▐ TEACHING STATEMENT

I have described the following viewpoint of mine to all my classes and students.  The following viewpoint is the underlying principle to my teaching philosophy:

       “What is intelligence? There are three levels of intelligence.  First, how do you apply knowledge?  Second, how do you learn or refine knowledge? Third, how do you create new knowledge?  So, it is application, refinement, and creation.  To apply knowledge, you need to learn how to recognize a problem, describe that problem, and find an appropriate solution to that problem.  To learn or refine knowledge, you need to be able to evaluate the quality of your solution and be able to identify why another solution can be better. Finally, to create new knowledge, you need to be able to be imaginative and creative.  You need to elevate yourself one level higher to look at the big picture of a problem. And I want to equip you with the knowledge and skills that will help you apply, learn or refine, and create knowledge.”

My Overall Goals for Student Learning

My goal as a teacher is to transfer my knowledge and experience effectively and enthusiastically to my students.  I want to share with them what I have learned.  I want to first guide them in solving problems and later let them be independent and enjoy tackling other problems themselves.  I want to equip them with insights so that they can apply them to whatever areas and domains pertinent to their careers down the road.  I want my students to be confident in what they have learned specifically, and to be confident in the student and professional careers in general.  I want them to be passionate about what they learn, and hopefully that transfers to their individual lives.  I want to motivate them to not only want to learn, but to enjoy learning! 

My goals for student learning are: (1) to prepare my students as engineers or scientists, (2) to get my students excited and eager to learn, (3) to encourage my students to realize the importance of both fundamentals and creativity, (4) to design classes so that my students can learn to work both as a team and as an independent problem solver, (5) to present and discuss current, published works of other researchers in related areas so that my students will be kept up-to-date with the latest technologies and research interests, (6) to introduce new classes that involve emerging research disciplines, and (7) to enhance my classes using real-world applications and examples from my research experience.

Skills I Aim to Teach

The skills that I aim to teach the students are skills that enable them to be successful in their student and professional careers and other endeavors later in life. 

For undergraduate students, I aim to teach them problem solving skills and learning skills.  I want the students to be able to identify where a problem is, describe what the problem is, understand why the problem occurs, and know how to solve the problem.  This involves pattern recognition and identification of interconnections.  I also want the students to be able to analyze a piece of knowledge critically, to be able to praise or criticize a particular solution.  Only then, they will be able to refine their knowledge.  I also want the students to be able to figure out when their knowledge needs to be refined.  I also point out how we can appraise a particular solution: advantages and disadvantages.  Finally, I want to teach them to be able to be resourceful by being inquisitive and tenacious in problem solving.  Often times, students give up at the first sign of impediments in their problem solving process.  I want to show them the process is not intimidating if one is resourceful.  And one can be resourceful by thinking from another angle, decomposing a problem into smaller subproblems, experimenting (trial-by-error), solving a smaller problem and generalizing the solution, and so on.  And I do that through my lectures, assignments, examples, and handouts.

For graduate students, I aim to teach learning skills and creative skills.  I want students to be able to think independently.  Skills towards independent thinking include questioning the merit of a particular approach, extracting the underlying principal methodologies from stash of detail discussions, identifying the truly important differences between two approaches, realizing the motivations behind a design, writing and presenting one’s ideas in an organized and systematic way, generalizing a specific solution to a general problem, specializing a general solution to a specific problem, and so on.  I want the students to be able to create.  Skills towards creative thinking include critical analysis, imagining what-if situations, investigating solutions from other disciplines, combining research interests and personal interests/hobbies, and so on.  Often times, students accept what is published as facts and this is not acceptable for graduate students.  In my class, I give problems that do not have a single solution.  I also often give partial credit to students give logically reasonable answers even though the final answers are incorrect. 

