Toward a Better Syllabus: Entropy-driven Introspection for Alternative Lesson Plans

Developing a lesson plan (or syllabus) for a course can be a very time consuming process. Once the instructor has a pool of topics to be taught in the course, the organization of those topics in a form that facilitates understandability by the students as well as efficiency with respect to the order of presentation can be an elusive task – many times considered to be an art that distinguishes good from exceptional teachers. In this paper we present a method that is helpful in the process of choosing a better lesson plan, among several alternative lesson plans. We do not imply that the presented method is a panacea for the formation of a best lesson plan, however, the method is useful in situations when several alternative complicated and lengthy lesson plans may be contemplated for the purpose of selecting the most viable option. Our method is based on the notion of entropy, borrowed from information theory. It provides a fairly simple and quick way to decide which one – among several alternative lesson plans, is a better choice for adoption

YUCSA: A CLIPS expert database system to monitor academic performance

The York University CLIPS Student Administrator (YUCSA), an expert database system implemented in C Language Integrated Processing System (CLIPS), for monitoring the academic performance of undergraduate students at York University, is discussed. The expert system component in the system has already been implemented for two major departments, and it is under testing and enhancement for more departments. Also, more elaborate user interfaces are under development. We describe the design and implementation of the system, problems encountered, and immediate future plans. The system has excellent maintainability and it is very efficient, taking less than one minute to complete an assessment of one student

Relevance Feedback in the Retrieval of Reusable Software Components

In this paper we focus on the issue of retrieving soji’ware from a collection of reusable sojtware components. The proposed method is a variation of the relevance feedback process, a popular retrieval mechanism typically used for text document environments. We describe how this method can be adapted for reusable software collections. Two variations of a relevance feedback process are presented. Also, experimental results of the methods ’ performance evaluation on two difSerent software collections are presented and analyzed. The results show that both methods perform well, by attaining recall and precision values above 70 % on the average. Specific drawbacks of the metho & are also identified and discussed, Our proposal constitutes an attempt to put the so&are retrieval problem in the map of technical obstacles for software reuse. Unlike most related reports that treat sofiaare retrieval as a subissue of some other sof?ware reusability issue (such as classification), we believe that sojtware retrieval is a self-standing issue. As such, we address the problem of sojiivare retrieval in a general pamework, that is, without being attached to particular sojivare classification and repository organization techniques