Lectures abandoned: active learning by active seminars

  • Authors:
  • Henrik Bærbak Christensen;Aino Corry

  • Affiliations:
  • Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark;Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 17th ACM annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Traditional lecture-based courses are widely criticized for being less effective in teaching. The question is of course what should replace the lectures and various active learning techniques have been suggested and studied. In this paper, we report on our experiences of redesigning a software engineering course in software architecture to employ a range of active learning techniques. The course was constrained by the study administration's traditional assignment of a three hour lecturing slot and as such we had to make techniques that fitted this imposed constraint. Our contribution is active seminars as a replacement of traditional lectures, an activity template for the contents of active seminars, an account on how storytelling supported the seminars, as well as reports on our and the students' experiences.