Software Research and the Industry

My research and teaching group just celebrated its tenth anniversary, and I wanted to take some time to reflect on our teaching: What worked and what didn’t.

Principles

When I started as a university professor ten years ago, I drew on my experience as a student, as a teacher, as a practitioner, and as an entrepreneur, to define the basic principles of how I wanted to teach:

1. Theory and practice should be joined at the hip; there should only be minimal delay, if any, between hearing some concept and applying it in practice
2. Learning requires repetition and practice, so the theory and practice of something to learn needs to be drawn out over several iterations to become effective
3. Learning is a marathon, not a sprint; therefore, learning and using the stick (grading) to direct learning should be continuous and not a fire-and-forget exercise
4. Feedback needs to be immediate and connected to a student’s actual doing, and not come at the end of a semester or later
5. Learning is holistic; while some concepts can be isolated, more often than not, concepts interact and require a realistic setting to be learned

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