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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Armando FoxSpeaker:
Armando Fox
Title:
Myths about MOOCs, Ebooks, and Software Engineering EducationÂ
Abstract:
This talk explains how the confluence of cloud computing, MOOCs, and ebooks have allowed us greatly improve both the effectiveness and the reach of UC Berkeley's undergraduate software engineering course. The first part of the talk is motivated by Industry's long-standing complaint that academia ignores vital software topics, leaving students unprepared upon graduation. Traditional approaches to software development are neither supported by tools that students could readily use, nor appropriate for projects whose scope matched a college course. Hence, instructors lecture about software engineering topics, while students continue to build software more or less the way they always had, in practice relegating software engineering to little more than a project course. This sad but stable state of affairs is frustrating to instructors, boring to students, and disappointing to industry. Happily, cloud computing and the shift in the software industry towards software as a service has led to highly-productive tools and techniques that are a much better match to the classroom than earlier software development methods. That is, not only has the future of software been revolutionized, it has changed in a way that makes it easier to teach. UC Berkeley’s revised Software Engineering course leverages this productivity to allow students to both enhance a legacy application and to develop a new app that matches requirements of non-technical customers. By experiencing the whole software life cycle repeatedly within a single college course, students actually use the skills that industry has long encouraged and learn to appreciate them. The course is now rewarding for faculty, popular with students, and praised by industry. The second part of the talk is about our experience using Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to teach Software Engineering. While the media's infatuation with MOOCs continues unabated, a recent opinion piece expresses grave concerns about their role ("Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?", Moshe Vardi, CACM 55(11), Nov. 2012). I will try to bust a few MOOC myths by presenting provocative, if anecdotal, evidence that appropriate use of MOOC technology can improve on-campus teaching, increase student throughput while actually increasing course quality, and help instructors reinvigorate their teaching. I'll also explain the role of MOOCs in enabling other instructors to replicate and build upon our work via a low cost Ebook and Small Private Online Courses (SPOCs) from EdX
Bio:
Armando Fox is Professor in Residence in UC Berkeley's Computer Science Division as well as the Academic Director of the Berkeley Resource Center for Online Education (BRCOE). He co-designed and co-taught Berkeley's first Massive Open Online Course on Engineering Software-as-a-Service, currently offered through EdX, through which over 10,000 students worldwide have earned certificates of mastery. He also serves on EdX's Technical Advisory Committee, helping to set the technical direction of their open MOOC platform. His computer science research in the Berkeley Parallel Computing Laboratory focuses on highly productive parallel programming and, more recently, online education. At Stanford he received teaching and mentoring awards from the Associated Students of Stanford University, the Society of Women Engineers, and Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society. He has been a "Scientific American 50" researcher, an NSF CAREER award recipient, a Gilbreth Lecturer at the National Academy of Engineering, a keynote speaker at the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing, and an ACM Distinguished Scientist. In previous lives he helped design the Intel Pentium Pro microprocessor and founded a successful startup to commercialize his UC Berkeley Ph.D. research on mobile computing. He received his other degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT and the University of Illinois. He is also a classically-trained musician and performer, an avid musical theater fan and freelance Music Director, and bilingual/bicultural (Cuban-American) New Yorker living in San Francisco.
