With the recent general availability of chat AIs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, teachers have to ask themselves how to deal with student homework potentially created using these tools. In the following ten minute video I provide a short illustration from my own teaching how students might use such chat AIs in creating homework, and I discuss how a teacher might react to it.
Continue reading “An Illustration of How Chat AIs Might Disrupt Teaching”Lecturing is getting increasingly bipolar
In this fifth semester of the COVID-19 pandemic, I can’t help but predict that teaching by way of lectures will be getting more bipolar. I foresee two main modes of lecturing:
- Increased use of videos in online lecturing rather than live performances
- Traditional in-person lecturing without serious online presence
This may hardly sound surprising, but some of the underlying mechanics that are leading me to this prediction may. There are two noteworthy developments:
Continue reading “Lecturing is getting increasingly bipolar”Top Three Career Advice for Students
These are the three top pieces of career advice I give to my students:
- Feel comfortable with people and culture
- Be close to revenues, not expenses
- Join a growing organization
Good Use of Ancient SD Cards
I finally was able to find a good for of those old (ancient!) SD cards I have flying around. The ministry of education in Bavaria requires that I send exam questions to them before use, by mail (the one without an e-). I can burn the questions to a CD, or put them onto a USB stick, but I presume I can also use my old SD cards. Yay for reuse!
How I Work With Industry Guest Speakers
I bring in guest speakers from industry into my courses, a lot. The benefits of doing so are are mostly that (1) industry speakers can cover some topics better than me and (2) the change of pace in teaching keeps students interested. In general, I don’t save time, though, because engaging industry in my teaching requires extra work.
Continue reading “How I Work With Industry Guest Speakers”How Not to Organize Written Exams
The traditional and efficient way for setting up and grading written exams is to have a professorship create the exam, supervise the actual exam, and then also have them grade it. They will usually use a team in the supervision of the exam and the grading, where work is split by exam question: One person (or a team in the case of a large exam) gets to grade one question across all exams. This ensures fairness, consistency, and speed.
Enter the Bavarian Ministry of Education. It invented a wholly different approach to creating and grading written exams. Here, it applies to students aiming to become informatics high school teachers.
Continue reading “How Not to Organize Written Exams”Why Soft is Hard v2 (in Teaching)
I previously discussed why “soft” research (qualitative research) is so much harder than “hard” research (quantitative research). The main reason is that there is less and later feedback, which can be incredibly frustrating for the impatient researcher. A similar argument applies to teaching “soft” skills, which is much harder than teaching “hard” skills.
Continue reading “Why Soft is Hard v2 (in Teaching)”Dear Ministry of Paper-based Exams
Dear ministry:
Ten days ago I received a pile of written exams to grade. Yesterday you sent me a note asking me to finish up already. In the future, I recommend you send the dunning notice together with the exams.
Continue reading “Dear Ministry of Paper-based Exams”The Downside of College Teaching
“Teaching young minds is great and keeps you young!”
There is some truth to this made-up quote. Growing older, you might get set in your ways, but younger people will most certainly challenge you to rethink those. While there is a lot of positive things to say, I want to discuss two difficult but critical issues that a new college teacher needs to be aware of, in particular if they are coming in from industry.
Continue reading “The Downside of College Teaching”How to Prevent Efficient Creation and Grading of Written Exams
Want to know how to make it hard for professors to create and grade written exams efficiently? Learn from the best, the Bavarian ministry of education, which oversees the handling of the state-wide written exams for budding high-school teachers of computer science. A thread.
Continue reading “How to Prevent Efficient Creation and Grading of Written Exams”