The Teaching Programming Online Vlog

Douglas C. Schmidt (d.schmidt@vanderbilt.edu)
Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor
of Engineering (Computer Science),
Associate Provost of Research, and
Data Science Institute Co-Director
at Vanderbilt University

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Overview

When done well, online programming courses can be just as informative and inspiring as traditional face-to-face programming courses. In particular, they are often more intentionally organized and flexible, enabling students to learn at their own pace. However, many instructors lack experience to teach programming online effectively, which motivated us to create a series of vlogs available at this YouTube playlist.

We got our start teaching programming online many years before it became a necessity. For example, Doug Schmidt taught the first "massive open online course" (or "MOOC") that Vanderbilt offered on Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture for Concurrent and Networked Software together with Coursera in the spring of 2013. Since then Jules White and Doug have taught several other online programming courses on the Coursera platform, as well as more recently for our undergraduate and graduate students at Vanderbilt. Doug has also taught dozens of live training tutorials covering pattern-oriented concurrent and parallel programming in Java on O'Reilly's safari platform.

To address common gaps in experience with teaching programming online we've created a series of vlogs to convey best practices we've learned at Vanderbilt University over the years to help others become more effective educators. Topics covered in these vlogs include tools, methods, and techniques for source code walkthroughs; organizing online content; creating and disseminating online content; and reviewing and grading assignments.

All the example material described in these vlogs will be available in open-source form from the Additional Resources section below. We look forward to reading your comments and questions on the topics we cover in these vlogs. We also hope that you'll share your own tips for effectively teaching programming online so that we can all benefit from each others expertise and experience.

Additional Resources

The following are other online sources of material on teaching programming online:

Back to Douglas C. Schmidt's Digital Learning page.

Last modified 15:29:39 CDT 28 September 2020