BORIS MILAŠINOVIĆ KREŠIMIR FERTALJ UNIVERSITY OF ZAGREB FACULTY OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING AND COMPUTING CROATIA Teaching staff role in students projects

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

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

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

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

A case study 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

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

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) 1Project (bachelor study) 1.5  Bachelor thesis 2.5Seminar (master study) 1.33  Project (master study) 2.3Master 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?

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

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”

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

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