For this task I was asked to compare my experience on teaching (or being taught) webcraft and programming with a list of best practices. Lets get right into that:
- Space learning over time: I believe that it is complicated to get this right in regular university classes; the reason being that students have different learning speeds that can even vary by topic. I personally like P2PU challenges because they allow students to advance at their own pace.
- Interleave worked example solutions with problem-solving exercises: I think its very time consuming for a teacher to evaluate correctly exercises of this topics. What we do for our challenges is provide the students with the final result and hope they can analyze why that is the correct answer.
- Combine graphics with verbal descriptions: Videos and diagrams work for me. We try to include them in the challenges to try and explain complex topics in an easier way.
- Connect and integrate abstract and concrete representations of concepts: I believe this is a must and always aim for that.
- Use quizzing to promote learning: I like pre-questions because they help me sort out what I know already. For the challenges we do ask questions, but don't really enforce the "think about this for a while".
As for quizzes to re-expose content, I'm not a fan. I'll come back to review the material if I feel like I need to. Though optional quizzes can be fun when I feel up to a challenge. - Help students allocate study time efficiently: I like it when the teacher gives a personal input on what he believes is the most important thing to actually learn. In our challenges we try to emphasize the important material by giving them specific tasks to perform.
- Ask deep explanatory questions: This helps me out a lot, though teachers don't usually do this. We don't do this in our challenges because evaluating the responses would be time consuming and difficult.
