Teaching Tips (including Best Practices)

Table of Contents

Multiple Choice Exams

• Multiple choice questions (choose one answer from among 4-5 choices for each question) are easy to mark, but they encourage guessing.
• Fill-in-the-blank questions are an alternative that requires students to know the answer, not just recognize the answer, but they are much harder to mark because students may choose a term that is correct but not one that the instructor intended (or that the marker recognizes as being equivalent to the "standard" answer).
• A hybrid approach is to provide a list of words or short phrases (in alphabetical order) followed by a number of questions each of which has one of the entries in the list as its answer.
• Students answer as for normal multiple choice, but choose from the entire list, not just a few words or terms given with each question.
• Pure guessing is not helpful (the odds of getting right answer are minuscule), but informed guessing (among 2-3 plausible alternatives) is rewarded.
• Students can use "recognition" to correctly answer a few questions, but if the list of possible answers is long enough, the cannot rely on this for every question because it takes too much time. So they need to know the answer (just like for fill-in-the-blanks).
• Marking is fast and accurate (perhaps even better than for traditional multiple choice because the same letters do not come up again and again on the marking key), especially because only numbers are used (the number for the word or term selected from the list) so poor handwriting is not an issue as it is with fill-in-the-blanks.
• For a one-hour exam 20 of these questions (two pages of questions and one page with the list of possible answers), followed by 3-4 more traditional "essay", "programming" or "do this example" questions is about right. Figure 1 minute for each multiple choice question, on average, when estimating how long students will need for this type of exam.
• The list of possible answers should be on a separate page so sutdents can remove it from the examination booklet so it can be consulted as subsquent pages with questions are being read.

Submitting Grades

• Enter your grades at https://ssc.adm.ubc.ca/fsc/servlets/SRVFSCFramework.
• An explanation as to what the percentage grades translate into in terms of letter grades can be found at http://www.calendar.ubc.ca/vancouver/index.cfm?tree=3,42,96,0.
• There has been a departmental policy that if a student fails a course because of a failed final exam, failed project, or other component of the course that must be passed in order to pass the course, the student's mark is the minimum of the computed mark for the term and a mark of 45. This is the usual policy, but mention it in the course outline (and in class near the end of the term), to avoid any misunderstanding.
• Ph.D. students must have an average of 80% and at least 72% in each course for the course to count for their comprehensive course requirements (see http://www/grads/affairs/Handbook.pdf). Ph.D. students need 68% in every course to be making satisfactory progress. M.Sc. students need 60%.
• For grad courses: If you want to give a student an extension at the end of the term, then when submitting marks to the FSC, you should enter a "T" for Thesis in Progress, or you can just leave it blank. If you enter "T", then you would need to submit a Change of Grade form when the student completes the course requirement. Some instructors prefer leaving the grade blank to avoid the paperwork. There is no published deadline for filling it out, and other students should be able to see their grades as long as you "submit" (but not "save") the grades.

How to Change a Student’s Grade

• You should be very careful in computing and submitting marks, because a change of grade involves a number of signatures, including that of the head of the department, and someone from the Dean's office. The procedure is as follows:
• If you require to change a student's mark after you have submitted your grades, there is now an option on the Faculty Service Centre (FSC) to print out the form with the student and course information already on it. All you will have to do is fill in the new grade, the reasons for the change and of course obtain the signatures.
• Log on to FSC as if you were entering grades (https://ssc.adm.ubc.ca/fsc/servlets/SRVFSCFramework) and click on the small box on the column marked "Change Grade" on the right hand side of your screen and then click on the gray box "Change Grades" located at the top and bottom of your screen. This will prompt you to open Adobe Acrobat to print the form out. Please note that you will not have this option if the grade you want to change is a "W" or "T", you will have to fill out the paper version of the Change to Academic Record form as before. The Dean's Office will only process the latest version of the Change to Academic Record form (at the bottom in small print it should have the 07/2003 date).

