Personalizing Computer Science Courses through Customized Tracks

Abstract

The goals of this proposal is to enrich the students’ educational experience by recognizing and integrating diversity of educational experience in the classroom. Specifically, we propose course-level personalized mini-tracks as an approach to support the scalable delivery of personalized mentoring advice based on student interests and backgrounds. This approach will be applied to an existing course, Introduction to Computer architecture, which is cross-listed as CS1541 and CoE1541, and which is attended by students majoring in Computer Science or Computer Engineering, with different backgrounds and interests. First, the flipped classroom approach will be applied to two of the four modules in that course, and then mini-tracks will be designed for students that are interested in hardware (hardware-oriented), distributed computing (mix of hardware and software orientations) and bioinformatics (software oriented).