Assessing the Effectiveness of Individual Reflections on Video Feedback
2021 ASEE Virtual Annual ConferenceSchilling, W. W.
2021
Abstract: We know from research that feedback to students is an decisive aspect in the learning process. Students learn better when they receive relevant and timely feedback from faculty members regarding their assignments. Multiple studies have shown this. However, if students do not review the feedback, it is not effective, and faculty members routinely speak to anecdotal stories of students disregarding feedback given to them. In previous papers, the usage of multimedia feedback has been discussed. In essence, with multimedia feedback, traditional written comments are generally replaced with a short, narrated video whereby the feedback is provided both using audio and visual techniques. Overall, this approach has been shown to be quite effective for communicating with students. However, as with traditional feedback, the videos are only effective if students watch them. This paper will present a new approach toward video feedback, namely integrating an optional individual reflection into the process. Student
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Work in Progress: Integrating the Entrepreneurial Mindset into a Software Requirements Course
2020 ASEE Annual ConferenceSchilling, W. W.
Abstract: One of the most challenging aspects of software engineering is teaching students requirements elicitation. Software requirements elicitation requires complex thinking and a thorough understanding of the customer and business needs. Traditionally, requirements elicitation courses have focused on pure documentation of requirements, the focus being on drafting unambiguous statements properly formatted to follow an IEEE standard. However, the challenge of requirements elicitation is often not in the documentation of requirements, but rather in understanding the needs of a customer. This work in progress paper intended to provide a case study of a novel approach to integrating the entrepreneurial mindset into a software requirements course. Working in teams, students are given an extensive scenario related to a real-world medical issue introduced by a brief video. Through the remainder of the course, students interview other students, real world practitioners, and others to understand the value of the product and the needs of potential clients before drafting a final requirements document which then could be used to develop the project. Through this approach, engineers communicate with nurses, athletes, pharmacists, and other non-engineers, learning the skills of teamwork, the perspectives of non-engineers, the limitations of technology, and in some cases, learn that a project that seems advantageous may actually not be successful. The paper will describe the project, the materials created for the project, and provide student observations on the success of this approach.
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Analyzing the impact of asynchronous multimedia feedback on novice computer programmers
2015 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)Schilling, W. W.
2015
For many engineering students, freshman programming represents one of the hardest courses for them to master. Unlike other science fields, few students are routinely exposed to programming in the K12 system. This can make the freshman programming course daunting. However, in the field of software engineering, success in this area is vital, as success in nearly all future courses requires mastery of this skillset. In the engineering field, we find that many students are visual learners. These students learn best by seeing, and they can perform very well in the classroom with the appropriate usage of teaching styles. However, when it comes to providing feedback to students on submitted assignments, the main method employed is the written comment, which is not conducive to visual learners. From a faculty member's standpoint, this makes sense, as it is the simplest form of feedback. However, written feedback is often ineffective at improving student performance, as many students simply do not read the comments because the students feel they are not relevant to their performance. This can be compounded in the freshman year, as students are still learning what is meant to be an effective college student. At higher levels, an alternative feedback mechanism, namely asynchronous multimedia feedback, has shown great promise. In lieu of written feedback, students are provided feedback for software engineering exercises through the use of a short video made via video capture. The video captures in multimedia format the instructor's perceptions and actions when grading a given assignment. The video shows, in real time, what the instructor saw, whether it is a program crashing or the successful operation of the program. Furthermore, it provides the instructor the ability to potentially fix simple blatant errors and see the instructor's debugging strategy. The article describes the pedagogical foundation for the technique, specifics of the technique used, student perceptions of the technique, and an assessment of the learning gains from using such a method in an introductory freshman programming course. In general, students are show to prefer the technique versus traditional grading, and a statistically significant improvement in overall outcomes for the experimental course is shown to exist. A statistically significant correlation between the watching of videos and outcomes is also shown.
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Case Studies for Enhancing Student Engagement and Active Learning in Software V&V Education
Journal of Education and LearningManohar, P.A., Acharya, S., Wu, P., Hansen, M., Ansari, A., Schilling, W.
