Saheed Popoola
ABSTRACT
Many classes in Information Technology programs often attract students with varying technical abilities and diverse academic backgrounds. Teaching such a diverse class makes it difficult to provide instruction that sufficiently engages all the students without overwhelming students with limited technical knowledge. This paper presents a set of simple and effective strategies that can be adopted by any instructor to teach a large and technically diverse class. These strategies have been evaluated via a survey of students in a graduate-level machine learning and data mining class. The results show that all the strategies were effective in aiding the students to complete the class; extra-credit assignments, collaborative tasks, and hand-on learning activities were most helpful in completing the class. Most of the students indicated a skill increase upon class completion, showing that the strategies satisfied the needs of most students.
- Ernst, H. R., & Ernst, T. L. (2005). The promise and pitfalls of differentiated instruction for undergraduate political science courses: Student and instructor impressions of an unconventional teaching strategy. Journal of Political Science Education, 1(1), 39-59. Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- Said, H., Zidar, M., Varlioglu, S., & Itodo, C. (2021, October). A Framework for the Discipline of Information Technology. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference on Information Technology Education (pp. 53-54). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Stockman, M., Leung, S., Nyland, J., & Said, H. (2006). The information technology minor: filling a need in the workforce of today. In Proceedings of the 7th conference on Information technology education (pp. 31-34). Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Strategies for Teaching a Large and Technically Diverse Class
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