Summer 2024

Note: Beginning in Spring 2024, all course information—including syllabi, assignment descriptions, and supplementary course pages—is delivered via Canvas. For quick-reference as well as for public access, however, we have generated the following export of that content. Note that some of these links point to content within Canvas; if you are a student in the class, these links should take you to the appropriate in-Canvas content. If you are not a student, these links will not work; however, you can find the same content elsewhere here on this page.

Quick links to content within this page:

Syllabus

Start Here

Syllabus

Assignments

Forum

Help

Quick Links

To help with navigation, here are some of the links you’ll be using frequently in this course:

• Tools: Research Guide & Course Library | Canvas | Peer Feedback | PeerSurvey
• Course Pages: CS6460 Home | Summer 2024 Syllabus | Summer 2024 Full Calendar | Course FAQ | Class Participation
• Assignment Descriptions: Assignment 1 | Assignment 2 | Assignment 3 | Qualifier Question | Class Participation
• Project Milestones: Proposal | Weekly Status Checks | Intermediate Milestone 1 | Intermediate Milestone 2 | Project | Presentation | Paper

Course Instructor

  David A. Joyner, PhD

Start Here! (Well, There!)

Hi! Welcome to CS6460. This course will begin at 9AM on the first day of the semester; if you’re visiting before then, return then to check the course out!

This course is different from most other courses you have taken in OMSCS. There is very little lecture material to watch. Instead, you’ll conduct your own independent research in whatever area of educational technology you find most interesting. You’ll be partnered with a mentor to help you hone your ideas and propose a novel project. To get started, click Start Here above, but after that you’ll mostly find yourself browsing the course library, interacting on the forum, and performing your own independent research.

 About this Course

If you would like to read more about this class in and of itself, there are two resources you should consult. First, you should check out the general course syllabus, located here on Canvas. This will give you a view of the course, its learning objectives, and its structure.

Second, you should check out the course syllabus for this semester specifically, located here on Canvas. Here, you’ll find the course calendar, assignment descriptions, and everything else you need to succeed in this course.

Finally, as you’ll see us say in several places, this course heavily utilizes the course discussion forum. That is where you’ll see course announcements, get answers to your questions, participate in class discussions, and more. So, join today!

This syllabus page provides information about the Georgia Tech OMS CS6460 class on Educational Technology relevant only to the Summer 2024 semester. Note that this page is subject to change at any time. The Summer 2024 semester of the OMS CS6460 class will begin on May 13, 2024. Below, find the course’s calendar, grading criteria, and other information. For more complete information about the course’s requirements and learning objectives, please see the general CS6460 page.

Course Calendar At-A-Glance

Below is the calendar for the Summer 2024 OMS CS6460 class. Note that assignment due dates are all Sundays at 11:59PM Anywhere on Earth time. We recommend changing your time zone in Canvas to show the due date in your local time. For the complete course calendar, please see the Full Course Calendar.

Course Assessments

Below are the various assessments in this course, as well as the relative importance attached to each. Note that we expect all students in this course to enter with enthusiasm and an earnest desire to contribute to both the course and the field, not simply a desire to get a grade and move on.

Additionally, we expect that the projects in the course will be extremely different, and it will not be possible to create any single rubric that can apply to every student’s work. As such, assignment descriptions are very general, and grading criteria will vary from project to project. Consistency is instead supplied by the structure of the course: every student should resubmit any subpar work where permissible, secure their mentor’s agreement on their proposal, and complete weekly status checks to adjust expectations and agree on deviations from the proposal.

Historically, any student who has not received an A has not fulfilled at least one of those three obligations. We assess all assignments on a 11-point scale, 0-10. These grades correspond to how close the assignment came to meeting the expectations of the assessment: 10 is “exceeds expectations”, 9 is “meets expectations”, 8 is “almost meets expectations”, and so on. If a student receives a grade below 9 on any assignment (excluding milestones and the final project deliverables), they may resubmit the assignment up to one week after the grade is received. Resubmissions may receive up to a 9.

Final grades will be calculated as an average of all individual grade components, weighted according to the percentages below. Students receiving a final average of 90 or above will receive an A; of 80 to 90 will receive a B; of 70 to 80 will receive a C; of 60 to 70 will receive a D; and of below 60 will receive an F. There is no curve. It is intentionally possible for every student in the class to receive an A.

Written Assignments (15%)

The first few weeks of the semester, you will complete three written assignments. These serve two purposes: they show your overall progress toward settling on an idea to pursue for your project, and they train you on some of the specific skills you’ll need to execute the remaining assignments in the course. By the time you reach the end of these assignments, you’ll have selected either the research, development, or content track, and you’ll have a high-level idea of your project. Each assignment is worth an equal portion of this 15%. For a complete description of the written assignments, see the pages dedicated to assignment 1, assignment 2 and, assignment 3.

Qualifier Question (10%)

Once you have explored and identified a general project area you would like to emphasize, your mentor will pose to you a targeted question about the chosen community. Your answer to this targeted question should reflect your understanding of the community, your ability to reason about the community, and your understanding of the broader issues facing the community. This question is where you should demonstrate your ability to converse in this community; therefore, your answer to this question is expected to be more polished and academic. You should certainly include citations to related work, and you should generally avoid speaking in first-person. For a complete description of the qualifier question, see the dedicated qualifier question page.

