CS2013-final-report

Undergraduate Teaching Assistants
While research universities have traditionally drawn on postgraduate students to serve as
teaching assistants in the undergraduate curriculum, over the past 20 years growing numbers of
departments have found it valuable to engage advanced undergraduates as teaching assistants in
introductory computing courses. The reported benefits to the undergraduate teaching assistants
include learning the material themselves when they are put in the role of helping teach it to
someone else, better time management, improved ability dealing with organizational
responsibilities, and presentation skills [4, 6]. Students in the introductory courses also benefit
by having a larger course staff available, more accessible staff, and getting assistance from a
“near-peer,” someone with a recent familiarity in the kind of questions and struggles the student
is likely facing.
Online Education
It has been suggested that there is a tsunami coming to higher education, brought on by online
learning, and lately, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) [1]. Discussing the full scope of
the potential and pitfalls of online education is well beyond the scope of this document. Rather,
we simply point out some aspects of online learning that may impact the ways in which
departments deploy these guidelines.
First, online educational materials need not be structured as just full term-long classes. As a
result, it may be possible to teach online mini-courses or modules (less than a term long,
somtimes significantly so), that nevertheless contain coherent portions of the CS2013 Body of
Knowledge. In this way, some departments, especially those with limited faculty resources, may
choose to seek out and leverage online materials offered elsewhere. Blended learning is another
model that has and can be pursued to accrue the benefits of both face-to-face and online learning
in the same course.
Part of the excitement that has been generated by MOOCs is that they allow for ready scaling to
large numbers of students. There are technological challenges in assessing programming
assignments at scale, and there are those who believe that this represents a significant new
research opportunity for computer science. The quantitative ability that MOOC platforms
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