The Database Disciplinary Commons
2010
Instructional Design: The Approach
The module was originally intended to be delivered by means of a formal lecture attended by all students, a seminar attended by all students and a practical session for groups of no more than 20 students at a time. The formal lecture was designed to provide students with underpinning knowledge and to direct their further research. The seminar would support the practical exercises and student discussion and the practicals would allow students to apply their knowledge. In the first delivery of the module, we found that while the formal lectures and practical sessions worked well, there were some problems with the seminar approach. Seminars tended to be dominated by the more able students while weaker students were less willing to contribute. Some students were not comfortable addressing the whole cohort.
For the second delivery, we changed the instructional design to one practical and a combination of formal and discussion type lectures. The discussion type lectures included some exercises, group discussions and question and answer sessions but student participation was more informal than in the seminars and there was less pressure on students to contribute. This approach seemed to work better for the majority of the students and in particular supported weaker students. In the practicals, students were free to choose whether to work in pairs or larger groups or to work individually. Most students choose to work in pairs or groups of 3 - partly dictated by the room layout - but some students chose to work by themselves.
Instructional Design: Formative Feedback
The module was devised on the basis that students would be expected to read around the taught material and carry out their own research. Individual research was a key element of the coursework assessment. To support this, the lectures included handouts and suggestions for further reading. MCQ practice tests were provided as formative assessment to support exam preparation. To support the coursework, a milestone was built into the course program. Midway through the module, every student was seen individually, for not less than 10 minutes, to discuss their proposed research paper and artefact. Every student received a generic feedback sheet, which highlighted common issues and also an individual feedback sheet tailored to the specific student. Properly speaking, the milestone was not formative assessment as some marks were allocated for this process but from a teaching perspective, this was a formative exercise. Marks were allocated only to ensure that all students completed the milestone (they did).
Instructional Design: The Mechanisms
Staffordshire University uses the Blackboard VLE. The module makes extensive use of Blackboard, posting all teaching materials, further reading, FAQs for the assignment, revision material and similar content on line. The module is taught over a 12 week period and in 2009/10, 10 weeks fell before the Easter break and 2 weeks after Easter. The two weeks after Easter coincided with the hand in for the Final Year Project which is taken by all the UK students. To support students taking the FYP, the module schedule concentrated teaching into the pre-Easter 10 week period, and the 2 weeks after Easter were used for exam revision and assessment. Students were allowed to demonstrate their coursework before Easter if they wished but only one student took advantage of this.
Instructional Design: Practicals
In some modules the aim of the practical is to teach a specific skill, for example SQL. The aim of the MDS practicals was to suppport the lecture material and coursework and to allow students to test out for themselves some of the implications of concepts covered in the lectures - does encryption in a modern DBMS really have a performance hit? How significant are data volumes when query optimising? Is it efficient to store semi-structured data in an ORDBMS?
As this was an advanced module with previous database modules as prerequistes, the module was planned on the basis that students would have some database development skills but might be unfamilar with aspects of enterprise DBMSs. The initial practicals provided a quick introduction to DBA functionality and students were expected to develop these skills in their own time. The practicals used both SQL Server Enterprise and Oracle 10g and switched between DBMS as required.