Project Proposal (10%)

After completing the first portion of the class, you will propose your project, either individually or in a group. You should lay out a broad description of the motivating principles and objectives of the project, a clear statement of what work will be done, a week-by-week plan for completing that work (including separating individuals’ responsibilities in the case of group projects), a description of the intermediate milestones to be delivered, and a description of the ultimate contribution that will be delivered. Your mentor will then work with you to scope your proposal, address any potential issues, ensure the feasibility of the project plan, and ultimately approve your proposal. Because your proposal is personal to the work you plan to do, writing in first-person is acceptable; however, it should be polished and academic, including references to related research. For a complete description of the project proposal, see its dedicated page.

Project Weekly Status Checks (5%)

Each week, you will submit a short, individual status check. If you are in a group, each member of the group will submit their own status check. The purpose of the status check is to ensure progress is being made on a weekly basis in accordance with the plan outlined in the proposal, to identify early on if group members are not fulfilling their roles, and to recover if unexpected obstacles arise. For a complete description of the weekly status checks, see their dedicated page.

Intermediate Milestones (10%)

While working on your project, you will deliver two intermediate video milestones, roughly one-third and two-thirds of the way between the proposal and the final project deadlines. These intermediate milestones serve two purposes: one, they are to demonstrate to your mentor the progress you are making, and two, they are to give you the opportunity to receive feedback from your peers. Both milestones should be videos including narration: you should show off the progress you’ve made and ask for what feedback you need. In addition to the video, you are welcome to include survey drafts, experimental plans, wireframes, etc. on which you would like feedback, but the primary focus of the milestone should be your video presentation. For a complete description of the intermediate milestones, click the dedicated pages for intermediate milestone 1 and intermediate milestone 2.

Final Project (20%), Paper (10%), and Presentation (5%)

At the end of the semester, you or your group will deliver three things: the project itself, a presentation of the project, and a paper. The nature of the deliverable will differ based on your project. If you select the research track, the deliverable will be the research instruments, data, and analysis. If you select the development track, the deliverable will be the working tool itself. If you select the content track, the deliverable would be the content that you developed. The presentation is meant to present the project to your classmates and, if you agree, to future students in the class. The paper is meant to present the project to potential conferences, journals, or investors, if you choose to use it that way. The three components of the final project are not weighted evenly; the final project itself counts for 20% of your final grade; the final paper counts for 10%; and the final presentation count for 5%. For a complete description of the final project and its two accompanying deliverables, the dedicated pages for the project, paper, and presentation.

Participation (15%)

Because this course is driven by the community of students, participation is required and assessed explicitly. Participation can come in many forms: interacting and posting on the course forum; contributing new articles and information to the class library; completing class surveys; completing Peer Feedback tasks; participating in conversations via other tools; participating in your classmates’ experiments and beta tests; completing the secret survey by clicking the hidden link here before the end of week 2 to indicate you read the entire syllabus; and more. Generally, participation is simply anything you do to make the class better for everyone else. Participation will be evaluated according to a point system described on the Class Participation assignment page. For a complete description of the participation policy, see its dedicated page.

Course Policies

The following policies are binding for this course.

Mentors

We have an incredible team of mentors helping out with this course. However, all our mentors are busy professionals with jobs, families, and OMS classes of their own. Each mentor will be assigned roughly 20 students, and each student should expect to effectively receive around 30 minutes of dedicated mentor time each week for the duration of the semester. This time includes time spent reading assignments and writing feedback.

Because of this, we ask that you be respectful and efficient with mentors’ time. Most importantly, note that with a few clearly-defined exceptions (providing the qualifier question, approving the project proposal), nothing you do in this class is dependent on the mentors. If absence of feedback or communication with your mentor becomes an issue, that should not be considered an excuse not to complete any assigned work. It will be taken under consideration with regard to the quality of your work, but waiting on feedback is not an excuse to fail to move forward.

Finally, there may be times when we need to shift mentors around. For example, if you get together with a few other students for a group project, we’ll rearrange those partnerships so that one mentor can work with everyone on that project. Or, if a person’s interests change and end up aligning very closely with a different mentor, we may move people around then as well. Finally, if drops or anything result in the load being very imbalanced between mentors, we may make switches then. We don’t anticipate issues here, but we believe it’s better to set these expectations in advance than to have to write policies governing these things later.

Official Course Communication

You are responsible for knowing the following information:

1. Anything posted to this syllabus (including the pages linked from here, such as the general course landing page).
2. Anything emailed directly to you by the teaching team (including announcements via the course forum or Canvas), 24 hours after receiving such an email.
3. Anything communicated directly to you by your mentor in your mentor thread.

Generally speaking, we will post announcements via Canvas and cross-post their content to the course forum; you should thus ensure that your Canvas settings are such that you receive these announcements promptly, ideally via email (in addition to other mechanisms if you’d like). Georgia Tech generally recommends students to check their Georgia Tech email once every 24 hours. So, if an announcement or message is time sensitive, you will not be responsible for the contents of the announcement until 24 hours after it has been sent.

For more individual information, your mentor will primarily communicate with you via your discussion thread. You should plan to check this regularly (ideally daily) for feedback.

Note that this means you won’t be responsible for knowing information communicated in several other methods we’ll be using. You aren’t responsible for knowing anything posted to the course forum that isn’t linked from an official announcement. You aren’t responsible for anything said in Slack or any other third-party sites we may sometimes use to communicate with students. You don’t need to worry about missing critical information so long as you keep up with your email and understand the documents on this page. This also applies in reverse: we do not monitor our Canvas message boxes and we may not respond to direct emails. If you need to get in touch with the course staff, please post privately to the course forum (either to all Instructors or to an instructor individually) and tag the instructor in the relevant post.

