Teaching a course with almost all lab time

Question

I am teaching two courses that are each one night a week, 6-10:30 PM. These are broken into three parts, two 1 1/2 hour, and then a final hour, with breaks in between.

The clases are scheduled such that the first two parts are in a large lab room that we will share with two or three other classes. We are discouraged from "teaching," i.e. speaking the whole class, in that shared lab, so that we don't disturb the other classes.

Obviously this set-up is less than optimal, especially since the one hour of teaching time is from 9:30-10:30 when the students (and I) will be tired. But I have been told it will not change.

The courses are a Java programming course, and an object-oriented design course.

I was curious if anyone had suggestions on how I could make a set-up like this work.

Answer 1

One way I could imagine is to do pre-recorded videos and allow the students to watch them on their headphones while in the lab and if they have a question, just come over to them and explain any parts. It is definitely not an optimal solution, but your situation is so sub-par it is hard to imagine there being any real workable solutions.

Use the videos during the first two hours and answer questions on a one-by-one basis, and then try and give as much of a refresher or summary as possible in the last hour when group communication is allowed.

Answer 2

Total guess, but here we go.

Maybe, a couple of days before the class, send an email stating what you plan to do in the next class. Give the appropriate chapter of the textbook and any other material you think they need, and say this is what we will be doing in the next class.

Then, during the class, have the students try to figure out the concept. Go and talk with each of them as needed, or have them work in groups, whichever is more appropriate to the material. Once you get to the group discussion part, discuss what went wrong with trying to implement the concept, and maybe give a preview of the next class.

And, of course, petition whoever scheduled this to change it ASAP.

Answer 3

A lot of CS classes work very well as project-centric instead of lecture-centric. The first two sections of your class will work very well in this regard: I suggest putting together a few projects that pairs of students can work on (never underestimate the power of pair programming in education).

When you get around to the lecture portion of your class, introduce new fundamental ideas in the context of the projects being worked upon. During the lab portions of the class, walk around facilitating forward momentum on the projects -- helping students debug sections of code, keeping unfocused teams on track, etc. One of the greatest joys of learning to program is realizing that you can very quickly build exciting pieces of software, especially in a social environment: make it your goal to keep the class excited and interested, and you'll have much less of a problem teaching in the evenings.

Answer 4

Really the first day is the hardest because you have to start with some concepts! Can you borrow another room for the first day? If not then start with a reading assignment. After that just make sure the last thing you do every lecture is assign a lab project for the next session. Yeah, it's pain that it is the end of the day when all are tired, but they would be just as tired if they were going to be doing lab work then. And on the plus side, people probably won't try to leave early as the lecture is last.

Try to make your lectures interesting and involve the students in discussion (I've found many students learn better if you use the Socratic method than straight lecture). Use a lively tone of voice. And do things that are not in the textbook so they have to pay attention. A lecturer droning on word for word what is in the text is a recipe for students to fall asleep even when they aren't tired. It's a disaster at 9:30 pm. And if people are really falling asleep a loud noise (say by stepping on a balloon) will wake them nicely.

I feel for you. If it makes you feel better I once had to teach two separate groups of students two different subjects in the same classrom at the same time. And that is exactly what I did for the more advanced group, they started with lab while I lectured the first group and then the other group did lab while I convered concepts with the second group.