Course Mentoring: Toward Achieving

Consistency in the Curriculum

Lucia DettoriSchool of CTI – DePaul University

Joint work with Amber Settle

ISECON November 4, 2004

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Outline

CTI 101 Who are we? Why do we need course mentors? The mentor’s responsibilities The technology Did it work? Where do we go from here?

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C T I 101: some faCToIds

Computer Science Telecommunication Information Systems

Founded 1996

30 FT faculty20 PT faculty

1800 students

80 sections/quarter

Currently 2004

80 FT faculty100 PT faculty

3500+ students

250 sections/quarter

Fall 02: 22 sections of Java 1

CTI’s degrees at a glance

13 BA/BS

14 MS/MA

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Content consistency : a must

Vertical nature of IT degreesJava 2 builds on Java 1 …

Shared introductory coursesDB1 serves CS, IS, NT …

Evolution of course content

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Content consistency: a challenge

Multiple sections

Use of part time instructors in introductory courses

First time instructor of the specific course

Propagating content changes

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Who is in charge? CTI structure

Faculty

1 Dean4 Associate Deans

UndergraduateCurriculumCommittee

GraduateCurriculumCommittee

Program CommitteesCS,IS,NT,IT,ECT,CGA,GAM,DC

“Cloud 9”

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Rules for a successful solution

Scalable Easily extendable to many courses

Distributed/decentralized One person can’t do it all Multi-campus school

Flexible 5/13 BS degrees were introduced in the last

year, one more this year. New courses will need monitoring

Rewards/incentives

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Course Mentors : the idea

Critical courses are assigned a course mentor

The course mentor is a fulltime faculty who has taught the course recently

Course mentor serves for a year for the purpose of continuity

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The mentor’s responsibilities

Hold a pre and post-quarter meeting with all instructors

Populate and maintain a SharePoint website for the course

Be a proactive contact person for tech-staff

Give feedback about the course to the appropriate committees

IS315 Analysis & Design

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The Share Point Course sites

The basics• Syllabus, week-by-week course coverage• Course guidelines, positioning of the course

Course material• Lecture notes, PPT, tutorials, links• Case studies, good examples• Assessment material, GAE

Discussion board

CSC211 Java Programming 1

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If you build it will they come?

Over 60 course sites with the bare minimum were created

50% of the courses identified as needing a mentors got one

Active mentors made a difference First time instructor Spotting problems early (Codelab)

Relying on volunteers alone will not work in the long run

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Cost neutral incentives

Fat bullet points (->money): the personnel committee has agreed to recognize mentoring as “going beyond the call of duty”

Teach what you want (->time): you are guaranteed to teach the course you are mentoring or any other you want

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Where do we go from here

Improve functionalities of the site Add search tools Go beyond the “lecture” view, tied

material to learning goals instead Move to a database driven system

Improve usability to facilitate use by other departments (Math, PSY, …)

Develop a metric of incentives agreeable to the administration.