Communicating with Instructors and TAs

Communication with the course teaching team should be handled via the discussion forum. If your question is relevant to the entire class, you should ask it publicly; if your question is specific to you, such as a question about your specific grade or submission, you should ask it privately. Most private questions should be directed specifically to your mentor and can be submitted in your mentor thread.

Our workflow is to regularly filter the forum for Unresolved posts, which includes top-level threads with no answer accepted by the original poster, as well as mega-threads with unresolved follow-ups. If your question requires an official answer or follow-up from an instructor or teaching assistant, make sure that it is posted as either a Question or as a follow-up to a mega-thread, and that it is marked Unresolved. Once an instructor or TA has answered your question, it will automatically be marked as Resolved; if you require further assistance, you are welcome to add a follow-up, but make sure to unmark the question as Resolved in order to make sure that it is seen by a member of the teaching team.

Similarly, in order to keep the forum organized, please post as a Post or Note instead of a Question if your question does not require an official response from the teaching team. For example, if you are interested in getting multiple perspective from classmates, getting feedback on your ideas, or having a discussion that does not have a single answer, please use Post or Note instead of Question. Please reserve Question threads for questions that will likely have a single official response. TAs and instructors will regularly convert Questions to Posts or Notes that do not need a single official answer, but it will save time and allow them to focus their attention on other students if you correctly categorize your post in the first place.

Late Work

Although this class is largely self-directed, deadlines and weekly routines help our mentors spend the majority of their time interacting with students and a minority handling administrative and organizational tasks. We have made the descriptions of all assignments available on the first day of class so that if there are expected interruptions (business trips, family vacations, etc.), you can complete the work ahead of time. In proposing your project, you are welcome to include external constraints in the planning process and build in time where you know you won’t be able to work on your project.

If due to a personal emergency, health emergency, family emergency, or other unforeseeable life event you find you are unable to complete an assignment on time, please post privately to your mentor in your mentor thread with information regarding the emergency. Depending on your unique situation, we will share guidance on how to proceed; if the emergency is projected to delay a significant quantity of the work required for the class, we may recommend withdrawing and reattempting the class at a later date. If the emergency will likely only impact a small amount of the course, we may be able to accept the work late as a one-time exception. If the emergency takes place once you have already completed a significant fraction of the coursework, we may offer an Incomplete grade to allow you to finish the class after the semester is over.

Note that depending on the nature and significance of the request, we may require documentation from the Dean of Students office that the emergency is sufficient to justify offering an incomplete grade or accepting late work. Note also that regardless of the reason, we also cannot promise any particular turnaround time for grading work that was approved to be submitted late; it may be that grades and feedback will not be returned before the end of the term, and it may be that a temporary grade of Incomplete must be entered to leave time to grade work that was accepted late.

If you are not comfortable sharing with us the nature of an emergency, or if you need more comprehensive advocacy, we ask you to go through the Dean of Students’ office regarding class absences. The Dean of Students is equipped to address emergencies that we lack the resources to address. Additionally, the Dean of Students office can coordinate with you and alert all your classes together instead of requiring you to contact each professor individually. The Dean of Students is there to be an advocate and partner for you when you’re in a crisis; we wholeheartedly recommend taking advantage of this resource if you are in need. You may find information on contacting the Dean of Students with regard to personal emergencies here: https://gatech-advocate.symplicity.com/care_report/

Academic Honesty

All students in the class are expected to know and abide by the Georgia Tech Academic Honor Code. Specifically for us, the following academic honesty policies are binding for this class:

• In written essays, all sources are expected to be cited according to APA style. When directly quoting another source, both in-line quotation marks, an in-line citation, and a reference at the end of the document are required. When directly summarizing another source in your own words, quotation marks are not needed, but an in-line citation and reference at the end of your document are still required. You should consult the Purdue OWL Research and Citation Resources for proper citation practices, especially the following pages: Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing, Paraphrasing, Avoiding Plagiarism Overview, Is It Plagiarism?, and Safe Practices. You should also consult our dedicated pages (from another course) on how to use citations and how to avoid plagiarism.
• Any figures borrowed from other sources must similarly be cited. If you borrow an existing figure and modify it, you must still cite the original figure. It must be obvious what portion of your submission is your own creation.
• Any programming sources, such as existing code or libraries, must be cited as well. Include a link to the original source of the code and clearly note where the copied code begins and ends (for example, with /* BEGIN CODE FROM (source link) */ before and /* END CODE FROM (source link) */ after the copied code). Any external libraries, images, or any other materials not created by you should be referenced either within the code (where possible) or in a README file included with the deliverable.
• It is important to note that “sources” in the above contexts means any material that you did not write yourself: it does not matter whether you are referencing academic sources with named authors, general web sites with no named writer, popular open-source libraries with many contributors, or AI-generated text in response to a prompt you provided. Any text that is not originally written by you is considered an external source that should be cited accordingly.
• As the projects you complete in this class are highly personal and original, you are permitted to share them publicly when the semester is over. However, by participating in this class you authorize us to pursue the removal of your content if it is discovered on any public assignment repositories, especially if it is clearly contributed there by someone else.

These policies, including the rules on all pages linked in this section, are binding for the class. Any violations of this policy will be subject to the institute’s Academic Integrity procedures, which may include a 0 grade on assignments found to contain violations; additional grade penalties; and academic probation or dismissal. Note that if you are accused of academic misconduct, you are not permitted to withdraw from the class until the accusation is resolved; if you are found to have participated in misconduct, you will not be allowed to withdraw for the duration of the semester. If you do so anyway, you will be forcibly re-enrolled without any opportunity to make up work you may have missed while illegally withdrawn.

