Exploring Global Thinking and Team-based Reflection in a Flipped Classroom

At our bachelor programs in computer science, we experience that a large fraction of students drop out from lectures and some eventually drop out from the studies completely. Some of the students are likely the ones that Felder and Silverman classify as the global learners: "They are the synthesizers, the multidisciplinary researchers, the systems thinkers, the ones who see the connections no one else sees." In this paper we will summarise our findings from running a three-week flipped classroom, global thinking session within a traditional database course offered to approximately 100 students. These three weeks covered all the XML related topics in the course. The aim of this project was to study if the flipped classroom would increase motivation and attendance - and thereby possibly the learning outcome. A key challenge in flipping the classroom is how to encourage students to prepare for the classroom sessions. Our approach was to encourage students to prepare for the sessions by designing at-home activities that could fit into the group-based reflection sessions at school. We wanted to encourage global thinking by allowing students to decide on how and in what order they covered the various XML topics. Empirically, the students filled out pre- and post-questionnaires, we observed how students collaborated in the in-class sessions, we conducted in-depth interviews of four of the teams, and we compared the exam results for this cohort of students with the results achieved by the next year cohort, which had the XML topics taught in the traditional way. The main-lessons learned were that students do think that a flipped classroom gives more opportunity for being active and that the majority of the student would like to see more global thinking in learning activities. However, we did not achieve as much at-home preparation or at-school collaboration and reflection within the teams as expected. Many teams split work among themselves and just assembled the individual parts without much reflection and discussion within the team. The exam results do not show big differences between the two groups, although it does seem that the weaker students did worse in the flipped classroom case compared to traditional teaching.&nbsp

Ph.D. Academic Life at the Time of the Coronavirus

Ph.D. students are an essential part of the academic world. They need to obtain new knowledge and skills while contributing to the advancement of their re-search field. This paper examines the way the academic life of Ph.D. students is affected by the pandemic COVID-19. Data for this study was collected through an online survey sent to the Ph.D. students of a department in a Scandinavian university. Data was then analyzed through a mixed (quantitative and qualitative) method. The questionnaire was distributed after one year of studying and working from the home office and far from an educational setup like physical classes, meetings, seminars, and conferences. The results show changes in how they meet their supervisors and other Ph.D. students and the type of tools they use for communications. The results also show that Ph.D. students face somechallenges related to the home office, project-related activities like data collection and experiment, and contact with others like socializing, communication, and collaboration. To reduce the impact of the Coronavirus, Ph.D. studentsalso suggested some solutions like having more online discussions with their supervisors and peer Ph.D. students, having a work-life balance, getting guidance and training from professionals, and being understood by the supervisors

Peer Code Review as Formative Assessment: A Case Study from a Database Course Project

Code review is an important quality assurance activity for software engineers. In addition, both reviewers and developers may improve their professional competencies when participating in code reviews. This paper describes a three-week database course project where the students designed and developed a database and a database application. After a three-week project work period, the students submitted their designs and their code repositories for peer review. 115 students participated in the code review of the 68 repositories submitted for review. The students could make use of the feedback they received and what they learned from studying other student’s code when revising the project for the final submission, which was graded by the teaching staff. In their final reports, the students reported on benefits and barriers for effective peer review that seemed to be more accentuated when the purpose was formative assessment. Benefits included high level thinking and deeper levels of learning and giving the students different points of view when reviewing their own solutions. Some of the barriers were the students’ lack of domain knowledge and lack of confidence in being reviewers, the quality of the projects submitted for review, the review workload, and the amount of work needed to modify the code after the review. &nbsp

Efficient Video Indexing on the Web: A System that Leverages User Interactions with a Video Player

