WOD Weekly Rhythm

Overview

This class meets on Mondays and Wednesdays and from now on will have a well defined “rhythm”.

At the top level, the course consists of a sequence of modules. Typically, each topic will take exactly one week to cover. In some cases, a module might be split into parts and take multiple weeks to cover.

Each module starts on Thursday and ends the following Wednesday. For example, the following portion of the calendar page illustrates the days allocated to the Cloud-Based Hosting module:

Thursday

The module web page is released. The module page contains overview materials (online readings and screencasts) on the material.   In addition, it contains experiences consisting of 3-5 “practice WODs”. These “WODs” (workout of the day) are short assignments with prescribed times for finishing, along with a solution video that I provide. You are encouraged to try each WOD without watching my solution video, then watch the video and repeat the WOD until you can complete it in the prescribed period of time.

Many students do the practice WODs two or three times. (And some students do not complete them at all.)

You should complete the practice WODs by the following Monday.

Monday

The Monday class involves a “Group WOD”. I divide the class into random pairs of students who work as a group on a new WOD they have not seen before that builds off the practice WODs they did by themselves. As with the practice WODs, there is a time limit on the Group WOD. The Monday class provides additional practice with the skills presented for the module, and an opportunity to work with others.

Tuesday evening

Students submit a technical report (blog entry) describing their experience doing the practice WODs. These reports are evaluated based upon the quality of the writing, not on whether the WODs were completed. This is to encourage students to be honest and also to make it clear that the actual evaluation of their programming ability will occur on Wednesday.

Wednesday

Students are given a new WOD that assesses their ability to utilize the skills presented in the module. There is a time limit for completion of the task. I have a developed an in-class procedure (involving index cards) for getting reasonably accurate data on the time spent by each student doing the WOD.

After the Wednesday assessment WOD, the students get the rest of the day off, and start the next module on Thursday.

Issues

In addition to this strict weekly rhythm, I occasionally assign work that takes longer than a week, although this has the potential danger of overloading the students with work.

Here are some of the significant differences between this approach and more traditional classroom pedagogy:

• Students are assessed almost purely on their capability to carry out tasks in an efficient manner. As a result, this approach is not suited to courses in which memorizing terminology is an important goal.
• The instructor must find a way to present the material as a sequential set of tasks to be mastered, generally in durations of 5-45 minutes.
• The instructor must present solutions to the tasks through online videos that demonstrate “Rx” times.  This turns out to be fairly time consuming.  I recorded almost 80 videos for this semester
• GitHub provides an efficient and effective way for students to record their WOD work.