Steps towards a scientific approach to a database course transformation

Abstract

Instructors modify offerings of their courses in response to changes in emphasis, curriculum, student preparation, resource limitations, and problems with previous offerings. Changes also involve assessment instruments such as assignments and exams, ensuring that students are indeed learning the material, rather than relying on from previous offerings. However, instructors are seldom guided by meaningful and useful data in making these changes. Instead, most rely on their gut feelings, and many changes are made in an ad hoc manner, with minimal supporting data to assess whether the changes contribute positively or negatively to student learning. This paper reports on our experience with the transformation of an undergraduate database course at the University of British Columbia (UBC), using best practices from education research. We provide examples of the types of data that can be obtained through various instruments, and can be used in an objective analysis to affect course changes. If such data collection methods are put into place before changes to a course are anticipated, instructors will be better prepared to assess how students are affected by those changes.This paper is organized as follows. Sections 1 and 2 provide background information about a process model for course transformation. Section 3 describes the course being studied. Section 4 shows different types of instruments that can be used for data collection. Section 5 provides examples of the data collected, and the analysis that can be performed using that information. Section 6 describes our plans for course transformation based on the data collected.