Professor Glenn Downing on Helpful Online Tools
Professor Glenn Downing of the University of Texas at Austin shares three tools he uses in addition to Piazza to more effectively teach his computer science classes as they shift online.
“I’ll be using Piazza, that’s been a staple in my tool chain for a decade now. I do use other tools that might be of interest. I’m really interested in automating mechanics of assessment.”
HackerRank for programming projects and electronic exams
HackerRank is a nice facility with which you can create a programming problem, you can specify some hidden input/output behaviors that that program is expected to exhibit. Students get a description of the problem, they write up a solution, and they try and try again to get the program to behave “correctly.” That’s been a fantastic tool for programming projects. I’ve been able to use this tool for electronic exams — we’ve been putting test questions on HackerRank and having people do exams with it.
Perusall for collaborative annotation of documents or books
You upload a document or a book and students can read the PDF or chapter of a book. Perusall creates virtual groups of students from the [list of] students you send in and they can collaboratively annotate the document. They can see each other’s annotations as well as comment directly on the paper. But here’s the magical part — at the end of that process, you press a button and an AI neural net will grade the annotations for quality. Press another button and it will give you a “confusion report” — it will highlight the 3 parts of the paper the AI was convinced because of the annotations were the most confusing parts of the paper.
Zoom for “in-class” exercises
I intend to be using Zoom. I learned about other tricks: breakout rooms, polls, raising your hand — all of which seem like a pretty useful thing. The breakout rooms sound the most enticing to me because I am constantly asking my students to do in-class exercises, and it sounds like I’ll still be able to do that by creating these temporary breakout rooms for them to do exactly that.
We will continue to share tidbits from instructors on how you can stay connected. If you have your own insights, email us at team@piazza.com and we’ll work to share it with the world.