AI Collaboration Policy

Relative to other classes, your goal in this class is somewhat different. Your goal in this class will ultimately be to contribute something meaningful to the world of educational technology representing roughly 100 hours of total work. Toward this end, you are welcome and encouraged to use whatever tools necessary to enhance the value of that 100 hours of total work. Thus, unlike other classes, you are permitted to directly use code generated by AI tools to build out your project as long as you sufficiently credit these assistants and adjust your project expectations accordingly. In this class, the important adjustment is that AI assistance should allow you to do more than you would have been able to otherwise, rather than allowing you to do the same amount in less time.

However, note that this policy only applies to functional artifacts like code and analysis. It does not apply to your own assignments reflecting your understanding of the literature, nor to your final paper and presentation reflecting your description of your project trajectory. All text written in natural language for delivery as part of the course assignments must be your own. Toward that end, the same academic integrity policy above applies to AI assistance: you are welcome to consult with AI agents just as you would consult with classmates, discuss ideas with friends, and seek feedback from colleagues. However, just as you would not hand your device to someone else to directly fix or improve your classwork, so also you may not copy anything directly from an AI agent into your assignment document.

Feedback

As mentioned previously, this course is as much an experiment in educational technology as it is a class on educational technology. First, because this class is experimental and we are continually striving to improve it, there are bound to be things that go wrong. We ask your patience and support as we figure things out, and in return, we promise that we, too, will be fair and understanding, especially with anything that might impact your grade or performance in the class. Second, we want to consistently get feedback on how we can improve and expand the course for future iterations. You can take advantage of the feedback box on the course forum (especially if you want to gather input from others in the class), give us feedback on the surveys, or contact us directly via private the course forum messages.

Full Calendar

The open-ended structure of this class leaves you a lot of room for exploration, but it also might make it difficult to know where you’re meant to be spending your time each week. The purpose of this calendar is twofold: one, to give you a single canonical listing of everything you need to do in the class, and two, to give you an idea where we expect your time to be spent each week. If you find yourself unsure where to spend your time, check here!

Numbers in parentheses are our estimates for how much time you should spend on each task. Note that these can be hard to estimate as some tasks (e.g. “Investigate the literature and gather sources”) overlap significantly with others (“Complete Assignment 1”, where half of assignment 1 is to write about what you gathered).

Assignment 1

Assignment 1 has two parts. The first, the Research Log, is a structured opportunity for you to report to your mentor and classmates the progress you’ve made this week in exploring the literature and refining your idea. Each assignment until the Qualifier Question, you’ll submit a new Research Log documenting your research progress since the last week. The second, the Activity, is a more structured opportunity to practice one of the skills you’ll need as you move forward in the class. Each part is worth 50% of this assignment’s grade.

Part 1: Research Log

First, if you haven’t already, you probably want to peek forward at the Qualifier Question and the Project Proposal assignments. These first several assignments build toward those, so it would be useful to understand where you’re trying to get!

The goal of these first several assignments is have a general project idea in time to receive a Qualifier Question. However, different students will enter the class at different places in that pursuit. Some of you entered the class already knowing exactly what you want to work on. Others of you need some time to explore. In either case, though, there is research to be done: if you’re in the former group, your research is to find what others have done in your area so you know how to contribute. If you’re in the latter group, your research is to find what you might be interested in doing and how you can contribute to the community.

The Research Guide is there to help you explore the literature no matter what ideas you have as you enter the class. In each of the next three weeks, you’re going to complete a Research Log that documents your growing understanding of the literature. The goal of this research log is to give you an ordered, formal structure for organizing your growing understanding of the research domain you want to enter. Each of the three research logs will follow the same structure, intended to capture your progress regardless of where in the process you are—both entering the class and as the class progress.

Your Research Log should contain 5 sections:

• Background: In about half a page, summarize your current state. For this Research Log, this is likely a summary of your prior interests. If you already know what you are interested in doing, you’d write about that; if you don’t, you’d write about your more general interests in Educational Technology.
• Papers: As you walk through the Research Guide, you’ll be finding lots of papers to read. Here, you’ll make a list of the papers you come across and give considerable attention to. We would expect the Research Log to include at least 15-20 sources (though more is fine as well), and at least 12 (preferably more) should be academic and peer-reviewed. You may include blog posts, newspaper articles, etc. as well, but you should have at least 12 academic sources, too. In the list, for each source, you’ll provide:
  • The paper’s bibliographic information (its APA citation, typically)
  • In around one sentence, how you found it (a Google Scholar search? From a conference’s proceedings? From another paper’s references? Something else?)
  • In around three sentences, a brief, original summary in your own words
  • In around three sentences, the main takeaways going forward

  You should never copy text directly from the source (including its abstract) unless you are quoting it with quotation marks and in-line citation; see How To: Avoid Plagiarism for more. Your summaries should be in your own words; if you want to quote the source directly, make sure to follow APA guidelines for in-line quotes and citations.

• Synthesis: In about a page, summarize the overall body of work you’ve put together. What are the high-level trends, large takeaways, or open questions you’ve found? If you’ve narrowed in on a particular domain, summarize that domain; if you’re still exploring, discuss the overall direction these efforts are leading you toward. Most importantly, anchor this synthesis in the papers you provided above, citing them where appropriate.
• Reflection: In about half a page, reflect on the process of finding sources, reading papers, synthesizing their contents, and building your understand. What was difficult, and what was easy? What are you finding yourself interested in going forward?
• Planning: In about half a page, provide a plan for what you expect to do next week. What threads or ideas will you pursue? What questions will you seek answers to in the literature?

