The next academic year at the university is over. Below will be my report on work on IT-specialty. Perhaps the topic of training at the university is close to someone, I will be glad to hear your comments and observations, ideas how to make the best possible.
At the moment I have 4 years of experience in teaching in universities. For the first 3 years I was leading the OOP and Programming Technologies at the 4th year at the Department of Informatics at SUSU. I already described this experience in the article "Training of IT-specialists at the university". I spent the current year at VMI in SUSU and occasionally at Chelyabinsk State University in several lectures.
Evolution of attitudes towards students
When I first came to university, everyone around me convinced me that the students were not the same. They don't teach them anything in schools. At the university, they do not learn anything. In general, the level of current students is not suitable.
And I believed. I even thought so at some point. But it took some time and it became clear that this was not the case. Behind the conversations about stupid students was hiding incompetence of teachers, unwillingness to make lectures interesting.
In fact, students grasp everything very quickly. The last course they did was with DVCS, CI, Kanban board and it was all integrated with each other. And I deliberately did not give a detailed description of the version control systems and nuances of CI, all of which the students found and studied themselves. Some of them sent me screenshots with descriptions of their systems instead of A4 reports, which I think is a great idea.
About the speed of perception, I think back to the 100th monkey effect. Apparently, the use of some practices has become so popular that for new IT-specialists there is no difficulty in assimilation and understanding.
Next, I will describe my vision of learning, how and why it was built in this way. I look forward to your suggestions.
Training program and goals
A year ago, I left the Department of Informatics because I couldn't put in "C's" and "A's" for not knowing the subject. Against the background of my unwillingness we had a conflict with the head of the department. Almost immediately I was invited to the department of VMI to lead the Methodology of project management on the 4th year. They gave me only 11 pairs, not so much for a deep understanding of the subject.
The tasks that this discipline sets itself:
Systematize the knowledge of course participants on the basic principles of flexible development and classical approach
To study the main approaches of modern software development: Agile (Scrum, XP, Crystal) and Lean (Kanban), from the beginning of the project to the release and support of the working product
To form competences of application of different approaches to software development project management in practice
Pretty ambitious for 11 couples, don't you think? We had to think of a way to make the information as simple as possible, try everything in practice and give a set of literature to study.
Organizing the process and playing lego
In the end, I decided to do the following:
During the lectures I tell the basic theory with examples from our projects and not only
Students are divided into teams and made a course team using one of the methodologies. The passing of the coursework is a pre-credit admission. On the course project they have to work on their internships in a team.
After learning a methodology, we play a lego game. For example, we are standing a house made of lego by Waterfall or Scrum.
Course project
The subjects of the course were determined by the students themselves. An important criterion for evaluation is:
Use of DVCS with open hosting. For example, github.com
Using a whiteboard. For example, trello.com
Using the CI server. For example, appharbor.com
Integration of DVCS, whiteboard and CI server
Besides, I had the right to change the subject if it was trivial. I didn't want to see any more spots or anything like that.
Coursework in my subject decided to combine with the coursework in GIS. It turned out that they had taken the topic from the GIS course and the methodology of working on the project from my course.
The credit is as follows
Formal questions for credit:
Methods, strengths and weaknesses, limits of applicability of Waterfall
Methods, strengths and weaknesses, Scrum's applicability limits
Methods, strengths and weaknesses, limits of applicability of Agile
Methods, advantages and disadvantages, applicability limits of RUP
Methods, advantages and disadvantages, limits of DevOps applicability
Methods, strengths and weaknesses, limits of applicability of XP
Methods, strengths and weaknesses, limits of applicability of Lean
Methods, advantages and disadvantages, applicability limits of Kanban
I allowed you to use anything that would help, including the Internet, on credit. But when a student comes to pass, you can't read from a sheet of paper, we take away anything that might interfere with a casual conversation. You could only put in front of you a general plan of the story.
The credit is based on the dialogue between the teacher and the student. For example, a typical question when someone told about Lean: "What losses do you think are the most significant in software development? Give an example from your team's work on the course. It is impossible to answer this question, write off the answer or find it on the Internet too. My goal was to make sure that the students grasped the essence of the problems and solutions.
Everybody passed the coursework on the first day of the course, which was never the case in my previous course. Usually half of the students did not pass the first time or even the second time. This time there was only one threesome in the coursework, the rest were passed on 4 or 5. Several projects bought domains and filled their projects into the public domain.
Several feedback from students after the course:
I liked the course, one of the really useful and making me think about my future professional career and my own development. Thank you for your interesting and bright lectures.
From myself, I would say that the only annoying moment was when your couples disappeared a couple of times, which we then did not restore. It was interesting to walk on your pairs, and it was a pity for the lost time.
What can motivate you more than such feedback on your work?
Problems and conclusions for the next academic year
The beginning of the course and the beginning of the course coincide. One of the first students to get to know the waterfall and Scrum, that's why they start projects with it. Later, several people said that it would be better to start working at Kanban if they knew about it from the very beginning. Perhaps you should have given an overview lecture on each topic at the beginning, so that students could choose.
I don't have a lot of real experience with Waterfall, just a few projects, so the topic of hard processes was not easy to give. Also, I think Waterfall takes more time to study artefacts, workflows, etc. If Kanban can be explained in a couple of lectures and students grasp it on the fly, then Waterfall is not that easy. Next year I'm thinking of preparing industry examples, looking for articles on the success/failure of a waterfall project.
In general, I can say about teaching at the university that it is not usually about students, but about teaching methods and the desire of the teacher to make interesting. I do not have a professional education in pedagogy, but reading the literature in this direction gives me an opportunity to predict the right approaches. The invested energy of the teacher is reflected in the interest of students. I saw the understanding of the topic on the exam, these students will bring the right ideas to the company, where they will find a job.
I wouldn't like to stop there, I gathered feedback from students, I want to make it even more fun next year. As a result, I will write an article similar to this one.