make this copy.
  
  
  
  
• Shell programs are used to perform the testing. set i=1 while [ -f test$i ] do run program < test$i > results if cmp results result$i then echo "Test $i passed" else echo "Test $i: differs" fi set i=$i+1 done

Results

• Tutor reaction is unanimous:
  it makes marking easier knowing what errors to look for
• Student reaction is generally favourable:
  • Computing people should use the same tools for student assessment that they use for other tasks.
  • The tests are a fair assessment of correctness.
  • It may be unfair to give tests without telling the contents of the tests.

Lectures in the future

• I prepare the notes in my office, on my computer.
• I walk empty-handed to the lecture, and logon to the computer there.
• I deliver the lecture using the display s/w:
  • Corrections and additions are made online.
  • Other computer resources used as needed.

• Student takes their portable into the lecture.
• They connect to the wireless network and download the same lecture material that I am using.
• They make pen-based annotations.
• Students who miss the lecture can access the material from their home, office, computer lab, etc.

Software requirements for my lectures

• Unix availability.
• High-quality presentation.
• Multimedia presentation.
• Non-proprietary software.
• Free software.
• Public file formats.
• Multi-platform software.

Accessibility of material

• Independant of network configuration
  • deliver on Unix
  • deliver on PCs (MS Lan).
  • deliver on PCs (Novell)
  • deliver on Macs
  • deliver over phone lines
• 24 hour access

Current Solution

• Rejected most commercial presentation s/w.
• Rejected Ascii files.
• Rejected PostScript files.
• Accepted World Wide Web
  • Public standard, with free s/w.
  • Network accessibility built in.
  • Not commercial presentation level, but ok.
  • Presentation is based on HTML.
  • Delivery is based on HTTP.

HTML (HyperText Markup Language)

• HTML is a scripting language e.g. <title> Lecture 1 </title> <h1> Course Overview </h1> This course has these aims: <ul> <li> To make you think. <li> To help you learn. </ul> <a href="file:rules.html"> Click to see course rules </a>
• WYSIWYG editors are available.
• Allows hypertext links.
  • e.g. to another part of this presentation such as topics of this talk.
  • e.g to another document such as an O/S lecture
  • e.g. to another computer altogether, such as ANU's list of Sydney and NSW Web sites
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Supports inline images (GIF format)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• External viewers for
  • other image formats (JPEG, etc) such as a map of Canberra
  • MPEG format movies
  • sound files
• Arbitrary programs can be run.
• Interactive forms can be used.

Student reaction

• Strongly in favour of computer use in the lecture.
• A number of students are trying to set up their own Web ``pages''.
• Students in laboratories are using the notes online.
• Some students with external Internet access use them at e.g. work.
• Lecture attendance may have dropped?

Comments

• This is not ``presentation'' level quality like you get from e.g. PowerPoint (student project?)
• The notes must be accessible to a World Wide Web (http) server.
• Bandwidth limits what can be done for graphics, movies and sound.
• Lack of network, lack of computers in lecture rooms, strikes, etc make this a little inconvenient.