This past semester I realized that I was struggling to get grades out to students in a timely fashion. Every semester I start the grading spreadsheet from scratch and add to it as we progress from one assessment to the next. I populate a Google Spreadsheet with the official student list (the class list post) […]
Recently, York University's Information Technology (UIT) department blocked access to our Learning Management System with a message about AI called "AI Features in eClass". You could not get to eClass without clicking on the "I acknowledge" button. I didn't click the button because I actually read the message and I don't accept it. And, because […]
This page describes an effort to automate the process of watermarking course material with unique identifiers to discourage the unwanted distribution of faculty-created documents by students and others. In my opinion this is a reasonable measure to counter existing problems with And, in the context of sharing of course material between instructors, it provides a […]
I opened up eClass today and saw this big disclaimer for the new AI system that management has added to the platform. I don't even know where to start with this. I suspected something like this was coming but I don't recall any real collegial conversation with management about its plans for implementing this. I'd […]
There are a lot of discussions at York University regarding the student status of individuals here at York University. The issue is complex and affects multiple aspects of life at the University. Here, I'm going to tackle one very specific issue: computer user profiles (or IDs). It is very common here at YorkU for an […]
I like to do flipped classes with H5P plugins on Moodle. When I do so I set up "from" and "to" time restrictions to ensure that the homework is done during the class period. It doesn't matter to me if the students are in the classroom or not. What's important is that they're doing homework […]
If you're an EECS instructor here at York University, you can obtain a lists of students that are currently in your course, text files that are easy to download and review. They're outside of eClass and found in one of three ways: To access the lists on an EECS server like indigo1, use an SFTP […]
Piracy of professor-authored teaching material is rampant. I've written about it before. Students and teaching staff have uploaded my material to Course Hero and I'm not happy about it. In spite of requesting that they don't do it, they still do it. I write explicit footnotes in my documents saying not to do it, and […]
The following is an example of the files needed to create a working Virtual Programming Lab exercise for Java: vpl_run.sh vpl_evaluate.sh MainClass.java StudentSolution.java TeacherReferenceSolutions.java TheTestClass.java With this you can evaluate one student submission against a single reference solution. Two methods are run: one is the student's method and one is the teacher's method. The output […]
A few of my colleagues here at YorkU have expressed an interest in using Python with Virtual Programming Lab on our Moodle-based eClass Learning Management System. I don't have a lot of Python experience, having only really used it for some data processing and toy embedded system demonstrations in the past. So I adapted the […]