TA Policies

• Joyce Poon and the "TA coordinator" elected by CSGSA (see http://www.cs.ubc.ca/spider/csgsa/representatives.html#Other) will select the TAs for you. If you want TAs with particular backgrounds (e.g., TAs who have done well in specific courses, as evidenced by their transcripts), or if you don't think that your currently assigned TAs are well suited to your needs, then contact Joyce or the TA coordinator as soon as possible!
• It helps to have a brief meeting with your TAs before the course starts, to get an idea of their strengths and weaknesses with respect to your course. Consider how well-suited a TA is with respect to the following duties in your course:
  • Marking
  • Giving labs
  • Giving tutorials
  • Holding consulting hours
  • Managing small groups
  • Answering discussion group questions (i.e., bulletin Board, newsgroup)
  • Programming
  • Creating assignments
  • Creating solutions
• It is required by the TA Union Contract that you specify each TA's responsibilities in writing, to avoid misunderstandings. Please use the form "TA Duties and Anticipated Workload" provided to you by the department each term.
• Hourly TAs may have a minimum and maximum number of hours that they would like to contribute to the course. Abide by their expectations. Monthly TAs, however, should spend an average of 12 hours per week on the course for a total of 192 hours per term. Of those 192 hours, 8 must be scheduled as paid vacation. Vacation time is normally scheduled in the period Dec 24 to Jan 1. Note that hours worked includes preparation time, meetings, exam invigilation and any required training sessions. Early in the term, and during the exam period, the TA's will probably work less than 12 hours per week, but it should average out.
• At the end of a term, but especially in December, many TAs like to leave for home as soon as possible to maximize their holiday time, or to take advantage of cheaper airfares. Warn your monthly TAs that they need to remain at UBC until a few days after the final exam, since they'll be needed to hold pre-exam consulting hours, and to invigilate and mark the final exam. Remember, monthly TAs are paid for the month in which the final exam period falls. Avoid the temptation of letting TAs substitute "a bit more marking on the last assignment" in exchange for leaving early, as this just adds more work to other TAs and instructors, who are probably busy enough as it is. If you allow a TA to be absent from UBC outside the normal vacation period of Dec 24 to Jan 1, please make it clear that any time taken after Jan 1 is not additional vacation time and that the TA will still be expected to work 192 hours over the course of term 2.
• Mention to your TAs that they will be evaluated at various stages in the course by the students and the instructor. Hopefully, this will promote greater TA responsibility, and will enhance the students' overall learning experience.
  • After the first month or so in the course, you should conduct a short, informal, mid-term survey of how things are going in the course. A sample survey is available from any instructor on the Undergrad Affairs Committee. Have students fill in this form during class. Later, read the surveys, and act on those areas which call for improvement.
  • Encourage your students to give you feedback (in class or during office hours) about how well things are going in the labs or tutorials.

Pedagogy

Encouraging Thinking

• Encourage open-ended thinking and assignments, especially in 3rd and 4th year courses.
• Expose students to some research in 4th year courses.
• Teach higher-order skills (e.g., how to construct an argument), rather than tailoring your teaching to satisfy the popular question: "Is this going to be on the final exam?"
• Avoid spoon-feeding (unless a particular topic is best served by spoon-feeding). By spoon-feeding, we mean: showing students the step-by-step solution to a problem that they could reasonably figure out on their own. For example, to reduce their workload, and to avoid reading the textbook or the course notes or looking up other resources, students often post or e-mail questions. Some instructors, TAs, and fellow students are all too happy to oblige, and some students tend to rely on this method to complete their homework.
• Beware of students that come to office hours and want the answers to assignment questions. Help them to learn to help themselves.
• Get students to take charge of more of their own learning.
• Train students to become independent problem solvers.
• Assume that students have the proper prerequisites for a course, and that they are doing the assigned reading in the course. Then, the lecture time can be spent more profitably.

Encouraging Reflection

• It would be good to have students reflect upon what they've learned, and thereby answer questions like:
  • How do these pieces of the course fit together?
  • Why is this material important?
  • What have I gained from this assignment, in exchange for the hours that I've put in?
  • What new ideas/concepts can I take from this course and apply to my next co-op work term, my career, a research topic, an idea for starting my own company, etc?
  • In what ways has this material sparked my interest into further exploration of this topic?

"Interactive Engagement", Clickers, and the Interactive Lecture

NOTE: This text is pulled from Steve Wolfman's notes after a working group meeting and could use some editing for brevity in wiki format. Please feel free to edit

Interactive methods are well-documented to achieve quantitative improvements in learning over "traditional" lecture. There's an enormous body of literature on this. To pick one article, Hake studied a huge swath of physics students and courses and found significant benefits to "interactive engagement" styles of teaching in 1998. (Hake's work is interesting in part because it's rare to find a study large enough to take whole COURSES as a unit of analysis, as opposed to individual students. That said, it's far from a perfect study.)

Clickers are NOT well-documented to achieve significant improvements over similar low-tech mechanisms when those mechanisms are used in similar ways. Mazur's group actually did a study on that recently and published a tidy little paper.

