SINOPSIS

The explosive growth of enrollment in courses, especially in engineering and computer science, has resulted in the need to rethink how to deliver instructions in large courses. As the number of students increase, it is simply not possible to increase staff and/or add more teaching facilities to deal with the situation. Instead, we must think of innovative ways to design technology and rethink delivery methods to improve instruction. One possible way to handle large numbers of students and/or improve instruction is to integrate well-produced instructional videos into the curriculum. In this paper, we describe a new technology platform that was developed at a major research university to address the scale and academic diversity of students taking computer science courses. By scale we mean the number of students taking a course, and by academic diversity we mean the varied levels of academic backgrounds that these students come from. The key idea of our project is to provide an easy-to-use platform and use real-time analytics to identify topics that need extra attention and/or identify students for whom intervention is necessary. Although we discuss large computer science courses, we believe that the technology and method discussed in this paper are equally applicable to any discipline and/or class size.