Methods That I Use

I have used several methods, with the underlying approach of making the subject topic more interesting, more “real-world”, and easier to grasp.  I also give a lot of examples, a lot of feedback, and a lot of questions to make students think.  My lectures are highly interactive—I prefer writing on the whiteboard, and interacting with the students as I go along.  I also give a lot of handouts to summarize key points or concepts, or issues that the textbook does not cover or does not cover well.  I also give quite a bit of homework assignments to make sure that students get a lot of practice conceptually and in programming.  I also tend to my e-mail very responsively.  Students get my response within 24 hours.  Usually, I respond to their questions immediately. These are my basic methods.  However, for different courses, I also have unique methods depending on the number of students and the makeup of the students.  Here I will list some of the methods that I have used in my courses: (1) game days – where students act as “software agents” participating in a multiagent environment and learn about how agents negotiate, compete, and cooperate among themselves to achieve global goals (my Multiagent Systems course), (2) ask-your-neighbor – where students in have to convince their classmates that their solutions to in-class short problems are correct (my CS1 course), (3) forums – where students broke into groups to come up with conceptual solutions (my CS1 course), (4) seminars – where students need to present papers and other students in the audience have to ask questions (my Information Retrieval and Multiagent Systems courses), (5) interesting assignments such as writing a tutorial on permutation (my Discrete Structures course) and building themed programming solutions (e.g., Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, etc., for my CS1 course), (6) test programs – short program modules that allow students to experiment with (my CS1 course), (7) quick questions – with the Personal Response Systems (PRS) clickers in my CS1 and CS2 courses, and (7) computer-aided education systems such as the intelligent tutoring system (ITS) called ILMDA and the computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) system called I-MINDS in my CS1 course, to help supplement the traditional delivery of content and group activities.

Further, for all my courses, I require students to pick up their exams personally from me.  That is, if they do not pick up their exams from me, their exam scores will be recorded as a zero.  During each individual one-on-one meeting, I go through each problem with the student, identifying what he or she did wrong and why and how.  For students who did well, I commend them and point out other things that they could do to further improve.  For students who did not do well, I discuss with them about their course schedule, their time management, trying to identify the aspects that they could do to help improve their understanding of the course topics and hopefully their scores in the next exams. I also point out specifically things that they need to do, at least in terms of interacting with me, the particular topics that they must understand, and encourage them.  I want them to at least try their best before giving up on the course.  For large courses such as CSCE155, CSCE156, and CSCE235, since I want to return all the graded exams within one week, I hold additional office hours for the entire week after each exam so that students can visit me in my office to pick up their exams.  This is very time consuming but I think this at least allows me to interact with all students in such large courses and allows me to at least encourage and motivate the students.

My Views that Encompass the Whole of My Teaching Assignment

Overall, I have five major views that encompass the whole of my teaching assignment: (1) Different Students Have Different Needs: Some students need to be pushed more; some need to be encouraged.  For example, there are very motivated students whom I tend to give more advanced comments in their graded exams or assignments, hoping to encourage them to probe further.  There are students who are not motivated whom I tend to give more examples in their graded exams or assignments, to make things convenient for them; (2) Fairness: This translates to my grading of the assignments, and to my teaching and treatment of students.  Students will be rewarded fairly based on their effort and understanding of the subject topics; (3) Tough Love and Integrity:  I strongly believe in tough love—no easy grades and no easy classes.  I believe in assignments that challenge the students.  However, they should not be overly difficult that they become unfair.  I believe likewise in personal integrity and course integrity.  This translates into quick turnarounds in returning homework assignments, providing ample information for final projects, specifying requirements, etc.  This also translates into my expectation of my students: no cheating, good effort, plenty of interactions between them and me, and good initiatives; (4) Fun and Games:  I strongly believe that lectures should be fun and should incorporate games if possible.  For my CSCE235 class, I used the idea of Lightbulbs—examples ranging from Chevy Chase’s National Lampoon to Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail, from triathlons to Big 12 basketball.  For my CSCE475/875 Multiagent Systems class, I have designated Game Days for role acting, and designed my final project as a Fox-and-Hound game.  For my CSCE155 class, I used forums – we acted out sorting algorithms, exception handling processes, etc., and we also had group activities to come up with conceptual solutions for disaster relief and building smart homes; and (5) Research and Applications:  Incorporating research activities into teaching has many benefits, ranging from the increased confidence of the instructor to a sense of purpose in students’ work.  And I think research and applications go hand-in-hand.  These two work well to show the students why people are interested in this subject topic, why and how this subject topic is challenging, and what we can do about it. 

