Connecting With Customers at SIGCSE
Team Mimir visits SIGCSE 2017
From February 21–24, seven members of our team visited SIGCSE in Baltimore, MD. We were able to connect with current customers, meet higher ed instructors who are teaching computer science, and visit with other vendors helping to improve and shape CS education. As vendors we were also granted the opportunity to offer a product discussion featuring Mimir Classroom. This synopsis is the result of questions asked during that session.
What’s SIGCSE?
The Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (ACM SIGCSE) hosts SIGCSE (a technical symposium or conference) each year. ACM SIGCSE is a special interest group of 2,600 members in computer science education who share a strong interest in the quality and improvement of computing education. SIGCSE, which will celebrate its’ 50th anniversary in 2019, brought 1,700 student volunteers, instructors, and vendors together from all around the world to discuss the present and future state of CS education.
The Big Questions
What are Mimir and Mimir Classroom?
Mimir is an education technology company based out of Indianapolis, Ind. Our core product, Mimir Classroom, was built to help instructors scale and automate their computer science classrooms.
How are you different than the solution(s) I’m currently using to autograde, check for plagiarism, or deliver curriculum to my students?
Whether you’re using homegrown solutions, assorted platform pairings, or nothing at all, Mimir Classroom can supplement your course in more ways than one.
Yes, autograding is a part of Mimir Classroom, but there are other notable features worth mentioning.
- For starters, the platform comes with a web-based IDE that has persistent settings and support for more than 70 languages.
- Instructors have flexibility to offer assignments as well as projects (think labs). Within projects, there are options for group projects too.
- Plagiarism detection aids instructors in reducing cheating in the classroom. We’ve also added a MOSS integration for those who prefer multiple layers of evaluation.
- The global content library comes pre-populated with free, high-quality coursework for instructors to use should they like. Subsequently each university has a content library that they can share between instructors and courses.
What’s the difference between assignments and projects?
Instructors use assignments to help students learn new concepts through practice. Think of assignments like homework or quizzes. Assignments have many question types including multiple choice, free form text, and code questions. Code questions offer instructors playback functionality to observe how their students are arriving at answers, if they copy and pasted code (potentially plagiarized), and when/where they’re struggling.
Projects are intended to test multiple concepts with multiple files to accomplish more complex solutions. If you’ve heard of ‘labs,’ projects are synonymous. The best part about projects is that students can complete them through Mimir Classroom’s web-based IDE. They’ll have all of the tools they need within Mimir Classroom to complete their work directly on the platform.
How much does Mimir Classroom cost?
Our pricing is always transparent and there are no hidden fees.
Higher ed accounts (universities) are charged at $25 per, student seat. We don’t lock our customers into contracts. Instead, we offer on-demand pricing. This means universities are only charged for one semester or quarter when instructors are on-boarding students to the platform for their courses. Mimir Classroom fees can be passed to students or paid for by the university.
High school accounts are charged $12 per student, per year. We don’t lock our customers into contracts. Instead, we offer on-demand pricing. This means high schools are only charged for one semester or quarter at a time when teachers are on-boarding students to the platform for their classes. Mimir Classroom fees are most often passed to students during their annual school enrollment.
Learn more about pricing on our pricing page.
If I wanted to make a case to my department leadership about integrating a tool like Mimir Classroom, what tips would you advise?
Foremost, instructor accounts on Mimir Classroom are always free. Before committing to use the platform, instructors can explore functionality and features, build assignments and projects, and even test our customer service response times. This makes it easy to determine how Mimir Classroom could provide support and aid in influencing those with purchasing power.
Based on school size and course type, we can provide relevant testimonials, case studies, and instructor referrals to further validate how Mimir Classroom has improved their curriculum delivery. On-boarding is never complete without one-on-one support organized by a customer success engineer and collaboration from our product and curriculum teams.
We’ll have an expanded answer to this question in another blog post soon. Check back here for that update!
What APIs does Mimir Classroom have?
Mimir Classroom pairs well with campus-wide course management systems (CMS) like Blackboard, Canvas, and Moodle and follows the LTI standard.
Backed by popular demand, we also have a MOSS integration, which allows instructors to run MOSS plagiarism reports on submitted work.
