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Return to Perspective
The education industry has a very poor record of productivity gains. In this brief article, I outline some of the ways the teaching of a college course in database systems could be made more efficient, and staff time used more productively. These ideas carry over to other programming-oriented courses, and many of the mapply to any academic subject whatsoever. After proposing a number of things that could be done, I concentrate here on a system under development, called OTC (On-line Testing Center), and on its methodology of "root questions." These questions encourage students to do homework of the long-answer type, yet we can have their work checked and graded automatically by a simple multiple-choice-question grader. OTC also offers some improvement in the way we handle SQL homework, and could be used with other languages as well.
@inproceedings {DBLP:conf/sigmod/Ullman03, author = {Jeffrey D. Ullman}, booktitle = {SIGMOD Conference}, title = {Improving the Efficiency of Database-System Teaching.}, pages = {1-3}, year = {2003}, url = {db/conf/sigmod/sigmod2003.html#Ullman03}, ee = {http://www.acm.org/sigmod/sigmod03/eproceedings/papers/ullman.pdf}, crossref = {conf/sigmod/2003}, bibsource = {DBLP, http://dblp.uni-trier.de} }  ©2004 Association for Computing Machinery |