How I Assess Student Learning

Since I focus on reasoning and problem solving and how a student arrives at a solution, I do not give multiple-choice questions.  All my questions are open-ended with a majority of them questions in the level of application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, instead of pure recall and comprehension.  (Note:  In CS1, the final exam has a multiple-choice part which counts towards the final grade, but it is designed as the post-test for our educational research in the Reinventing CS Curriculum Project.)  I use quizzes, exams, presentations, game days, group activities, topic summaries (e.g., “stupid questions”), term papers, programming assignments and labs to assess student learning.  Whenever I grade their solutions, I also look at their reasoning process.  I give partial credit for logically sound reasoning. 

The Use of IT and Computer-Aided Education Research

My vision of using information technologies (IT) to improve teaching and learning and conducting computer-aided education research is to inspire, prepare, and empower creative and innovative instruction and learning with intelligent information technology and advanced research to usher the 21^st century information age into anywhere, anytime, anyway education.  Specifically, the goals are to: (1) utilize intelligent IT to facilitate student learning and assessment and pedagogical evaluation, (2) conduct research on the effectiveness and impact of using IT in education, (3) provide innovative methods to incorporate IT in the automation and enrichment of instructional materials, including the processes of development, delivery, and evaluation, across different disciplines, (4) provide a bridge to bring together teams of various disciplines for incorporating and/or developing IT-based tools in education, and (5) maintain and disseminate a repository of proven tools related to goals 1-4.  These are in accordance with the goals of the National Center for Information Technology in Education (NCITE), of which I have been director since 2004.

Towards achieving the goals, I have conducted fundamental CS research in the areas of multiagent systems and intelligent agents to build intelligent computer-aided education systems.  In particular, I have built two systems: ILMDA and I-MINDS.  ILMDA is an intelligent tutoring system that is able to self-evaluate to adjust its own reasoning process and label its instructional content over time, thus making it more accurate and adaptive to student needs.  I-MINDS is a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) system that supports teaching and learning in large or distance classrooms.  It consists of intelligent agents working together behind-the-scenes to serve the teacher and the students in classroom activities such as answering questions and working in groups.  Both systems have been deployed and evaluated and are constantly undergoing changes.  Through this work, I have learned about instructional strategies, learning models, student pedagogy, and educational experiments, which in turn have helped me improve my own teaching and curricular development. Subsequently, I have published a number of conference and journal publications in computer-aided education research as well as in using IT in CS education.

Pedagogical Activities

I am a faculty member of the Instructional Technology and Internet-Based Education (IT-IBE) Faculty Group, a multi-disciplinary group comprising professors from the Teachers College and Department of Computer Science and Engineering.  The group’s goal is to bring Information Technology into the classrooms and how to do it to benefit both teachers and students in terms of pedagogy, curriculum, and management.  I have also attended several Education and Technology Research Forums organized by the IT-IBE group.  I participated in the UNL Peer Review in Teaching program organized by Paul Savory, Amy Goodburn, and Amy Burnett, in 2003-2004.  I subsequently joined the Advanced Peer Review in Teaching Program in 2004-2005.  I learned how to create inquiry portfolios focused around a specific question or issue regarding teaching practices, course structures, and student learning over time.  My course portfolio for CSCE235 was subsequently featured in a technical article by Bernstein et al. in 2006. 

Because I have taught CSCE 235 Introduction to Discrete Structures, I have also joined two national efforts in improving the instruction of discrete structures topics: SIGCSE Subcommittee on Discrete Mathematics in 2003 and ITiCSE Working Group on Concept Inventory for Discrete Mathematics in 2006. 

Published Works

Specific to teaching, I have published several conference papers, notably 4 SIGCSE and 3 ITiCSE papers.  For example, one of my SIGCSE papers discussed how I used Game Days to teach my multiagent systems class.  One discussed how I used an intelligent tutoring system in my CSCE 155 class.  These papers reported on the design of the instruction and the outcomes of the instruction in terms of student learning. 

Because of my research work in computer science education, I have also published in journals such as Computer Science Education, Journal of Educational Technology Systems, Journal of Educational Resources in Computing, and IEEE Transactions on Education.  These papers reported on the research design and results in improving computer science education.

I have also actively applied my research work to the domain of computer-aided education systems to support teaching and learning.  As a result, I have also published papers in technical conferences and journals to detail the research and development of these systems as well as the evaluation and deployment results.