Undergraduate Issues
Ideas for improving computer science courses
- If you are an undergraduate, or member of staff who agrees/disagrees
with my ideas then please contact
me.
- A practical linux course for first years teaching all the skills
needed for completing courseworks such as file management, using
emacs, using pine email etc. The staff at Royal Holloway are very
biased towards Linux, but they should be aware that as more students
are taught at school on Windows machines, they will become increasingly
more alienated from the Linux environment. If they properly addressed
this issue I feel that programming course marks would improve.
Telling students to look at man pages or the CS web site to understand
how things work is too scary for new undergraduates!
- A first year training session on how to work from home or other
windows systems to connect remotely to the network. I feel that
Tolansky is a very open environment and encourages copying between
students (especially when ugrads are not given a proper introduction
to Linux).
- Less discrete maths and automata theory. Maybe a course on information
theory, which would teach prequisites to many other courses such
as matrix algebra, calculus, probability theory etc.
- More practical workshop/tutorials for complicated courses such
as Computer Learning, Computational Finance etc. to demonstrate
the theory.
- A second year course in machine learning covering Mitchells
text, such as ID3, Bayesian algorithms.
- More effective use of powerpoint presentations
- Not switching lecturers so often. Keep them teaching the same
course so feedback from students can passed on from year to year
to improve the course.
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