Abstract:

We look at the teaching-learning aspects in undergraduate CS programs in an institute like NIT, Trichy, India. Teaching materials (TMs) in the digital form are one source by which a third party auditor can be convinced about a programs’ quality. By TMs we refer to a logical uploadable file possibly in a digital form with the following: (a) Regular-class lecture notes (b) Pre-requisites delivered via references (c) Problems, solutions/detailed solutions across all topics (d) Quiz questions to assess pre-requisites, lecture contents (e) Sample question papers with appropriate references (f) Supplementary reading material (g) Placement-related MCQs for courses wanted by the industry.

While a third party accreditation by the National Board of Accreditation in India is important to every bachelors and masters programs in any National Institute of Technology (there are over 30 NITs in India), we find that mere money inflow from the central government to institutions that are centrally funded is not sufficient to improve grassroot-level upliftment of CS teachers. Therefore a (qualitative and quantitative) research question in the context of NIT-like institutions is: RQ: WHAT FACTORS FUNDAMENTALLY IMPROVE THE TEACHING-LEARNING PROCESS IN A TEACHING INSTITUTION IN INDIA TO THE SATISFACTION OF ALL STAKE-HOLDERS? This question in the present form of proportions beyond the borders of NITs is relevant in the opinion of the authors since in India accreditation of an NIT is in comparison with other institutions offering similar programs. We address RQ (may be with a skew) from a teacher-oriented, student-friendly perspective; we again take up the problem of algorithm-related undergraduate teaching omitting programming concerns. Some pertinent aspects of organizing a remote laboratory space and conduct of laboratory work appear in our earlier conference-papers [1,2]. We make qualitative observations as regards content delivery and skill orientation. A concern for CS teachers in NIT-like institutes is to develop learning materials for basic programming and algorithms courses when school-level programming skill is non-uniform in the bachelors first year of study. We stress that programming activity is associated with problem-solving abilities; we devote a section for illustrative examples; in the stated math-oriented examples we make a mention of these how different aspects of programming may be linked to the exercises and how challengers may be well-posed. We remark that programming challenges with mathematical solutions will boost the confidence of students at the risk of getting drawn into the world of discrete mathematics although the industry-view in India is radically different.

References:
[1] K. V. Iyer and K. Seshadri, ‘’ Adoption of virtual laboratories for CS: Deterrents, enablers and modalities’’, Proc.13th Int’l. Conf. on Education & New Learning technologies, IATED Online Conference, Spain, July 2021.
[2] K. V. Iyer, K .Seshadri and R. Mohan, ‘’Leveraging conventional CS problems for blended-learning in algorithms practice: An experimental option in undergraduate learning’’ , INTED-2023 Conference, Spain, March 2023.

Keywords:

Problem-solving, Programming, Mathematical problems, Undergraduate CS teaching, Algorithms lab work.