From the blog Karl R. Wurst by Karl R. Wurst and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

From the blog Karl R. Wurst by Karl R. Wurst and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

I'd rather not host my work with a company that doesn't respect my licenses.

#CSWorcester

From the blog Karl R. Wurst by Karl R. Wurst and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

From the blog Karl R. Wurst by Karl R. Wurst and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

From the blog Karl R. Wurst by Karl R. Wurst and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

From the blog CSWorcester – On becoming an Eccentric Professor… by Karl R. Wurst and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

From the blog Karl R. Wurst by Karl R. Wurst and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

From the blog CSWorcester – On becoming an Eccentric Professor… by Karl R. Wurst and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Full POGIL and All OER

These two changes affect both courses.

POGIL

POGIL is an acronym for Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning. It is a student-centered, group-learning instructional strategy and philosophy developed through research on how students learn best.

The POGIL Project, What is POGIL

In past semesters, I have done some POGIL or POGIL-like activities in classes. Students seemed to be highly engaged with them. When I started to lecture, engagement started to go down. So, I plan to teach entirely with POGIL activities this semester in both of my courses.

In 2015, I attended the 3-day Northeast Regional POGIL Workshop held at Muhlenberg College, in the Introductory Track. That gave me the basics about how to teach with POGIL, I used it occasionally, mostly using activities that had been written by Stoney Jackson at Western New England University, or Clif Kussmaul at Muhlenberg.

I also tried to write some activities of my own, which were generally better than lecturing, but didn’t really fit the full POGIL methodology. So, this summer, I decided to attend the 3-day 2018 Northeast Regional POGIL Workshop (at Manhattan College), and take the Writing Activities track.

But before I went to the workshop, I decided to go all-in and teach CS-140 this summer as a full POGIL course. This was a good time to try this experiment because I had a small class (only 6 students) and I knew that there were a lot of already written activities for CS1 (Introductory programming) in Java. I used the activities from Chris Mayfield (at James Madison University). I read all of his activities, and soon decided that I would have to write some of my own. But having such a great collection of activities from Chris helped me generalize the structure of the activities and write some of my own.

Now I am writing all my own activities for my two courses this semester. This will be a challenge to keep up with, and I’m sure they will not always perfectly follow the POGIL learning cycle, but it feel confident that these will be a good start that I can improve upon for future semesters.

OER

In Fall 2017, I applied for and received an Open Educational Resources Initiative (OERI) mini-grant from the Worcester State University Library. I used it to teach CS 343 without a textbook. I did the same with CS 348 in Spring 2018 (without a grant). This semester I will be continuing by using OER in CS-343 again and eliminating the textbook from CS-443.

One of the reasons I decided to go full POGIL is that the activities replace much of the reading material in the courses. I can write an activity that introduces the concepts and terminology to the students for the first time, and then assign them some online readings for more details.

It’s great that I can save the students money with OER instead of a textbook, but from my perspective the most important feature of OER in my classes is that I can organize the class around material that I feel is important to the students. Often the course topics in these upper-level software development courses cannot be covered in a single book – I would have to assign 3 or 4 books to cover the areas, and I would use only part of each book. And I’m very fortunate that Computer Science is a field where practitioners feel compelled to document what they do, what tools they use, and how they work, on the Web providing me with a large collection of materials I can assign to my students.

Still to come…

In future posts, I’ll discuss Specification/Competency Grading, Self-Directed Professional Development Blog Entries, as well as changes in tools that I am using this semester.

From the blog CS@Worcester – On becoming an Eccentric Professor… by Karl R. Wurst and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

But, what would make it even easier for me, would be to also have them add a tag for the week that the post is due (e.g. Week-1) so that I don’t need to scroll back until I find the first post from the previous week.

So, I’m tagging this post in the same way that I’m thinking of asking them to do it to see if it works.

From the blog CS@Worcester – On becoming an Eccentric Professor… by Karl R. Wurst and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.