Managing Distributed University Courses

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Managing Distributed University Courses

• Sanna-Maria Räisänen
• Tampere University of Technology
• Institute of Software Systems

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Presentation contents

• The Open Source Courseware project (OSCu)
• Experiences and problems regarding distributed
  courses
• Practices developed to deal with the problems
• Conclusions

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Background of the OSCu project

• A lack of teaching personnel in universities
• The field of software engineering is constantly
  changing
• The project helps to develop up-to-date software
  engineering education

4
OSCu project

• Develops a model for cooperative course
  development between universities
• course material bank
• distributed course implementation model

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Distributed course organization

• Responsible university
• designs and organizes the course
• develops and updates the course materials
• implements the lectures via videoconferencing for
  all universities participating in the course
• Remote universities
• carries out their part of tutoring, reporting and
  feedback collection on the course
• tutoring assistants takes care of the local
  organizing issues, exercise sessions, and all
  tutoring tasks for their students

6
Distributed course organization

• Project coordinator
• develops guidelines for distributed courses
• ensures that all the actors understands the
  project goals, guidelines, and their tasks on the
  courses

7

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During the first year

• Three universities organized four courses, all of
  them having two participating universities
• 70-200 students in a course, altogether 525
  students
• Experiences were gathered both from the students
  and the course personnel

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There were problems in ...

• Ensuring the same level of tutoring for all
  students in a course
• Videoconferencing lectures
• Motivation among teaching personnel
• Practical issues
• Material documentation
• Coordination of courses, performing all required
  tasks

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Improvements

• Instructions and guidelines
• Coursemasters who helps the lecturers and
  coordinates the courses
• Checklist for course preparation
• Weekly communication
• Course seminars
• Approximation of needed working hours
• Distributing the course planning work
• Implementing and evaluating all the practices on
  an example course

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Conclusions

• In distributed courses, it is very important that
  everyone in course personnel understands and
  performs all the tasks assigned to her/him
• Communication and cooperation have to function
  smoothly in all courses
• The working models needs to be clear and
  motivating
• Feedback is needed from students and all course
  personnel in order to ensure development of the
  practices

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Questions?

• Thank you for your attention!
• More information
• http//www.cs.tut.fi/oscu/
• Contact information
• sanna.raisanen_at_uta.fi