The goal of this Research Log is three-fold: to structure (in conjunction with the Research Guide) your exploration of the literature, to report to your mentor your progress in an externalizable and organized way, and to provide enough information for feedback from your mentor and classmates. The process of building your understanding of the literature is a personal journey that is difficult to assess, but we feel confident that if you can externalize the outcomes above, you’re taking steps in the right direction. We will expect your Research Log to show that you’re following the advice prescribed by the Research Guide.

Part 2: Activity

In a couple weeks, you’re going to be asked to propose your project for the semester. For some of you, that’s going to be building something that solves a problem (Development Track). For others, it’s going to be researching a phenomenon (Research Track), to identify it (“Are cat-owners more likely to succeed in OMSCS than dog-owners?”) and/or to explain it (“Why are cat-owners more likely to succeed in OMSCS than dog-owners?”). For others, you’re going to be teaching some content (Content Track), which in its own way is building something that solves a problem.

No matter what you’re doing, though, there are some commonalities. There will be a need you’re addressing, whether the need is a problem to be solved, a topic to be taught, or a phenomenon to be explained. There will be some audience, either to learn your material, to use your tool, or to participate (actively or passively) in your investigation. There will be some method you use to try to address that need, whether it be implementing some software, conducting some study, or developing some content. There will be a result: you might not reach the point of evaluating your result this semester, but you should be developing something that could be evaluated because that’s simply good design.

Mapping these together, however, can be a difficult task. One of the major things new researchers must learn is how to ensure a method is actually addressing their need and audience, as well as how to ensure an evaluation actually identifies success or failure. These are not trivial concepts.

One of the best ways to learn these things is to take CS6750, but either you’ve already done that or it’s probably too late to plan to do that before you move forward. The next best way, though, is to look at how others have addressed this.

So, for this week’s activity: select five papers. These can be papers you’ve reviewed as part of your Research Logs, or they can be papers you seek out solely for this activity. Note that not all papers will be compatible with this activity: you need to select papers where the authors were clearly solving a problem or investigating a phenomenon. Don’t worry, this still makes up a large number of papers.

Then, for each paper, introduce it with its full APA citation information and include a link to where the paper can be found. Then, create a logic chart/Guzdial Chart/Blumenfeld Chart. These charts are ways of mapping need, audience, method, and results in order to ensure they connect correctly. For this activity, yours will be a little more general than that link: that link is specifically for research projects, while we’ll include development projects as well.

Your chart should have four “columns”, each with 2-3 sentences answering the following questions. You do not have to actually make them columns, you can do this as subsequent subsections, bullets, or some other format, as long as all these parts are here and answered in sufficient depth:

• What is the need? What problem is trying to be solved or phenomenon trying to be investigated?
• What is method? What did they build to solve the problem? What did they do to investigate the phenomenon?
• Who is the audience? Who are the participants or subjects?
• What were the results? What did they find?

Then, for each paper, critique the alignment between need, audience, method, and results. Are the results justified by the method? Does the method address the need? Is the audience fitting for the need? Overall, how strong is the alignment between need, audience, method, and results?

For example, here would be what you might write about one of my papers, “Toward CS1 at Scale: Building and Testing a MOOC-for-Credit Candidate”:

Paper

Joyner, D. A. (2018). Toward CS1 at Scale: Building and Testing a MOOC-for-Credit Candidate. In Proceedings of the Fifth Annual ACM Conference on Learning at Scale. London, United Kingdom. ACM Press.

Need

There is a need for scalable computer science education that preserves the rigor and reputability of an on-campus program. Modern MOOC platforms make content available, but they are often weaker on assessment, so the credential they generate is not as good as college credit.

Method

The authors developed an online CS1 course that is used as the basis for a for-credit class at Georgia Tech, as well as offered in MOOC form. To investigate its success, the authors had students in the for-credit online section complete a set of surveys and assessments that would allow them to be compared to the for-credit traditional section.

Audience

The audience for the MOOC overall is anyone interested in learning CS, but the audience for this study are undergraduates at Georgia Tech. Some of these undergraduates are in this online section, while some are in a traditional on-campus section.

Results

The authors found that students in the online for-credit section achieved comparable learning outcomes with students in the on-campus for-credit section, and appeared to enjoy the experience more, rating the course more highly. They also reported spending less time per week on the course.

Critique

The study gives pretty compelling evidence that the online for-credit students learn as much as the on-campus for-credit students. There are possible issues with the pre-test and post-test because it is difficult to know how much effort students invest in them, but that should be consistent across both sections, so it doesn’t bias things one way or the other. However, the method and results fall short of answering the core goal. Although this shows that online for-credit students learn as much as on-campus for-credit students, it does not demonstrate that MOOC students learn just as much as well. Without investigating the MOOC students’ actual learning outcomes, the authors can’t claim the MOOC students learn just as much (which they do not actually claim, but simply leave as a possibility).

You may find that some papers are a bit difficult to fit into this structure. For example, the paper used in the example above could be thought of in two ways: as a Development/Content study, where there was a need for scalable CS education and a MOOC was chosen as the method to solve that problem; or as a Research study, where there exists a scalable CS course and there is a need to demonstrate its equivalence with a traditional course through the method of shared assessments. That’s okay: there are no objective answers here. This is an organizing structure to allow you to structure your thinking and investigate your selected papers in depth.

The length of your deliverable will depend in part on your formatting, although we would generally expect 3-4 pages, a bit less than one page to answer these questions for each of the 5 papers.

