Improving CS education at Wits using an online assessment and evaluation system

Abstract

As the current trends in education and educational funding continue, the class sizes perpetually increase thereby decreasing the amount of time a course instructor is able to dedicate to each student. If the nature, style or methods of instruction do not change accordingly, the quality of education is significantly reduced. In this poster we present our work on developing and using technology to address this problem and improve the quality of education at the School of Computer Science at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, South Africa.The School of Computer Science at Wits is a very appropriate environment for carrying out this study since the instruction methodology and curriculum have remained unchanged for the last 10 years, the class sizes grew from 120 to 200 over the last year, and there is an understanding on the part of faculty and administration that the educational quality has diminished and improvements must be made. Currently the dominating format of a CS course at Wits is traditional lectures, tutorials, tests and labs, all of which lack an interactive component and feedback mechanisms. Aside from rare questions to the class during the lecture, which usually engage only few students in the class, there is no active communication either between the instructor and the students or among the students themselves. Testing includes a few exams for each module with all students completing the same tests. Feedback from tests is usually limited to a yes/no response with respect to the correctness of each answer. In rare instances a lecturer also provides solutions to the test. Students are expected to work outside of the scheduled activities but regular homework is not assigned due to the large work overhead of grading and administration. Typically during a course there is only one assignment which covers a large portion of the material Some students find such assignments overwhelming, this is especially true for students with less practical programming experience.