Abstract:

The Open University of Israel (OUI) offers a program of study for Computer Science (CS) graduates towards a high school Teaching Certificate in CS. The program is unique in that it enables studying towards the certificate in a distance-learning environment and therefore can be pursued by people who wish to combine further education with careers and personal responsibilities.

In the paper, we describe the Teaching Certificate Program, which provides an opportunity for CS graduates to pursue an educational career. Particularly we describe the course “Computer Science Methodology Workshop” which utilizes multi-media technologies expressly developed for distance learning.

The Workshop aims to impart a didactic approach to CS teaching, while focusing on the following topics: Introduction; Problem-solving methods; Conditional and Iterative execution; Misconceptions regarding CS topics; Recursion and its teaching/learning methods; Teaching strategies; Algorithm correctness and Algorithm efficiency; Preparing assignments, programing tasks and exams and Inquiry Based learning.

As this workshop deals in didactics, written material is not sufficient since it is very important for students to observe a teacher in action. Thus, we decided to base the workshop on online materials and on the textbook "Guide to Teaching Computer Science" (Hazzan, Lapidot & Ragonis, ‏Springer, 2011).

The workshop has ten units all of which include video lectures, video clips, presentations and tasks. Some of the online lectures are given by a panel of selected CS teachers who present the material and their on-hand teaching experience. The students are requested to study the given materials and to answer several tasks. The students upload their answers to the course website, and they are also required to review their peers' answers.

We designed a questionnaire, which was given to the students who participated in the Workshop. The questionnaire was aimed at examining the students' views and attitudes towards the workshop and its contribution to their practical teaching experience.
The questionnaire focused on the workshop structure and on the fact that a major part of the study material is presented as online lectures. In addition, we wanted to check the students’ feelings towards the requirement to participate in an online discussion group and to take part in a peer review process.

The main insights from the survey are:
• Most of the students in the Teaching Certificate Program are studying towards a second career in teaching after long years of employment in the high-tech industry.
• Most of the students are very satisfied with the distance education delivery mode adopted by the teaching certificate program. This enables participating in the program and simultaneously continuing with their careers.
• Most of the students are very satisfied with the workshop and they feel that the material presented in the workshop contributes in their practical teaching experience in the classroom.
• Most of the students are satisfied with their peers' comments on the assignments in the discussion group.

Following positive feedback from the students who participated in the workshop, we plan to develop small MOOCs which will be available to the CS teachers' community.

Keywords:

Computer Science Teaching Certificate Program, Teacher training, Distance Education, Online Course.