However, CWSEI and its Colorado counterpart have begun establishing some research results that show clickers to have some possible advantages (e.g., in terms of level of participation). It's also possible to do some things with clickers (discussed in that same Harvard paper above) that you really can't do with cards. Whether you WANT to do those or not is up to you

That said, if your students have clickers, they're pretty easy to use. For non-clicker solutions, try: basic hand-raising, raising a hand with 1-4 fingers to indicate options 1-4, the same but holding to the chest (to avoid students glomming on to other students' responses), using colored index cards, the same but holding them to the chest, using white index cards with colored post-its taped on (these can be held high out front to avoid the answer glomming phenom and then flipped around so people at the back can see).

For those interested in the advantages of traditional lecture, Bligh published an excellent overview in his book "What's the Use of Lectures?" IIRC, his meta-analysis concluded that for some specific low-level learning goals, lecture is no worse than interactive methods and therefore probably a more efficient means to achieve these (although just-in-time teaching proponents would probably argue that the very MOST efficient way to accomplish those types of goals would be to have students learn them on their own from the textbook).

Examinable Material

• Emphasize to the students that any material that is taught (but is not examinable) is still beneficial to their learning.
• Since there's often far more material in a course than can be reasonably covered in a final exam, consider putting some questions (that you don't intend to ask) in a sample or practice final exam. This will encourage students to learn that material. Most instructors provide solutions to the sample questions.
• Consider asking one or more midterm questions that apply to the assigned textbook readings. This might encourage students to actually read the textbook during the rest of the term.
• Consider asking one or more exam questions that deal with the assignments, especially in those courses where assignments are not weighted very heavily. (In many courses, assignment weightings are necessarily low because of the difficulty in judging whether or not a student has done his/her own work. This is also a reason for why we have a "must pass the final exam to pass the course" rule.)

Workload

• It is true that the amount of coverage for a typical computer science course today is far greater today than it was 10-20 years ago, but recall that students today have Google, online course materials like lecture slides and tutorials, far better textbooks (usually), etc. Still, be careful not to overload the students. As a rule of thumb, the amount of homework should be about 2-3 hours per lecture hour. The University of Washington, for example, suggests 3 hours of homework per credit, per week.
• Before adding new material to a course, think about what existing material should come out in order to make room for the material that you plan to add!
• For many students, especially first-year students, a computer science course takes up more time than any of their other courses. Even good students have complained about the workload in computer science (in particular, the programming assignments). While it is true that learning to program well takes practice, instructors should consider narrowing down the scope of a programming assignment to avoid busy work (i.e., work that is repetitive and doesn't really enhance the learning process).
  • Think about goal-learning outcomes.
  • Note that diminishing returns occur from larger programming assignments.
  • Consider asking your students:
    • What did you get out of this programming exercise?
    • How many hours did you spend on it?
  • Consider attaching time limits to an assignment: "If you don't get this working within x hours, then come and ask for help." Perhaps a student is needlessly struggling, is misunderstanding something, or is not aware of certain resources for the course.
• One of the reasons for why students often start assignments "at the last minute" isn't necessarily laziness, but because they have too much work (e.g., midterms, assignments, projects) to do in other courses. A solution is for such students to take less courses, perhaps deferring their graduation date. They could also "time slice" their courses, although the benefit of time slicing versus a large block of dedicated time needs to be considered. Every student should pay attention to his/her own utility function, whether it be to maximize overall grades (e.g., maybe just don't do an assignment that's only worth 2%, if a midterm worth 20% is quickly coming up in another course), or to focus on a course that really interests them and for which they believe will be integral to their future job.