Submission Instructions

Complete your assignment using JDF, then save your submission as a PDF. Assignments should be submitted to the corresponding assignment submission page in Canvas. You should submit a single PDF for this assignment. This PDF will be ported over to Peer Feedback for peer review by your classmates. If your assignment involves things (like videos, working software prototypes, etc.) that cannot be provided in PDF, you should provide them separately (through OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.) and submit a PDF that links to or otherwise describes how to access that material.

This is an individual assignment. Even if you already plan to work on a team for the project, this assignment should still be completed individually.

Late work is not accepted without advanced agreement except in cases of medical or family emergencies. In the case of such an emergency, please contact the Dean of Students.

Grading Information

As with all assignments in this class, this assignment will be graded on an 11-point scale (0 to 10), in accordance with the grading policy outlined in the syllabus. If your deliverable receives below a 9, you may revise and resubmit it once within one week of receiving a grade. Resubmissions may receive up to a 9. Note that this should not be treated as a de facto free pass to submit sorely lacking work initially; we reserve the right to deny resubmission or grade a resubmission more harshly if we perceive the original submission was lacking in earnest effort.

Peer Review

After submission, your assignment will be ported to Peer Feedback for review by your classmates. Grading is not the primary function of this peer review process; the primary function is simply to give you the opportunity to read and comment on your classmates’ ideas, and receive additional feedback on your own. All grades will come from the graders alone. See the course participation policy for full details about how points are awarded for completing peer reviews.

Assignment 2

Assignment 2 has two parts. The first, the Research Log, is a structured opportunity for you to report to your mentor and classmates the progress you’ve made this week in exploring the literature and refining your idea. Each assignment until the Qualifier Question, you’ll submit a new Research Log documenting your research progress since the last week. The second, the Activity, is a more structured opportunity to practice one of the skills you’ll need as you move forward in the class. Each part is worth 50% of this assignment’s grade.

Part 1: Research Log

Your Research Log for assignment 2 follows the same procedure as that in assignment 1. Its goal is to be general to your current progress: if you have a very clear idea for what you want to work on, the sources you’ll select will be very close to that problem or phenomenon; if you don’t yet have a strong idea, you’ll choose a greater variety of sources to keep exploring at a higher level. Either way, you’ll begin by summarizing your progress entering the week, then provide an itemization of your exploration for the week, the synthesize that with what you’ve explored before, reflect on the process, and plan for next week. If you haven’t already, you should peek forward at the requirements of Assignment 3, the Qualifier Question, and the Proposal. Your Research Log is intended to prepare you for these upcoming assignments.

Your Research Log for this week should be all-new material (as you aren’t repeating the same research you did last week!), but you can include your previous Logs as appendices if you think they provide useful context to your peer reviewers.

The sections of your Research Log will be the same as Assignment 1, although the directions differ slightly due to your greater background so far:

• Background: In about half a page, summarize your current state. This would largely cover where you left off last week.
• Papers: List the papers you came across this week and gave considerable attention to. We would expect the Research Log to include at least 15-20 sources (though more is fine as well), and at least 12 (preferably more) should be academic and peer-reviewed. You may include blog posts, newspaper articles, etc. as well, but you should have at least 12 academic sources, too. In the list, for each source, you’ll provide:
  • The paper’s bibliographic information (its APA citation, typically)
  • In around one sentence, how you found it (a Google Scholar search? From a conference’s proceedings? From another paper’s references? Something else?)
  • In around three sentences, a brief, original summary in your own words
  • In around three sentences, the main takeaways going forward

  You should never copy text directly from the source (including its abstract) unless you are quoting it with quotation marks and in-line citation; see How To: Avoid Plagiarism for more. Your summaries should be in your own words; if you want to quote the source directly, make sure to follow APA guidelines for in-line quotes and citations.

• Synthesis: In about a page, summarize the overall body of work you’ve put together, both in this Log and the previous ones. What are the high-level trends, large takeaways, or open questions you’ve found? If you’ve narrowed in on a particular domain, summarize that domain; if you’re still exploring, discuss the overall direction these efforts are leading you toward. Most importantly, anchor this synthesis in the papers you provided above (and in previous Logs), citing them where appropriate.
• Reflection: In about half a page, reflect on the process of finding sources, reading papers, synthesizing their contents, and building your understand. What was difficult, and what was easy? What are you finding yourself interested in going forward?
• Planning: In about half a page, provide a plan for what you expect to do next week. What threads or ideas will you pursue? What questions will you seek answers to in the literature?

The goal of this Research Log is three-fold: to structure (in conjunction with the Research Guide) your exploration of the literature, to report to your mentor your progress in an externalizable and organized way, and to provide enough information for feedback from your mentor and classmates. The process of building your understanding of the literature is a personal journey that is difficult to assess, but we feel confident that if you can externalize the outcomes above, you’re taking steps in the right direction. We will expect your Research Log to show that you’re following the advice prescribed by the Research Guide.

Part 2: Activity

In the Qualifier Question, the Proposal, and the Final Project, you’ll be expected in part to write a literature-backed analysis of the space surrounding your problem. To do this, you’ll need to wield sources from the literature in defense of your claims. This takes practice, and in some ways is a chicken-and-egg problem: you use the literature to explore your problem or question, but you then use your evolving problem or question to inform further exploration in the literature. It is also difficult to learn from your peers on these assessments: did they do better research, or are there just more sources for their problem?

So, to practice writing in a formal, academic style with citations, we are giving you a prompt. Use the Research Guide to explore the literature surrounding this prompt, especially the pages on finding papers to read, reading an academic paper, writing an academic paper, and using citations in your writing.

