Managing Distributed University Courses Sanna-Maria Räisänen Tampere University of Technology Institute of Software Systems

Presentation contents  The Open Source Courseware project (OSCu)  Experiences and problems regarding distributed courses  Practices developed to deal with the problems  Conclusions

Background of the OSCu project  A lack of teaching personnel in universities  The field of software engineering is constantly changing The project helps to develop up-to-date software engineering education

OSCu project  Develops a model for cooperative course development between universities –course material bank –distributed course implementation model

Distributed course organization  Responsible university –designs and organizes the course –develops and updates the course materials –implements the lectures via videoconferencing for all universities participating in the course  Remote universities –carries out their part of tutoring, reporting and feedback collection on the course –tutoring assistants takes care of the local organizing issues, exercise sessions, and all tutoring tasks for their students

Distributed course organization  Project coordinator –develops guidelines for distributed courses –ensures that all the actors understands the project goals, guidelines, and their tasks on the courses

During the first year  Three universities organized four courses, all of them having two participating universities  students in a course, altogether 525 students  Experiences were gathered both from the students and the course personnel

There were problems in...  Ensuring the same level of tutoring for all students in a course  Videoconferencing lectures  Motivation among teaching personnel  Practical issues  Material documentation Coordination of courses, performing all required tasks

Improvements  Instructions and guidelines  Coursemasters who helps the lecturers and coordinates the courses  Checklist for course preparation  Weekly communication  Course seminars  Approximation of needed working hours  Distributing the course planning work Implementing and evaluating all the practices on an example course

Conclusions  In distributed courses, it is very important that everyone in course personnel understands and performs all the tasks assigned to her/him  Communication and cooperation have to function smoothly in all courses  The working models needs to be clear and motivating  Feedback is needed from students and all course personnel in order to ensure development of the practices

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