Course Policies

• You should strive for fairness and consistency when establishing course policies. Remember, if you do a favour for one student, others may be feel slighted at not being given the same treatment.
• On your course outline, list your expectations for:
  • Attendance
  • Late assignments
  • Missed midterms
  • Missed final exams
• Avoid giving in to special requests for early exams (e.g., student wants to qualify for cheaper airfare). The Dean's office states: "Students are responsible for being available throughout their exam period, travel plans not withstanding. The dates of the exam period are published in the Calendar in the spring so students have no excuse for booking a flight during that period. PLEASE DO NOT GIVE IN TO PLEAS FOR EARLY EXAMS. If you do, the student is likely to cite your compliance as an argument to get a colleague teaching another course to do the same. Word gets around. If you think a student's case is exceptional (and wanting to get home early is not), direct the student to their Faculty's advising office."
• If a student misses a final exam, he/she must contact his/her Dean's office, or in the case of science students, the Faculty of Science Information and Advising Office to request an academic concession. You should only give a makeup exam if the Dean grants an academic concession. In particular, it is not your responsibility to evaluate the student's reason for missing the exam or to collect and validate any needed documentation in support of the student's claim--the science advising office will do that. If an academic concession is granted you get to select when the exam will be written.
  • The missed exam can be offered: (a) at the same time that the next section of this course has its final exam (e.g., in April for missed December exams), (b) during the August deferred exam period, (c) at a time of your choosing before the August deferred exam period.
  • Avoid having the student write the exam shortly after the others write (e.g., 0-3 days), as this usually gives a distinct advantage to this student (he/she has more time to study, and word gets around pretty quickly about the questions on the final exam). Furthermore, if more than one student missed the exam, it can be a hassle to try to accommodate everyone's schedule. If students fail to show for your make-up exam it is a missed exam and they must again request an academic concession. For additional information see the Academic Concession section in the Faculty of Science regulations at http://students.ubc.ca/calendar/index.cfm?tree=12,215,410,407 . You probably also want to consult the Term-end Guidelines found in the Learning and Teaching section at http://science.ubc.ca.
  • An exception to the above is a student that is about to graduate (e.g., missed an April final exam, but would be graduating in May). Such students should probably write a replacement exam after the end of the April exam period.
• Students who miss the final exam should make sure that they download needed materials from the course Web site (e.g., practice questions and course notes on WebCT), since these resources may no longer be available to them after the end of the term.
• In the days preceding your final exam, advertise your sickness policy. Experience has shown that fewer students tend to miss the final exam when they find out that the instructor isn't going to be offering a make-up exam two days later.
• To be fair to all students, avoid re-using exam questions for which the integrity may have been compromised. For example, students may already be discussing their solutions on the newsgroup or bulletin board. Replace such questions on future exams, including make-up exams. Also, replace "big mark" questions on a specialized subtopic with other questions, because once a student knows that subtopic X is covered, this gives them a distinct advantage over the other students. If you've numbered the exams (e.g., serial numbers), it should be easy to see whether or not you got all of the exams back, including the leftover ones. Be sure to collect the marking schemes from the TAs, and don't leave the marked exams or solutions lying around in open spaces in your office. These latter few points will allow you to re-use some questions on future exams.
• Some instructors feel that a student who writes a deferred exam should be given a slightly harder exam than the other students, given that they've had more time to study, and that word has gotten around about the questions on the exam.

What is a Grade?

• Are you measuring performance at various milestones during the term, or are you only concerned with students having a mastery of the material at the end of the course? The answer to such questions will determine whether or not you permit a final exam to count for 100% of a student's grade. Generally speaking, most instructors provide well-defined weights for the assignments, labs, quizzes, midterms, and final exam; and abide by the formula established at the start of the term.
• Watch out for students who are trying to "negotiate" the course marking scheme with you. Some students will want you to place a greater weight on their final exam (e.g., ignoring their bad midterm). Some students will want you to place a greater weight on their assignments. Some students may approach you near the end of the term, and mention to you that they weren't really feeling all that well when they wrote the midterm, and are hoping that you'll replace their midterm mark with their final exam mark (if the final exam mark is higher). You should provide a consistent grading scheme that is fair to all students, without favouring certain students.

Textbook Room

• Current textbooks (and some old textbooks, and some useful reference books) are in the Textbook/Supplies Room. Please keep the room reasonably organized, by keeping together those books related to a specific course.
• Don't forget to sign out any books that you are borrowing. The sign-out book is managed by the receptionist at the Main Office's front desk. Unless you are teaching a course, please use discretion on taking books because we sometimes run out of textbooks for TAs and instructors, and this can be very frustrating at the start of the term. Re-orders are time-consuming and expensive (and students indirectly foot the bill).
  • e.g., At one time we had 10-15 copies of a database book (worth up to $140 a copy); yet we still ran out of these books for the few TAs we had for a database course. The former TAs said they returned their copies, and there was no record of signout for the other copies.