2015
Two critical problems facing the software (S/W) industry today are the lack of appreciation of the full benefits that can be derived from Software Verification and Validation (V&V) and an associated problem of shortage of adequately trained V&V practitioners. To address this situation, the software V&V course curriculum at the author's institution is being improved via a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded project. The basic objectives of this project are to enhance the quality of software education via increased student engagement and by bridging the gap between the basic principles discussed in the classroom and the complexity of real world problems. The teaching method utilized promotes higher levels of student engagement and learning through interactive, hands-on exercises, case studies and discussions. In addition, the instructional materials were purposefully designed not only for university classroom settings, but to also be deployed for on-the-job professional training in S/W industry settings, thereby helping to increase the pool of professionals with contemporary V&V knowledge and skills. The new course curriculum enhancement described in this paper is guided by academic research and industry best practices that focus on four specific V&V focus areas: "requirements engineering, reviews, configuration management", and "testing". Among many educational tools that are being developed to achieve the project objectives, the work related specifically to the development of one central component, case studies, is described here. Historically, case studies have been educational tools utilized in business, law, and medicine, but are not as prominent in software engineering. The hypothesis is that case studies would be effective educational tools to introduce real-world professional practices into the classroom, which would help the students in both identifying and solving problems, and developing a perspective on applying knowledge. In this paper we describe a set of V&V related case-studies that we have drawn from industry experiences and developed as pedagogical tools. These case-studies cover several important topics in the S/W V&V domain such as software testing, legal issues in software, software consumer protection, and requirements from the customers' perspectives.
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Integrated Active Learning Tools for Enhanced Pedagogy in a Software Engineering Course
The ASEE Computers in Education (CoED) JournalAcharya, S., Manohar, P., Wu, P., Schilling, W., Ansari, A.
2015
Effective teaching requires effective teaching tools. This pedagogical requirement is especially important for software engineering education, where graduates are expected to develop software that meets rigorous quality standards in functional and application domains. To enhance students’ understanding of the needs of the professional software industry, lecture notes are supplanted by additional pedagogical tools being developed at the author’s institution for a software verification and validation (V&V) course. These active learning teaching tools, consisting of class exercises, case studies, and case study videos, are being developed in partnership with industry. The basic objective of the project is to improve software education so that it is aligned with both academic research and industry best practices. This project is being funded through a NSF-TUES grant.
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Assessing the effectiveness of video feedback in the computing field
2013 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)Schilling, W. W.
2013
Engineering students exhibit a wide array of learning styles across the perception, input, organization, processing, and understanding dimensions. To improve students performance in the classroom, many techniques have been developed to address these variances. The computing fields, however, tend to have a large percentage of students who are visual learners. These students learn best by seeing, and they can perform very well in the classroom with the appropriate usage of teaching styles. However, when it comes to providing feedback to students on submitted assignments, the main method employed is the written comment, which is not conducive to visual learners. This method is most prevalent in the academic community because overall, it is the simplest form of feedback that a faculty member can provide to students. However, written feedback is often highly ineffective at improving student performance, as many students simply do not read the comments because the students feel they are not relevant to their performance. This paper presents an assessment of an alternative method for providing feedback to students: video feedback. In lieu of written feedback, students are provided feedback for software engineering exercises through the use of a short video made via video capture. The video captures in multimedia format the instructors perceptions and actions when grading a given assignment. The video includes both aural commentary as the assignment is assessed, as well as dynamic visuals of the grading process, demonstrating failures and improvements that can be made in the submitted assignment. The article describes the pedagogical foundation for the technique, specifics of the technique used, student perceptions of the technique, and an assessment of the learning gains from using such a method in a junior level class. In general, students are show to prefer the technique versus traditional grading, and an improvement in overall outcomes for the course is shown to exist as well.
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Modeling the reliability of existing software using static analysis
2006 IEEE International Conference on Electro/Information TechnologySchilling, W.W., Alam, M.
2006
Software unreliability represents an increasing risk to overall system reliability. As systems become larger and more complex, mission critical and safety critical systems have had increasing functionality controlled exclusively through software. This change, coupled with generally increasing reliability in hardware modules, has resulted in a shift of the root cause of systems failure from hardware to software. Market forces, including decreased time to market, reduced development team sizes, and other factors, have encouraged projects to reuse existing software as well as to purchase COTS software solutions. This has made the usage of the more than 200 existing software reliability models increasingly difficult. Traditional software reliability models require significant testing data to be collected during software development in order to estimate software reliability. If this data is not collected in a disciplined manner or is not made available to software engineers, these modeling techniques can not be applied. It is imperative that practical reliability modeling techniques be developed to address these issues. It is on this premise that an appropriate software reliability model combining static analysis of existing source code modules, limited testing with path capture, and Bayesian belief networks is presented. Static analysis is used to detect faults within the source code which may lead to failure. Code coverage is used to determine which paths within the source code are executed as well as how often they execute. Finally, Bayesian belief network is then used to combine these parameters and estimate the resulting software reliability.
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