DAAD Project “Joint Course on Software Engineering” Humboldt University Berlin, University of Novi Sad, University of Plovdiv, University of Skopje, University of Belgrade, University of Niš, University of Kragujevac Version: June 12, 2006 A Course Support on the Web for JCSE Zoran Budimac, Zoran Putnik

2 DAAD project „Joint Course on Software Engineering“ © Introduction:  As already mentioned, during the school-year 2005/06, at the DMI in Novi Sad, we held a JCSE course for undergraduate students, for the second time.  At both occasions, we followed the teaching method proposed by professor Klaus Bothe: first, we present lecture – using slides in English, then we give PDF version of slides to students.

3 DAAD project „Joint Course on Software Engineering“ © Introduction:  It was suggested – and our experience confirms to that – that this way students pay much more attention to a presentation, than when they are given slides in advance.  A reason for giving them a PDF version, was copyright and security, of course.  (We might mention here that one student, after passing his exam, gave us a present – a complete PDF version of a course, sheathed in a hard cover. Heavy science – a book has at least 5 kilos…)

4 DAAD project „Joint Course on Software Engineering“ © Introduction:  Last year, we used a web-site of a Chair of Computer Science to publish the material.  The material was published in 6 different versions: 3 English versions, with 1, 2, or 6 slides per page, and 3 Serbian versions with the same distribution.  Since we already got involved with an eLearning system Moodle, we decide to employ it at JCSE also.

5 DAAD project „Joint Course on Software Engineering“ © Appearance of a course:  A home-page of a system is the one shown in the following picture.  It can be found atperun.im.ns.ac.yu/courses  On the left side of the screen, several course categories can be noticed.  The one that interests us right now, is “Regular courses/Redovna nastava”

6 DAAD project „Joint Course on Software Engineering“ © Appearance of a course:  Here we can see a screen “Course categories”, where students and visitors can chose between 6 regular courses, 28 courses created by students attending “Elective seminar – eLearning” 10 “other” courses, collected from last years “Elective seminar” and “Educational software” courses (in the meantime more than) 3 Demo courses, downloaded from the Internet

7 DAAD project „Joint Course on Software Engineering“ © Web support:  Considering the JCSE course, it can be noticed that we acknowledge three “lecturers” for it, while on the right side of the screen we gave a short description of it.  A picture of a key under the course name implies that an enrollment key exists, as a security measure of a Moodle software system.  A key is given to all of the enrolled students, thus protecting the learning resources, and also the privacy of students

8 DAAD project „Joint Course on Software Engineering“ © Web support:  Was it necessary?  You tell me. We had a student named “Bob Marley” from “Kingston, Jamaica” registered on our system, trying to enroll to a course.  As you can see, we have 220 students altogether using Moodle system, 79 of them enrolled in a “Software engineering” course.  (Others are enrolled into a courses “Operating systems”, “eLearning”, “Software Project Management” etc.).

9 DAAD project „Joint Course on Software Engineering“ © Web support:  As for the teachers, we have one teacher of the “1 st order”, and two teachers of “2 nd order”  Still, all of the teachers are also editors, i.e. persons having a permission to change a course contents.

10 DAAD project „Joint Course on Software Engineering“ © Web support:  Here is a home-page of JCSE course.  You may notice DAAD sign,  forum used as Q & A section about “how-to-use- Moodle”,  advertisement for Joint Master studies in “Software engineering”,  links to additional material on the field.  chat with lecturer – still to be explored!

11 DAAD project „Joint Course on Software Engineering“ © Web support:  And – the course material …  … first few, and the last few topics are presented in the following pictures.

12 DAAD project „Joint Course on Software Engineering“ © Web support:  The previous slide presented the whole of the JCSE web-page.  This kind of web-page is a bit overloaded with material.  Let us take a look at several other web-pages, that can be used to separate different kinds of material.  For example, page containing only learning resources:

13 DAAD project „Joint Course on Software Engineering“ © Web support:  Or, web-pages containing quizzes (on the right), and  Forum – containing the last agreements between students and lecturers about the dates for the final tests, marks, professors signature and similar.

14 DAAD project „Joint Course on Software Engineering“ © Forumi:  And, much more important, forum concerning “how to efficiently solve one of the assignments”.  What is shown here is just a start of a discussion.   Later, besides student starting a discussion and a professor, several more students commented.

15 DAAD project „Joint Course on Software Engineering“ © Web support:  The next picture is more important/interesting, so we’ll give it some additional attention:  This is a web-page concerned with the assignments.  It contains text (and resources, if needed) of the assignment, description of the assignment type, and final dates for submitting them.  Also – since page is presented from the lecturers view – we have the ability to access all of the submitted assignments.

16 DAAD project „Joint Course on Software Engineering“ © Web support:  Even though this page is probably not originally intended for such a purpose, we also used it for keeping track of tests, prelims, and bonus points.  Those can be recognized at the picture.  Assignments of a type “upload a single file” are real assignments. (Notice the number of submitted files – it’s close to number of existing teams – 15)

17 DAAD project „Joint Course on Software Engineering“ © Web support:  Assignments of a type “offline activity” are actually other activities that can earn points for students, i.e. tests, or bonus points (Notice the number of students earning points – all who entered test)  Existence of a Moodle and possibility for electronic assignments submitting, add to the course quality.  Students didn’t need to run to the faculty, search for the assistant, and present their paper. They simply uploaded a file.  Much less paper work.  Much more fun – one team submitted assignment on 31.december … at about 23 hrs

18 DAAD project „Joint Course on Software Engineering“ ©  If we take a closer look into the page with the assignments, and try to check results of one specific assignment, we can see how Moodle takes care of statistics, and how we used assignments for communication with students. Assignments results:

19 DAAD project „Joint Course on Software Engineering“ © Web support:  Moodle keeps track of all of the points earned and entered through the previous web-page.  Here is a situation at about half of the course:  Here we can see how many points/percents each student earned by category (Practice, or Theory), and in total.  Data can be sorted by any of the columns, as it suits us.

20 DAAD project „Joint Course on Software Engineering“ © Web support:  We divided students into 15 teams for the purpose of assignments solving.  Moodle helped us organize it better:  Click on a selected group shows member names.  Further, we can get more information about them, remove them from the group, create more groups, or reorganize existing groups.

21 DAAD project „Joint Course on Software Engineering“ © Web support:  A walk through other Moodle pages, reveals some more useful data.  If a student haven’t log in for some time, (s)he can check activities (s)he missed in the last N days.  Or – just search through activities if (s)he knows what (s)he’s looking for.

22 DAAD project „Joint Course on Software Engineering“ © Web support:  If we scroll down, to the bottom of the same screen, we’ll see several assignments at the end (left picture)  Moodle page Calendar reveals important dates concerning those same assignments (right picture)

23 DAAD project „Joint Course on Software Engineering“ © Conclusion:  In order to improve the course support for JCSE, we decided to use Moodle system for eLearning.  We are aware that there are many improvements possible within a system and even more within our way of using it.  In the future, we plan to extend this usage, transforming Moodle into something more than just a resource storage, and students marks database.  For a start, we emphasized a usage of forums and chats.

24 DAAD project „Joint Course on Software Engineering“ © Conclusion:  Still, we are satisfied with how much flexibility Moodle added to our course.  Even more, we are satisfied with the ease, and simplicity of its usage.  And the most, we are satisfied with all of the possibilities for communication with students.  We look forward into the probable improvements of Internet usage among our students and lecturers, which will add to the quality of this web-support.

25 DAAD project „Joint Course on Software Engineering“ © Thank you for the attention