On August 21 I broadcast a request on this topic. The collated responses may be found at
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/dickey/CS1-DL-summary.html
There were only a few responses. If there are more people out there willing to share experiences, I would still be very happy to hear about them (reply privately to dickey@cs.washington.edu). The page contains my original message, the full text of the responses, and in some cases my notes on those responses. Response #3 is the most radical (the author posted it to the whole list, though it didn't seem to generate any discussion). Following the last response is a note about related activity at my own institution. Thanks to everyone who wrote in!
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ORIGINAL MESSAGE
.Anyone have any experience to relay about delivering a traditional college-level introductory programming sequence using TV, VCR, Internet delivery, or mediated versions thereof (i.e., some live person standing by in the classroom while the tape is playing, to answer questions etc.)? Please reply in private, and thanks.
[Not currently interested in courses other than CS1/CS2, and not interested in courses that are simply enhanced by extensive use of the Internet. Also not terribly interested in post-bacchalauriate professional training, etc. I'm talking about a substitute delivery mechanism for the traditional in-person college course.]
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At __, we have an active Engineering Outreach program which ships VCR tapes anywhere in the world. We faculty can generate a pittance by taping a course and grading the papers. So I did just that with the CS1 course I'd been teaching for several years.
Results were mixed. A few students did quite well, even some students who had never programmed before. However, on balance, I was disappointed at the number who just dropped out, maybe after trying a couple lessons. I think the very first programming course a student takes is enormously difficult unless a teacher is available to respond to immediate concerns.
Over 8 semesters, I've had about 10 students complete the course, and about 30 who never got much beyond paying the tuition (a few of these reclaimed their payment when they discovered they were out of their depth). Not a good ratio, in my estimation.
On the other hand, a colleague did an abbreviated CS2 course (directed toward incoming grad students without a CS undergrad emphasis) and has had somewhat better success -- maybe 50-60% passing.
[Notes on response 1: The students may watch from home or from facilities at their company, but in any case there is no proctor or supervisor present during the viewing. A local proctor administers exams.]
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At Stanford we taught CS1 and CS2 on the Stanford Instructional TV Network. Most TV students had the ability to ask live questions. But there were also students who watched a videotape instead. They had a local tutor who would watch the tape with them so they can answer questions. Jim Gibbons (former Stanford Engineering dean) has been the major advocate of this and has done lots of interesting studies. He calls it TVI (tutored video instruction). He has evidence to support that under TVI, students actually do better. A and B students are still A and B students, but C students tend to become B students (presumably because they are afraid to interupt a faculty member with what seems like a stupid question, but they aren't shy about asking the tutor while watching the tape). ... Stanford is still teaching such courses on TV.
[Notes on response 2: From what I could learn, the remote students are employees of companies and watch from their companies' facilities.]
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In the spring of 1996
I convinced my department that the lectures in our intro programming course (taken by roughly 120 of the 170 freshman each fall -- the remaining 50 place out or into an advanced section) were a waste of time. Half the students found them boring and half found them way to hard to follow. On the other hand, I said, the course (which was being taught as 3 lecture hours a week) would really benefit from a lab section.Suprisingly enough they believed me, and for the last two years, the course has been offered in its new format:
This year we are also adding a pre-lab quiz that they print off the web and hand in at the beginning of lab. It doesn't count, but is intended to encourage them to read the notes before coming to lab.
I would love to do a longer lab (1.5 to 3 hours) but we don't have the staffing at this point.
The course has been very successful thus far. The students like the flexibility of not having to come to any classes if they can demonstrate that they already understand the material. The addition of labs has definitely improved the quality of the programming we see on the exams, and we rarely hear on reviews that some students were totaly lost (which we often heard before).
This year I am adding more Shockwave simuolations/explanations to the notes to make up for the reduced amount of tracing that they see. This skill definitely suffered in the first couple of years.
The course assumes absolutely no background.
The course is in Java, but does not teach applets at all. In truth it is basically a pascal course. Very standard CS 1 fare. I have augmented the pathetic java i/o with a support class that does formatted i/o. I have also
developed an applet shell in which I can embed text applications. This way they can run all the sample programs in the notes from within their browser.
