Experiences with just-in-time teaching in systems and design courses

ABSTRACT

I report on my experiences with Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) in two systems courses and two design courses as a new instructor at a small liberal arts college. My purposes are threefold: to further raise awareness of JiTT in the computer science education community, to show instructors can achieve JiTT's goals with simple technology and preparation on the fly, and to consider strengths and limitations of the approach, particularly for new faculty. My experience has been very positive: classes have been fun, engaging, and conversational. Students have reported that they come to class better prepared and appreciate the opportunity to ask and discuss questions before class. Where others have warned of the high workload with this approach, my experience is that the workload is reasonable compared to preparing a new course from scratch; the approach discourages some types of overpreparation. For these reasons, I would recommend the approach for other new instructors.

REFERENCES

• 1: T. A. Angelo and K. P. Cross. Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers. Jossey-Bass Publishers, second edition, 2003.
• 2: O. Astrachan. Non-competitive programming contest problems as the basis for just-in-time teaching. In FIE '04: Proc. 34th Annual Frontiers in Education Conf., 2004.
• 3: Tammy Bailey , Jeffrey Forbes, Just-in-time teaching for CS0, Proceedings of the 36th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, February 23-27, 2005, St. Louis, Missouri, USA
• 4: R. Boice. Advice for New Faculty Member: Nihil Nimus. Allyn and Bacon, 2000.
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• 9: Sarah Schwarm , Tammy VanDeGrift, Making connections: using classroom assessment to elicit students' prior knowledge and construction of concepts, Proceedings of the 8th annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education, June 30-July 02, 2003, Thessaloniki, Greece
• 10: Tammy VanDeGrift , Richard J. Anderson, Learning to support the instructor: classroom assessment tools as discussion frameworks in CS 1, Proceedings of the 7th annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education, June 24-28, 2002, Aarhus, Denmark

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.3 COMPUTERS AND EDUCATION
      K.3.2 Computer and Information Science Education
          Subjects: Computer science education

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors

Keywords:
active learning, classroom management, formative assessment, just-in-time teaching (jitt), web-based techniques