Other Resources

• There's a great set of resources for undergrad teaching at https://secweb.cs.ubc.ca/local/views/ta.shtml, including the UBC Computer Science Instructor Manual
• The Faculty of Science's teaching page can be found at http://www.science.ubc.ca/index.htm?http://www.science.ubc.ca/teaching.htm
• Course scheduling for the following winter (no graduate courses are offered in the summer) starts in February. As it is extremely difficult to find large size classrooms, instructors are encouraged to submit their course scheduling requirements for the following year as early as possible. Contact Joyce Poon if you want to schedule a grad course.
• You can use https://ssc.adm.ubc.ca/fsc/servlets/SRVFSCFramework to give you a classlist for the classes you're teaching, or you can simply use the command "classlist [classnumber]" to give you a quasi-up-to-date listing. The classlist is refreshed nightly at the start of a term, and sporatically thereafter.
• There's a calendar of dates at http://students.ubc.ca/calendar/download/IDatesandDeadlines.pdf. This calendar is awful. Surely there exists a better one. Does anyone know of a better one?
• The AMS has a database of old exams from classes at http://www.ams.ubc.ca/exams/index.cfm?subject=CPSC. Currently they only have exams from 315 and 430, but you may want to check there if you're planning on reusing things.
• The "Tomorrow's Professor" mailing list offers great teaching (and other university) tips. You can check out the archives at http://ctl.stanford.edu/Tomprof/index.shtml, or subscribe by sending mail to Majordomo@listsDELETEthisTEXT.stanford.edu with "subscribe tomorrows-professor" in the body.
• Have more to add? Click the edit button below.

Faculty Workload

• Do you have ideas on smart use of time for teaching?
• For example, in lectures I use a mix of slides for general points and equations but the whiteboard for diagrams and working out examples. I believe this is fairly effective for students, requires them to take coherent notes and be aware and active in class, but also minimizes the time I need to spend in preparation.
• I had a good experience with assigning a 1-page report on a research paper, giving students sepcific questions to answer in the report (that required thought beyond what the paper said) --- it was fun, fast and easy to both develop and mark, and I think was a good learning experience in a 4th year course.

e-Workload

• Gregor Kiczales pointed us to the following paper

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/education/21professors.html?ex=1141189200&en=5101027d00284aa7&ei=5070

• The article makes a number of good points. What it leaves out is that we (or our universities) have adopted e-technology and then leveraged that to increase class sizes and otherwise reduce the resources that used to be provided to students. In a large class that uses

  WebCT

  , students cannot realistically expect to attend office hours because there simply is not enough time for each student to have any significant time (rough calculation: 200+ students in a course means 30 office hours during a term if each students gets 10 minutes during the term, which is two hours per week, all that is available).

• The 24/7 expectations that students have may indeed be attributable to an "all about me" attitude, but they might also reflect that fact that we use

  WebCT

  and then expect that students will read it fairly often. In a traditional lecture style course, students would only be responsible for receiving information about due dates, assignments, etc., during the scheduled lectures. I suspect most instructors now expect students to monitor

  WebCt

  or e-mail on a daily basis.

Kelly

Feedback

• The end-of-term review comes too late to allow for the implementation of requested improvements, at least for the current course. It is recommended that you hand out a short survey about a month into the course, asking about the pace of the course, the style of lecturing, the effectiveness of the overhead projector or whiteboard or laptop projection, whether one's voice is too soft, how the TA is doing in the tutorials or labs, etc.
• At the end of an assignment, you might want to ask a few final questions in the form of feedback (to accompany the assignment to be handed in), such as:
  • How long did it take you to complete this assignment?
  • What did you like the best about this assignment?
  • What did you like the least about this assignment?
  • What helped you learn the best in this assignment?
  • What distracted from your learning in this assignment?
• During office hours, ask some of your regulars how the class is going, how the TAs are doing, whether the textbook is helpful, whether an assignment was too long/hard, etc.

Evaluation

• How to read your evaluation forms: I discovered after three years here that the number that matters is line 6 (effectiveness), not the line 7 average that seemed like the obvious one to me. -Tamara

Viewing Grade Distributions

• You can look at the grade distribution for one or many courses through this (horrendous) interface at http://www.pair.ubc.ca. Click on Data Access, and then Grades Distributions.
• If you just want to browse multiple iterations of one particular course and section, it's probably best to choose "Specific Section" to get it interactively. Repeat with the changed year or section number.
• But you can get email that tells you all the courses for a particular term. That's more useful if you want to figure out, for example, prevailing custom for the course average or understand enrollment distributions. Not to mention being just plain interesting. Choose "Specific Subject", rather than "Specific Section", and you can get all the "CPSC" courses ... sent to you by e-mail (about 1-2 minutes later), in tabular format.
  • Remember that a session of "2008w" refers to the 2008-2009 school year, and not the 2007-2008 school year. (If the 2008-2009 school year has just ended, and you mistakenly type "2009w" as the UBC session ID, then the application will e-mail you a blank page with no error messages.)

First Day of Class

• Here are some of the do's and don'ts for your first day of class FirstDayOfClass.pdf.