Teaching staff role in students projects

1. Teaching staff role in students projects Boris Milašinović Krešimir Fertalj University of ZagrebFaculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing Croatia

2. Outline • Hypothetical vs. real world problems • Pros and cons and teaching staff responsibilities • An optimistic view on students’ projects • mBotanic - A successful case study • A pessimistic view on students’ projects • Disproportion between collective agreement, curriculum and actual state • (Still optimistic) Conclusion

3. Projects based on a hypothetical problem • Pros: • Small effort to initiate and coordinate project • Easy experimenting with new technologies • Students work can be thrown away without consequences • No constraints • Cons: • Students are not impressed by the typical and hypothetical examples • Students look for purpose and utility of their work • Consequently they could choose some another study • No real user, no real evaluation => feature hard to implement are dropped • Could be boring or frustrating assigning effort to nonsensical things repeatedly

4. Real world projects • Pros: • More interesting, attractive • Develops high-level understanding and design before coding • Can lead to new projects and research • Cons: • Forgetting on educational goals • Students are not employees or researchers • Could lead to frustration from a user • Require much more effort for teaching staff

5. Additional effort from teaching staff • During students assignment • Problem decomposition • Resource and time management • Help in development • Coordination with users • After product delivery (permanently?) • Integration • Maintenance • Responsibility

6. A casestudy • mBotanic • Android application for support of botanic field observations • Team formed of students of different study and knowledge level • Development separated • Client side developed by students • Server side done by staff

7. Teaching staff effort in mBotanic project • New development platform with no previous experience • Platform capabilities had to be checked in order to define project scope • Installation procedure described • Literature filtered • Development of server side component • Coordinating user and students • Previous domain knowledge reduces need for user presence • Testing before deployment to users devices

8. Collective agreement and staff workload • Teaching workload (according to collective agreement) of a • professor : 300 workload units/ per year • senior assistant 225 workload units / per year • assistant: 150 workload units / per year • Lectures: 1 h = 2 WU, PhD lectures: 1h=3 WU, laboratories : 1h = 1WU … • Collective agreement does not measure indirect workload • Faculty council expressed indirect workload as 1.5 * number of students * factor • Factors: • Seminar (bachelor study) 1 Project (bachelor study) 1.5 • Bachelor thesis 2.5 Seminar (master study) 1.33 • Project (master study) 2.3 Master thesis 4 • => 6 WU for a student’s master thesis? • => cca 15 WU assigned to teaching staff for mBotanic? • Should we return to hypothetical projects? 

9. Are hypothetical projects’ cons really cons? • “Students are not impressed by the typical and hypothetical examples” • Most of staff is not bothered with this • No direct consequence on status, salary… • “Students look for purpose and utility of their work and consequently they could choose some another study” • If nobody cares then there is nothing better to choose. • Low mobility of students • “Could be boring or frustrating assigning effort to nonsensical things repeatedly” • …except if you don’t put any effort

10. More “bad” things • Some personal observations • legislator/curriculum authors/faculty council view on students (projects) • Does not care at all • “Just do it whatever you want, but don’t complain and don’t ask for additional staff!” • science is almost only criteria for most of things • but we are not an institute! • some colleagues’ opinions on putting to much effort on work with students • “Why do you care so much?” • “Don’t be so dedicated to teaching, science should be primary focus” • “Everyone can teach, but not everyone can be a scientist”

11. Good things • Benefits from mBotanic project(and similar projects) • Established development principle for future projects • Staff become informed on new platform capabilities • Experience with multiplatform projects • Some parts of new knowledge would be added to teaching materials • Project development continued for master thesis • Expected to be distributed to botanic field experts • Good reference in attracting new students

12. Conclusion • If pessimistic view is thrown away , use of real world problems could be a win-win-win situation… • User gets value for (no) money • Students get grades and valuable experience being motivated during assignment • Side effect: (Some) students realize whether they want to be software engineers/developers or not • No obvious direct benefit for teaching staff, but successful implementation makes teaching staff • satisfied, proud and more attractive to students • up to date with implementation of new technology • competent for delivery of new courses • Still, there is need to change measuring methods of teaching staff workload and appreciate more usage of real world projects in students assignements