Online education and MOOCs were praised as having the potential to equalize access to education, but critics have suggested that they are having the opposite effect and are disproportionately used by already-affluent audiences. What is the truth about the relationship between online education and equity of access? Is it having an equalizing effect, or is it actually widening the gap in access to education? In answering this, you could choose to consider equity based on gender, race, socioeconomic status, geographic location, or other factors, but you do not need to cover them all.

Note that we do not have a correct answer in mind for this question. Instead, we are looking for the extent to which you come up with an answer and defend that answer with the available literature. Note that if you find sources with contradictory conclusions, you should not select only those that support your conclusion: you should instead include the contradictory evidence, and provide an explanation for why you maintain your conclusion despite that evidence. This is what makes a good argument: putting both the supporting and opposing evidence in context.

We expect that a good answer to this question will require around 3-4 pages, excluding references; this is neither a minimum nor a maximum, but rather just a heuristic for the depth we expect. The writing for this activity is expected to be formal: avoid personal pronouns and contractions, cite appropriate literature both in-line and in the references section using APA format, and organize your response around a central thesis that you then support with evidence.

Submission Instructions

Complete your assignment using JDF, then save your submission as a PDF. Assignments should be submitted to the corresponding assignment submission page in Canvas. You should submit a single PDF for this  assignment. This PDF will be ported over to Peer Feedback for peer review by your classmates. If your assignment involves things (like videos, working software prototypes, etc.) that cannot be provided in PDF, you should provide them separately (through OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.) and submit a PDF that links to or otherwise describes how to access that material.

This is an individual assignment. Even if you already plan to work on a team for the project, this assignment should still be completed individually.

Late work is not accepted without advanced agreement except in cases of medical or family emergencies. In the case of such an emergency, please contact the Dean of Students.

Grading Information

As with all assignments in this class, this assignment will be graded on an 11-point scale (0 to 10), in accordance with the grading policy outlined in the syllabus. If your deliverable receives below a 9, you may revise and resubmit it once within one week of receiving a grade. Resubmissions may receive up to a 9. Note that this should not be treated as a de facto free pass to submit sorely lacking work initially; we reserve the right to deny resubmission or grade a resubmission more harshly if we perceive the original submission was lacking in earnest effort.

Peer Review

After submission, your assignment will be ported to Peer Feedback for review by your classmates. Grading is not the primary function of this peer review process; the primary function is simply to give you the opportunity to read and comment on your classmates’ ideas, and receive additional feedback on your own. All grades will come from the graders alone. See the course participation policy for full details about how points are awarded for completing peer reviews.

Assignment 3

Assignment 3 has two parts. The first, the Research Log, is a structured opportunity for you to report to your mentor and classmates the progress you’ve made this week in exploring the literature and refining your idea. Each assignment until the Qualifier Question, you’ll submit a new Research Log documenting your research progress since the last week. The second, the Activity, is a more structured opportunity to practice one of the skills you’ll need as you move forward in the class. Each part is worth 50% of this assignment’s grade.

Part 1: Research Log

Your Research Log for assignment 3 follows the same procedure as that for assignments 1 and 2. At this point, though, we would expect most people to have a decent idea for what they would like to work on, and this week should be spent refining that idea with sources more closely related to your interests. As with last week, you’ll begin by summarizing your progress entering the week, then provide an itemization of your exploration for the week, the synthesize that with what you’ve explored before, reflect on the process, and plan for the next stage of the class. Take a look at the Qualifier Question and Proposal requirements to understand a bit more about why you’re gathering these sources; your Research Log is intended to prepare you for these upcoming assignments.

Your Research Log for this week should be all-new material (as you aren’t repeating the same research you did last week!), but you can include your previous Logs as appendices if you think they provide useful context to your peer reviewers.

The sections of your Research Log will be the same as Assignments 1 and 2, although the directions differ slightly due to your proximity to the next stage of the class:

• Background: In about half a page, summarize your current state. This would largely cover where you left off last week.
• Papers: List the papers you came across this week and gave considerable attention to. We would expect the Research Log to include at least 15-20 sources (though more is fine as well), and at least 12 (preferably more) should be academic and peer-reviewed. You may include blog posts, newspaper articles, etc. as well, but you should have at least 12 academic sources, too. In the list, for each source, you’ll provide:
  • The paper’s bibliographic information (its APA citation, typically)
  • In around one sentence, how you found it (a Google Scholar search? From a conference’s proceedings? From another paper’s references? Something else?)
  • In around three sentences, a brief, original summary in your own words
  • In around three sentences, the main takeaways going forward

  You should never copy text directly from the source (including its abstract) unless you are quoting it with quotation marks and in-line citation; see How To: Avoid Plagiarism for more. Your summaries should be in your own words; if you want to quote the source directly, make sure to follow APA guidelines for in-line quotes and citations.

• Synthesis: In about a page, summarize the overall body of work you’ve put together, both in this Log and the previous ones. What are the high-level trends, large takeaways, or open questions you’ve found? If you’ve narrowed in on a particular domain, summarize that domain; if you’re still exploring, discuss the overall direction these efforts are leading you toward. Most importantly, anchor this synthesis in the papers you provided above (and in previous Logs), citing them where appropriate.
• Reflection: In about half a page, reflect on the process of finding sources, reading papers, synthesizing their contents, and building your understand. What was difficult, and what was easy? What are you finding yourself interested in going forward?
• Planning: In about half a page, provide a brief, preliminary plan for what you expect to do for the project itself; this should allow you to get some early ideas from your classmates and mentor about your scope and approach.