In this paper, we propose a user-based video indexing method, that automatically generates thumbnails of the most important scenes of an online video stream, by analyzing users' interactions with a web video player. As a test bench to verify our idea we have extended the YouTube video player into the VideoSkip system. In addition, VideoSkip uses a web-database (Google Application Engine) to keep a record of some important parameters, such as the timing of basic user actions (play, pause, skip). Moreover, we implemented an algorithm that selects representative thumbnails. Finally, we populated the system with data from an experiment with nine users. We found that the VideoSkip system indexes video content by leveraging implicit users interactions, such as pause and thirty seconds skip. Our early findings point toward improvements of the web video player and its thumbnail generation technique. The VideSkip system could compliment content-based algorithms, in order to achieve efficient video-indexing in difficult videos, such as lectures or sports.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, UCMedia 2010: 2nd International ICST Conference on User Centric Medi

Educators’ Experiences Online: How COVID-19 Encouraged Pedagogical Change in CS Education

The COVID-19 lockdown in the spring of 2020 created a unique pedagogical change situation. Educators had to make significant and rapid changes to their teaching approaches, with the time frame being in the magnitude of hours, not weeks or months. At NTNU, a survey was conducted among the educators shortly after the lockdown to study how the educators experienced the change from campus based face-to-face learning to online learning. A total of 56 educators responded to the survey, with 22 of these affiliated with a Computer Science (CS) department. Nearly all the CS educators reported having a positive change experience during this time. More than half of the CS educators reported having prior online teaching experience, while nearly three quarters reported having sufficient or partially sufficient competence needed for the change. In this survey, CS educators highlighted pedagogical challenges as the main challenge. The findings also highlight the fact that some educators found aspects of online teaching to be better than campus based teaching and that CS educators collaborate and exchange pedagogical experience when facing change. Approximately two thirds of the CS educators reported that they consulted a more experienced person or worked closely with colleagues when making the change from a face-toface mode of delivery to that of an online only mode of delivery. Given the variety of experiences reported and the willingness to collaborate and exchange experience, it can be argued that CS staff and other departments may choose a path of knowledge sharing and communities to support future blended and online teaching opportunities

The Hidden Benefits of the Campus - What the Covid-19 Pandemic Can Teach Us About the Computing Learning Environment

The educational context for students and educators across the world changed when the Covid-19 pandemic forced many educational institutions to shut down all on-campus activities in the spring of 2020. In this paper, we explore how computing students’ behaviors were affected by the transformation to online-based learning during the pandemic and what this can teach us about the learning environment. A mixed-method analysis of a survey sent out to students in the weeks after lockdown investigated the important aspects of the learning environment, both on campus and online. Results show that informal learning spaces are essential to students, yet challenging to transfer effectively to the online environment. Furthermore, the scaffolding for study behavior development provided by the schedule and structure in the oncampus environment was found to be valuable to students, but often difficult to replicate online. In the paper, these findings are described and discussed further, exploring the educators’ short and long-term implications

KOLS-prosjektet i Værnesregionen: økt kompetanse og bedre samhandling i helsetjenesten i Værnesregionen

KOLS har i løpet av de siste tiårene blitt en folkesykdom. Sannsynligvis har godt og vel 370 000 nordmenn KOLS, og antallet er økende. Nærmere 1400 mennesker dør årlig av sykdommen (Nasjonalt KOLS-råd). KOLS er en alvorlig kronisk sykdom med varig nedsatt lungefunksjon. Det er en lidelse med betydelig grad av sykelighet, uførhet og tidlig død. (Nasjonal strategi for KOLS-området 2006 – 2011) Økt forekomst sammen med det faktum at samhandlingsreformen pålegger kommunene et større ansvar medfører flere KOLS-pasienter, og behov for å heve kompetansen, i kommunehelsetjenesten. Denne rapporten omhandler et prosjekt som har som formål å heve kompetansen på kronisk lungesykdom blant helsepersonell i Værnesregionen. Målsettingen med prosjektet var å opprette en ressursgruppe på kronisk lungesykdom i Værnesregionen, lage et oppslagsverk, og et kortfattet undervisningsopplegg til bruk i internundervisning.Utviklingssenter for hjemmetjenester i Nord- Trøndelag, Stjørdal kommun