Class & Lab Support and Services

Every instructor needs basic tools through which to teach that are not commonly available in most of the current classes. These include one computer per class and a datashow to display slides and to keep students from engaging in writing the notes when they could be paying attention to the lectures. Additional, support could be that readily available call-in support to a technician if the computer fails to work properly or the request to install any particular software on that device for example to display an animation, or to run a program in front of the class.

We can in fact consider support and services under the following categories;

Services as previously mentioned may include the ability to display the slides electronically, along with the giving students photocopies of the slides and/or an online location that contains the slides to allow them to concentrate on the explanation.

Windows have to be covered with blinds as direct sunlight onto a desk may cause students to be uncomfortable with the sunlight reflected on their books and papers.

Desks and chairs must contain an area for them to store their books and things, in addition to having tables that support both right and left handed students.

Every student should have a University based email address that is in the format studentnumber@specific-server-for-students. This way, all students can be informed through email if any classes are cancelled by the instructor with one email from the University server. One may ask why doesn't an instructor just collect student emails and sends them a group email? There are two problems;

1. A large number of girls do not like to give their emails to any open lists because they do not want the boys to see their emails.
2. If the same email is sent to more than twenty emails existing on Yahoo, or hotmail, then it is treated as spam and it is quite common for students to have their email addresses there.

Consequently, many of the faculty use Yahoo groups, to collect groups of students on one server and they send them emails from the yahoo server. This is NOT at all common academic practice, nor is it acceptable for a large institution.

The solution is not tough, but it requires some investment in a few email servers that allocated a limited space to every student in the "mythical" university as is currently occuring in perhaps every single respectable international university in the world.

Additionally, every course requires some online space to post slides, and materials, etc, directly by the instructor of the course. Currently a number of Universities use WebCT which is a costly approach to providing slides online. There is a FREE alternative that is an open source project aimed at encouraging more online support to students and already implemented in several Universities.It is called the Sakai Project and if you click on the name, you can find out more about it. So why pay for this, if it can be made available free of charge.

However, this is NOT elearning, as it only provides materials through a web site and does not include any approach to teaching. In other words, it's like a book on the screen so it is only elearning support. Online learning is a different subject that I will not cover here.

Class Forums are also important to allow students to ask information about anything they are wondering about with peers studying the course at the same time. They allow instructors to detect misconceptions when students believe they understood something right and it is wrong. Instructors can also make announcements to students on the board. This type of support is called "collaboration" between students and people like Vygotsky have placed the groundwork for this type of learning.

All large Universities should offer high quality heavy duty photocopiers that satisfy their faculty needs and for larger photocopy jobs they should provide dedicated photocopying services like for tests and exams for multi-section courses.

Book order services differ between either having an on campus order system by instructors or one or more out-sourced book stores that allows instructors to alter books more frequently without necessarily completely using prior issues ordered for the course. Most foreign universities also encourage instructors to write their own books, with two main benefits. Instructors are encouraged to engage in writing these books because their students will buy them, and secondly they start off as written notes that students buy at only the copy price. So, the notes continue to exist for students who cannot afford the book. The main issue here is that publishing the books, has to be through an International academic publisher and not locally, to ensure the quality of publication. As for students, they will be using these books as their main reference so they are just buying these books to replace any other book they may buy. The same cost restrictions that apply to books with respect to a cost ceiling will apply to these books.

Every course taught at any University MUST have at least two extra references to be used that are availably in the library. At least 3 copies in the reference section and a 25% of the number of students who register for the course should have copies for borrowing in the library. University instruction must help students be curious and read from different sources, rather than just reading from one source.

Courses that require labs usually require lab assistance to be provided to students during lab times. Assistants should be briefed at the begining of every course of how the class is to be conducted.

No teaching should be allowed by lab assistants during lab times because this time is dedicated to student practice. Instead students should be individually working on solving tasks that they are given by the course instructor. The assistants are not allowed to set the questions, nor are they allowed to solve them for the students.

Socratic Tutoring can be used to train assistants how to conduct tutorials. They will give students hints of how to arrive at the answers without telling them explicitely to allow students to solve their problems on their own

It is a pity to find people using terms like "peer tutoring" when they wish to say "group work" or "collaboration". In fact, most studies reveal that in "peer tutoring" there must be two roles; one of a student who already knows the material say 4th year undergraduate and the other a student who is new to the system so this approach is too costly to a class with a large number of students. Group work on the other hand, may deny some students from practicing what they learned in class because if the task is simple, one student will solve it and give a copy to the other rather than explain it to the other.

Students should be encouraged to do their work on their own and then tested at least once in a practical setting to ensure that they are capable of writing the required types of programs or scripts. This will give them more practical experience and allow them to be able to handle practical type jobs when they graduate rather than the current trend of students looking for jobs that do not require a lot of programming (perhaps no programming).

When a test date is agreed, an instructor has to reserve rooms for that test. It is a pity to sometimes find that rooms cannot be reserved, and only a list of empty rooms provided, so instructors have to be there before the test to make sure that the rooms the students were informed of are actually empty. Or to post on the door that this room is for the following test on the following date and wait for complaints to arrive. A centralized scheduling system would include room reservations, so this problem would be solved.

A sufficient number of people must be informed of their duties to help monitor student tests prior to the test dates. Schedules have to be formed and load assignment to various monitors has to be calculated to ensure that no one person is allocated a high load compared to others.

Student attendance in the test has to be collected during the test and all the papers counted in each class to ensure that every single paper has been collected. The class number and the number of students must be written on the cover of each envelope. Then a paper has to be pasted to the top of each envelope with the question number and who will mark it. Every instructors that marks a question signs next to that question on the cover to show that his work in complete and the envelopes are exchanged until all the questions have been marked.

Marks are then added by the section instructor and entered into the excel sheet then sent to the course coordinator.

Courses differ in their practices as while some instructors allow students to take their papers home, others do not. The essential point here is that every single student has a right to contest any grade and understand why marks have been deducted for any particular question or part of a question.