{"id":664722,"date":"2020-06-07T19:54:53","date_gmt":"2020-06-08T02:54:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-blog-post&p=664722"},"modified":"2020-10-26T21:22:52","modified_gmt":"2020-10-27T04:22:52","slug":"csew20-how-should-online-computer-systems-courses-be-taught","status":"publish","type":"msr-blog-post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/articles\/csew20-how-should-online-computer-systems-courses-be-taught\/","title":{"rendered":"CSEW’20 | How Should Online Computer Systems Courses Be Taught?"},"content":{"rendered":"
Earlier this year, a novel coronavirus rendered online teaching a norm.<\/p>\n
With \u201cclassroom\u201d experiences poor, effective interactions between teachers and students difficult to maintain, and teaching quality easily affected by network conditions, online teaching has created many difficulties for teachers who are used to having a blackboard and a physical presence in the classroom. In particular, computer systems courses in colleges and universities come with even more difficulties, such as high demand on servers, hardware and technical issues, and uncertainty in the way to carry out experiments and tutorial courses.<\/p>\n
To address this, the China Computer System Education Workshop hosted by MSRA launched its first online event in 2020 with the topic: “How Should Online Computer Systems Courses Be Taught?” The expectation was that this event would help teachers summarize, refine, and reflect on their experiences with online teaching through sharing and discussion, so as to maximize the benefits of China’s computer system education.<\/p>\n
This is the first time in five years that the workshop has moved from an offline to online setting. More than 30 front-line computer systems educators from Tsinghua University, Peking University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, University of Science and Technology of China, Nanjing University, Zhejiang University, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Wuhan University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and The Chinese University of Hong Kong, among other universities, contributed to an exciting discussion on teaching experiences.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
How do you teach classes online? What methods can be applied to offline teaching in the future? The teachers shared their own experiences and generated many new and valuable ideas through their discussion.<\/p>\n
To tackle the problem of students having difficulty concentrating in online lessons, teachers can divide lecture content into fragments, and they can set problems so that students are able to learn continuously. To deal with the lack of interaction between teachers and students, a sense of “classroom” can be strengthened through blackboard writing, and student feedback and communications can be improved by creating WeChat groups, establishing personal contact, issuing questionnaires, etc. Online teaching has also spurred unexpected joys. Experiments on the cloud, Online Judge and so on have shown very good results.<\/p>\n
The workshop was hosted by Prof. Haibo Chen of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Prof. Xiaoming Li of Peking University, Prof. Kang Chen of Tsinghua University, Prof. Yubin Xia of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Prof. Yanyan Jiang of Nanjing University led discussions on individual topics. Let’s take a look at their sharing of teaching computer systems courses online.<\/p>\n
Shared by: Prof. Xiaoming Li, Peking University<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Prof. Xiaoming Li of Peking University offers two courses this semester. They are “Selection of Computing Problems in Society and Market,” open to undergraduates and postgraduates at Peking University, and “Computational Thinking Methods in Social Sciences,” open to freshmen at Guangzhou University. The courses consist of MOOCs, course materials, homework, and discussion.<\/p>\n In order to improve the effectiveness of online teaching, Prof. Li shared the five principles he has stringently (and deliberately) followed: set high expectations for students, help students build \u201cscaffolding,\u201d guide students to be problem-driven, understand students’ statuses, and improve work efficiency.<\/p>\n Using his Guangzhou University course as an example, Prof. Li relayed how to practice these principles in an actual teaching setting. “Computational Thinking Methods in Social Sciences” is an interdisciplinary course in social science and computer science. The Social Science students in the class have not taken courses such as data structure, but Prof. Li still set high expectations for them. The homework he assigned has high programming requirements. The first week\u2019s homework was to make a calculation program suitable for the aggregation coefficient of network nodes.<\/p>\n High expectations require the support of “scaffolding.” Prof. Li does not require students with weak foundations to learn content with high logic requirements such as traversal and search, but rather reminds them that “all graph-related searches can be converted into the multiplication of adjacency matrices and vectors,” so that these students do not feel that the course requirements are out of reach.<\/p>\n Prof. Li believes that the ultimate goal of programming is to solve problems, so it is crucial to have “problem-driven” awareness. In order to gain a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the actual situation of the students, Prof. Li divided up the students and provided feedback in groups, striving to reach a balance between work efficiency and communication effectiveness through a combination of individual and collective communications.<\/p>\n A month after class started, Prof. Li conducted a survey on learning experience and discovered that although students had different opinions on the format of online teaching, it was generally agreed that they had acquired a good deal of knowledge, that course materials and the information learned in class were instructive, and that the homework was challenging but could be completed. Prof.Li, so far, has achieved a certain level of success in his teaching goal of enabling students to form a richer understanding of the application of computational thinking in the social sciences and achieve a certain depth of experience.<\/p>\n Prof. Li emphasized that one of the most important aspects of online teaching during the pandemic is to allow those who have been conservative about online teaching to see that this is also an acceptable method of teaching. It is conceivable that the participation of the majority of front-line teachers in online teaching will promote its development in the future.<\/p>\n Shared by: Prof. Kang Chen of Tsinghua University<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Prof. Kang Chen from Tsinghua University offers two courses: “Introduction to Distributed Systems” for graduate students and “Principles of Computer Composition” for undergraduates. Prof. Chen introduced his own experience in “moving” these two courses online, and focused on the highlights of the “Principles of Computer Composition” cloud experiment platform.<\/p>\n The course “Introduction to Distributed Systems” was forced to go online. Prof. Chen referred to the course handout framework of MIT\u2019s course number 6.824 to organize the content and methods of his lectures, and referred to the video course by MIT professor Robert Morris to arrange his teaching process.<\/p>\n When teaching offline, Prof. Kang Chen can judge the participation level of students through their expressions and actions. For him, the lack of real-time feedback from students is a major difficulty in online teaching. Of course, online teaching also has its advantages. For example, the course can be recorded, which makes it convenient for students to check back on its contents at any time.<\/p>\n Currently, Prof. Chen \u2019s main teaching tools are his computers, iPad Pro, and Pencil. He uses Zoom on his iPad Pro to broadcast, and uses Pencil and Notability to share blackboard notes. Due to a concern for network problems during the live broadcast, Prof. Chen would record his lecture beforehand and pass it to the online classroom as a backup. During the actual class, he would give the lecture again and answer questions raised by students in real time, so as to emulate offline classroom experiences to the greatest extent.<\/p>\nActive Launch of “Experiments on the cloud”<\/em><\/strong><\/h2>\n