G53DDB
In my first year at Nottingham I taught a 3rd year module,
Developments in Digital Business. This was the first year this
module had been offered by the school and so a fair amount of module
design was required.
At the end of the semester, I remained deeply unhappy with the module and felt unqualified to
continue teaching it and so was relieved when a new lecturer took it
on the next year. It is not an exercise from which I feel I learned a
great deal.
Module Design
G53DDB was my most challenging design problem and the first I faced on appointment at Nottingham. It was, and is, a third year module called Developments in Digital Business and its syllabus described a module that was intended to bring students up to speed with the latest developments in the Digital Business field. It had been proposed as a compulsory module for the new e-Commerce and Digital Business degree offered by the School and had never been delivered before I was appointed as module convener.
The challenge was therefore to develop from scratch a module in
area of which I had no prior knowledge at a suitable level for third
year students. I was advised by the school to use external speakers
to a great extent and that the module should be pitched as one that
was directly relevant to the real world. Although I
initially took this route in designing this module I found it
difficult to frame exam questions on material which I had not yet
seen delivered and concluded that I was going to have to provide a
certain amount of material myself in order to ensure that I could
construct suitable exam questions. This was partly motivated by a
desire to provide sample exam papers in advance which I considered
an important safety blanket for students undertaking a new module.
I am now less convinced of the importance of providing sample exam
questions: students clearly greatly appreciate them but there is a
risk they will study only for the exam. On the other had
exam questions clearly help target student revision
and attention and so, if well-constructed, could be used to provide
an alternative framework for student learning to that provided in
lectures. The module convener who took over from me has decided to
adhere much more strongly to the guest speaker route and in fact
specifies that the lectures he provides are background and framework
lectures only and are not a part of the examinable content of the
lecture. He has been helped in this partly by greater familiarity
with the content provided by recurring guest lecturers and by the use
of a number of videos and other media to provide relevant content. I
chose to base my lectures primarily on a text book which covered the
basics of Digital Business branching out into a couple of areas that
particularly interested me personally (the legal aspects of the
Internet and the mathematics of bandwidth in Peer-to-Peer systems).
This was sufficient to provide material for the exam and the
module was reasonably well-received in SET/SEM evaluation. As part of
the PGCHE course an observer sat in on one of my lectures and he
commented that, as I feared, the content I provided seemed very simple
for a third year module, on the other hand he was impressed by the
amount of note-taking going on and so felt that the material was
valued by the students.
Lectures
Following advice on the nature of student attention in lectures I chose to break each lecture in the middle. The mechanism
I used was to present a sample exam question for the students' to
think about/discuss, a sample answer to the question was later
supplied on the module website. I felt too intimidated by the size of
the class (90 students) to feel confident about soliciting useful
feedback on the question in the lecture. The observer who attended a
lecture as part of the PGCHE course felt the sample questions served
little purpose and recommended their removal. In general I have
reduced the opportunities for structured student breaks in lectures,
not because I necessarily think them of little utility, but I have
found it hard to find a format in which they appear to work well for me.
Coursework and Feedback
The module syllabus also specified two written courseworks. As a
third year module I felt it important that these contain a significant
amount of critical thought. This aligned with learning outcomes
requiring that students be able to acquire and evaluate
information and predictions about the area. I settled
on two essays one to be based
on survey data and one on reading the media. I deliberately specified
that the survey need not be particularly wide-ranging and allowed the
students to work in groups, asking only that their interpretation of
the data be individual since it was the interpretation in which I was
primarily interested. This coursework went well though a number of
students put perhaps too much effort into the survey and then felt
cheated when it became clear it was not the primary source of marks
for the exercise. The second coursework I based on the reading of
articles in the popular media since I felt that Digital Business was
an area particularly prone to hype and exaggeration and a degree of
healthy skepticism about media reports would be a useful skill to
foster in a Digital Business Graduate. The module was first offered
in the 2001/2002 session and so I set the students the task of
evaluating the interaction between the events of September 11th 2001
and the Internet and Digital Business through the medium of popular
reports. They were asked to read two newspaper or magazine articles
on the subject, evaluate their accuracy, assess their conclusions and
then to draw their own conclusions based on the reading. In general I
was disappointed by the students' tendency to take anything they read
as gospel, a few wrote things such as "this appeared in a British
broadsheet so can be assumed to be impartial and generally accurate"
and suggested that it had never occurred to many of them to treat media
writing critically even in a field which had experienced a
stock-market bubble and crash during the course of their studies and
on a subject as obviously fraught and emotionally-charged as September
11th. In general the only students who approached the writing
critically were the few who had looked at reports written from a
Muslim perspective and even then there was a tendency to assume that
discrepancies with "western" reporting were due to bias on the part of
the Middle-East rather than the west. SET/SEM evaluation revealed
general mystification with the coursework as a whole and suggested
that even after taking the exercise and reading the feedback they
remained mystified about the point of it. Such a general widespread
failure to approach material critically can not be confined to the
module alone but suggests a failing with the design of assessments
throughout the degree - it was a shame, however, that this assessment
was clearly not well enough designed to make any impact upon the
problem.
For the first essay, I gave detailed feedback to the students in terms of the strengths and weaknesses of their content and lists of the problems in grammar and presentation. The general presentation of the essays was poor, possibly due to the fact that computer science students are not often exposed to essay style coursework and so the presentational feedback dominated and caused considerable anger ("Grammar is not relevant to me as a Computer Scientist"). It was also very time-consuming to type up the feedback (based on my annotations of the essays which I needed to keep for inspection by the external examiner) and so I opted not to give such feedback on the second essay unless it was specifically requested. Only a couple of students did so, although the grammar and referencing (the two major problems with the first coursework) on display appeared to have significantly improved. Module feedback suggests that despite the complaints the students valued the feedback they were given on the coursework.
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