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Case Study: CSU Long Beach Part 4

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Alvaro

Dr. Alvaro Monge

Dr. Alvaro Monge, Professor in the Department of Computer Engineering and Computer Science at CSU Long Beach

Dr. Alvaro Monge has earned BS, MS and PhD degrees in computer science (BS UC Riverside, 1991), (MS, and PhD from UC San Diego, 1993 and 1997). Previously at the University of Dayton Ohio, Dr. Monge joined the Computer Engineering and Computer Science Department at the California State University Long Beach (CSULB) in1999. In addition to overseeing grant projects, Dr. Monge held key positions as an academic advisor at the graduate and undergraduate levels and is currently the academic advisor for all computer science undergraduate students and for computer science students in the Engineering Honors Program.

In this case study

With the explosion of interest in Computer Science classes, we wanted to know how successful schools are making the transition to support ever-increasing numbers of students. We asked Dr. Alvaro Monge, Advisor for Computer Science Program at CSULB (California State University Long Beach), to share his thoughts and methods.

In this 4-part blog series, Dr. Monge shares his techniques and strategies for successfully supporting both his school and his students in the growing field of CS education.

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Part 4: Gain Staff Advantage for Your School

With the exploding demand for CS education, it isn’t only the number of students that have grown, but the competition for qualified teaching staff must be considered as well. At CSULB, we have the added challenge of several competing schools in the same area; as a result, we must very carefully consider how to grow our classes when local teachers have many choices of where to work. In order to keep up with the student demand, it is important to consider all the incentives that keep current instructors happy and attract new teaching staff as needed.

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First Address the Low-Hanging Fruit

Most teachers would prefer not to repeat the same lecture three times in a given day, so we have found ways to make use of larger classrooms instead of repeating classes. While this solution offers the added advantage of making efficient use of physical resources, it also brings its own set of challenges.

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Let Technology Do Repetitive Work

Regardless of whether students choose to submit assignments early, every student can improve their learning through the use of immediate feedback. When students submit their coding assignments, they don’t have to wait to see whether it was successful or not. Students gain instant feedback – night or day – and can immediately implement improvements.

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Make Feedback More Constructive

In spite of our best efforts, we at CSULB are reaching a point where we are running out of options as to who we can bring in to teach. Technology is simply mandatory for us to manage the increased demand.

Also for schools like ours that choose to run larger class sizes, the key is finding a way to manage the larger workloads in a given class. There are many ways that technology makes this possible – from automated grading to the fact that comments from a teacher or TAs can be saved and reused where the same mistake was made in multiple places in code.

I hope you have gained some valuable insight into how you can continue to not just grow, but also improve CS education for your school.

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To see all of the previous blogs posts, click on any the following links:

The course aims to bridge the gap between basic Python programming courses and more advanced topics like machine learning. I noticed that students often lack experience in handling real-world, unclean data, so the first half of the course focuses on teaching Pandas for data manipulation and libraries for data visualization, followed by machine learning tools in the second half.

  • Part 1: Track Growth
  • Part 2: Optimize Student Learning while Growing Class Sizes
  • Part 3: Improve the Feedback Loop

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