A Case Study of Two TDM Pilots Using Virtual Programming Environments and Gamification | HackerNoon

Table of Links

Abstract and 1 Introduction

2 Related Work

3 A Virtual Learning Experience

3.1 The Team and 3.2 Course Overview

3.3 Pilot 1

3.4 Pilot 2

4 Feedback

4.1 Relentless Feedback

4.2 Detailed Student Feedback

5 Lessons Learned

6 Summary and Future Work, Acknowledgements, and References

A. Appendix: Three Stars and a Wish

3.3 Pilot 1

In the first pilot we wanted to test the content of this course but also different methods for teaching online. We are all likely to be teaching virtually more often in the future even once the pandemic subsides. For example, EFI was planning to run hybrid courses to students across the world, even prior to COVID-19. In this new world, we believe that online and hybrid teaching is here to stay alongside teaching students in the classroom. Higher education will need to determine their offer of different experiences to students be they on site or participating online synchronously or asynchronously.

We limited the first pilot to 25 participants. The backgrounds of students who signed up for our course were mixed coming from Law, Linguistics and Business. Everyone was either a student or a member of staff at the University of Edinburgh, where we had advertised the course, including every level from professor to undergraduate, joining from around the world. Some students even participated from different time zones.

On each day we started with a short presentation discussing the TDM theory of what was being taught in the practical session that followed. In the first pilot this was a live lecture, not recorded, allowing us to adapt the content to questions that came up during the course. When one teacher spoke the other two managed the video chat, answer- ing questions or dealing with specific problems from students, and raising questions to the speaker. This was something we found was essential as it was very easy to lose flow and get distracted without this help. We learned then that it would have been extremely challenging to teach this course live online single-handedly and after each session expressed appreciation that there were three of us helping each other.

We used a variety of technologies provided by the university. Learn,[5] our in-house virtual learning environment (VLE), was used to provide access to course materials. We met with students virtually using the Blackboard Collaborate software[6] which is accessible through Learn. Aside from the video itself, we used text chat, the virtual whiteboard, polls, the ability to raise a hand, breakout groups, file sharing, and screen sharing, all functionalities which have become second nature after a year of pandemic but which when we ran the first pilot were for the most part still fairly unfamiliar to many participants. We also used Noteable,[7] the University of Edinburgh’s in-house notebook platform, to provide a virtual programming environment (VPE) with Jupyter Notebooks,[8] and used GitHub[9] to provide students access to the course material and code. We note that the students did not have to learn how to use GitHub, which would be a big ask for coding novices, but merely had to paste the GitHub link of the corresponding material into Noteable which then automatically loaded the material in the form of a notebook.

Each day the students were given two sets of worked through problems using the VPE which they used directly through the VPL in their own browser. We found this to be a really important tool for everyone as it reduced the need for students to download and set up software on different operating systems and alleviated us from doing a lot of technical support to get students set up and running for all the practical parts of the course.

During the sessions the students were given a link to a GitHub repository from which they could pull new notebooks onto the VPE at the beginning of each session. The notebooks include a combination of explanations, code to run and mini or extended programming tasks. For each approximately hour-long coding session students were assigned a random buddy and which they were put in a breakout room within the Collaborate video call. By now we are used to teaching and/or learning online and have likely experienced joining break-out rooms but at the time when we ran the first pilot most of our participants had never been in a break-out room before. So that experience took some getting used to. We described it as feeling like being put in a separate room with your buddy. You can chat and share screens without being overheard by other people. If the students got stuck on a particular coding problem or line of code and could not solve the issue together, they could raise a virtual hand and an instructor would drop into the room to help and answer questions or resolve programming issues. We also regularly popped into the rooms to see how everyone was doing, something which was well received by the students.

One of our team members is a strong proponent of pair programming (Williams et al., 2000; Hanks et al., 2011), where two students work together on a single machine to solve problems. This allows each pair of students to learn from each other as well as from their teacher(s) and thereby helps to broaden participation and to dispel the myth that programmers work on their own (Williams, 2006). We wanted to see if it was possible to take this approach into a virtual teaching environment. In addition to the students learning TDM skills, it also provided an opportunity for social interaction which was particularly welcome when we first piloted our course at the tail end of the first wave of COVID-19 in the UK and after weeks of strict lockdown with no or little opportunity to meet and interact with people outside one’s own household.

One advantage of Blackboard Collaborate is that instructors are able to see visually when the people in break-out rooms are chatting to each other. This helped us to gauge if students embraced our pair programming experiment or if they preferred to work quietly “side-by-side” but connected virtually

After each practical session we pulled everyone back into the shared room and asked participants to fill in a quick survey to give us feedback. We answered any questions, had a quick break, and then moved onto the next notebook with a new buddy. We wrapped up each session with a short Q&A and another round of feedback.

3.4 Pilot 2

By the time of the second pilot in September 2020, we had gotten a lot more used to online meetings and two members of the teaching team had trained in a summer course on hybrid teaching called An Edinburgh Model for Teaching Online. This time we allowed 30 participants to sign up with over half of them from Scottish Government and the commercial sector, alongside university students and staff.

The main change we made to our first pilot, without altering the course content, is that we restructured the course material into teaching with digital badges (Gibson et al., 2015; Muilenburg and Berge, 2016) which are used in gamification of education (Dicheva et al., 2015; Ostashewski and Reid, 2015). The principles that guided us were: flexibility, compartmentalisation and empowering the learner. Each badge is built around a Threshold concept (Land et al., 2005), a core step or skill (a ‘eureka’ moment) that opens the doors to further learning. Using a clear name and symbol, each badge signposts students’ takeaways and how it fits within the top level learning journey (see Figure 2).

The macro-structure in which badges form our course is complemented by a micro-structure of each badge: background theory and instructional content, code-along videos, notebooks with worked examples, exercises of increasing difficulty, relentless feedback, pair work and mini coding problems (with solutions). Badges build on top of each other, forming branches and enabling optional, further learning. Additionally, the modular micro-structure, enables easier switching between platforms or teaching modes (e.g. videos versus slides) and multiplies the benefits of improvements. Badges proved to be a promising format for delivering teaching of this course, especially in times of change, disruption and pivoting.

We wanted to give us and our course participants more flexibility, so we recorded all of the short lectures presented at the start of each badge and situated before each coding session in the course. This allowed students to come back to the recorded lecture materials later-on. It also gave us more flexibility answering questions in the chat, solving technical issues in the background and discussing the running of a given badge in a teaching team break-out room while participants were watching the video lecture.

[5] https://www.learn.ed.ac.uk

[6] https://help.blackboard.com/Learn/ Instructor/Interact/Blackboard_ Collaborate

[7] https://noteable.edina.ac.uk

[8] https://jupyter.org

[9] https://github.com