If you'd like to have a look at the materials as they were last fall, go to http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~hodas/courses/cs5_1997. You need to use a 4.x browser as there is an involved javascript that manages the navigation frames. Also, the applet I mentioned does not appear to work properly under Netscape for unix. It just beeps when you try to type at it. It works fine on Macs and Wintel though.
If you chop the "_1997" off you'll get the current version of the notes, which are under active revision for the start of classes in 8 days (yikes!).
PS: I have, at various times in the last two years, been held up by the administration as a posterboy for electronic delivery/distance education. I must constantly remind them that the main purpose of moving the lectures to the web was to make room for the greater student-faculty contact in the lab. While the advanced/natural programmers can go through the course without ever seeing a prof, the weak students absolutely need the contact and support in their training.
I also think that CS 1 lectures are uniquely uninteresting and appropriate for this sort of delivery. I would not move any of my other courses to the web. The interaction and discussion in class is simply too important. I do, however post skeletal lecture notes for those students who must miss a class.
[My notes: The highlighting in the Web version is mine, not the original author's. I find this approach really intriguing and hope we'll continue to hear follow-up here and at SIGCSE. It's technically not distance learning, because the students are still in the lab with the teacher, but what would prevent there from being multiple labs at distance sites, each with its local teacher? Of course, what works at a highly selective liberal-arts college might or might not transfer everywhere, even so...]
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We offered a course via Mind Extension University on video cable to ~30 million homes and via Electronic University Network on America OnLine. This ran for nearly four years in both venues. In addition to the 28:30 taped lectures, we had a supporting textbook which we wrote and a very extensive Web site. This course ended in May, 1997.
The course was a very rigorous introduction to program design and implementation for non-CS majors, but it met nearly all of the CS1 requirements and a few later ones such as file I/O, etc.
[Notes on response 4: the language used was Basic. The replacement course is "entirely hands-on" with apparently less emphasis on programming.].
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Twice I delivered a course called CS101 to the Alaska bush (1993,q994). Several remote sites simultaneously, using something we called "interactive computer graphics" (IDG).
CS101 is a computer literacy course with two or three weeks of programming at the end. Many of the students had barely touched a computer before, and had trouble using the keyboard and operating
the IDG platform. Moreover, they were many miles away from me, and one of the remote sites was unreachable by road. I tried some things that worked, and other that failed. In the end, I feel the students learned what they were supposed to learn.
When I did this same course locally a few times, I had found that what was most helpful was a lab in which somebody like me could lean over the shoulder of a student and demonstrate things directly on the student's computer. Maybe, something like piano lessons. This sort of thing was impossible with the remote CS101 offerings. I couldn't do the direct leaning from afar, and there were no local assistants available.
Although it wasn't easy, we managed. We did things like synchronized small program development. Email helped a lot. Phone calls and fax helped some.(This was before the heyday of the web).
These and other exercises convinced me that there are few courses that can't be offered, with good educational results, by distance delivery. Some subjects are harder than others, especially if things like smell and physical body sensations and maybe a little fear (I'm also a flight instructor) are needed.
Existence proofs? There is now quite an abundant literature on distance education, which I try to look at occasionally. Much has been done in recent years, and quite a few principles discovered and enunciated. The University of Pennsylvania seems to be one of the leades in this area.
A classic boring lecture is even worse via distance delivery. You can't throw erasers at sleeping students. Sometimes, you can't even see who is sleeping.
I found the distance delivery efforts to be interesting and fun, although sometimes very frustrating. Good
luck.
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2. This quarter "we" (I'm not personally involved, but watching very closely) are trying a small-scale experiment with distance delivery of CSE143, the 2nd quarter of our intro sequence (uses C++). The students will view the proceedings from a community college classroom with a tutor present. The model is Stanford's "tutored video," mentioned in Response #2 above, but incorporating some Internet-based capture and delivery techniques we've used successfully with Master's level classes for the last couple of years.