The goal of this Research Log is three-fold: to structure (in conjunction with the Research Guide) your exploration of the literature, to report to your mentor your progress in an externalizable and organized way, and to provide enough information for feedback from your mentor and classmates. The process of building your understanding of the literature is a personal journey that is difficult to assess, but we feel confident that if you can externalize the outcomes above, you’re taking steps in the right direction. We will expect your Research Log to show that you’re following the advice prescribed by the Research Guide.

Part 2: Activity

In the Project Proposal, you will state a problem or question, and then give a plan for how you will solve or answer it. The mistake many people make at this stage is to rush to what they plan to do without pausing to thoroughly define the problem or question itself. In the absence of a good problem statement or research question, it is difficult or impossible to judge whether the solution or answer adequately addressed the problem.

So, for this activity, you are going to practice writing both a problem statement and a set of research questions. A problem statement addresses Development and Content track projects: there exists some problem that needs to be solved (where that problem could be, “people need to learn X, but at present they cannot”). Research questions address Research track projects: there is a phenomenon that needs to be explained, or relatedly, there is an area in which phenomena may exist that have not yet been identified.

Although you’ll generally choose one track for your project (although there may be overlaps), in this activity you’ll practice writing both. This will equip you to give better feedback to your classmates. For Activity 3, you’ll thus turn in both a problem statement and a set of research questions.

Ideally, you are far along enough in your research that you can write problem statements and research questions that may be rough drafts for what you eventually use in your proposal. If not, you’re welcome to choose any problem with which you’re familiar. It does not even have to be in education for this activity (although we would recommend staying topical) but it may be easier to write in a domain with which you’re more familiar. Don’t overcomplicate what counts as a ‘problem’ or ‘phenomenon’: a problem is anything that isn’t working as well as it could, and a phenomenon is anything we can observe and may want to explain or explore. “Students need grades and feedback faster” or “Professional certifications are prohibitively expensive” would both be problems. “Retention rates in online courses are low” or “We do not know about the structures of online courses” would be phenomena to explore.

Problem Statement

There are many ways to write a problem statement, but in order to give you a starting point, we follow the structure advocated by Ashford University among others. You might not follow this structure exactly in your proposal, but following it now should give you good practice on the value in defining these details piece-by-piece. Your problem statement, which defines a problem to be solved, should include the following parts:

1. Background Information. First, provide some background information. Depending on your problem area, the reader may not be familiar with its basic vocabulary and existing structures. Provide enough background that someone with limited familiarity with the area will be able to understand the general problem.
2. General Problem Statement. The general problem statement describes a broad problem within the domain you described above. The problem here is likely so general as to be unsolvable without further specification. For example, “global temperatures are rising” is a general problem statement. It is a stated problem, but without knowing more about why the problem exists, it is not solvable.
3. Scholarly Support. Here, you would provide evidence that the problem or phenomenon actually exists. Note that if scholarly support is absent, you may supply other forms of support, although a complete lack of scholarly support means you would likely first approach this as a research question to establish if the problem exists in the first place.
4. Specific Problem Statement. Here, based on that scholarly support, you drill the problem down into details that can actually be solvable. For example, “Industry is outputting carbon emissions at a greater rate than can be absorbed by the earth”, “The earth is retaining greenhouse gases causing an increasing concentration over time”, or “Environmentalism tends to be prioritized only by affluent nations” would all be more specific ways to state the problem: these are more solvable. You may find you define your problem statement specifically in a way that connects to the solution that you have in mind; that’s okay.
5. Closing Commentary. Finally, you would briefly discuss the overall impact of the problem you have described. How will society be affected if it remains unsolved? How will it be affected if it’s solved?

We expect a good problem statement to be around 2 pages in JDF. This is neither a minimum nor a maximum, but rather is just a heuristic to understand the level of depth we would expect. Ignore the length heuristics from Ashford University itself; we expect more depth.

Research Questions

While problem statements focus on problems to be solved, research statements focus on phenomena to be observed or explained. Research questions are generally expected to have certain characteristics:

• Clarity: Research questions should be clear and specific enough that the audience can understand the purpose.
• Focused: Research questions should have a sufficiently narrow focus as to be addressable and answerable.
• Concise: To be clear and focused, research questions are also expected to use as few words as possible.
• Complex: Research questions generally cannot be answered by simple numbers or yes/nos; questions like ‘how’ and ‘why’ lead to more complex answers.
• Arguable: Research questions should be addressable by facts rather than opinions.
• Hierarchical: Research questions can generally be decomposed into sub-questions which, if answered, will supply an answer to the overall question.

Write a research question that can be decomposed into at least three smaller questions. For example, the question, “How can AI be used to improve performance on algebra homework?” could be decomposed into, “To what extent can AI make sense of students’ intermediate problem-solving steps?”, “To what extent can AI use that understanding to generate hints?”, and “To what extent do such hints improve students’ performance?”

Then, justify that all three sub-questions are meet the criteria above for complexity and arguability (clarity, focus, and conciseness will be relatively self-evident). What kinds of answers can you expect to receive to these questions, and what kinds of facts or data will support those answers?

Note that this is expected to be a difficult exercise; do not expect it to come naturally. Writing good research questions is difficult to do, but it is a very important skill to learn. A quick Google search for “how to write good research questions” will bring up some additional valuable material.

We expect a good set of research questions with accompanying justification to be around 2 pages in JDF. This is neither a minimum nor a maximum, but rather is just a heuristic to understand the level of depth we would expect.

Submission Instructions

Complete your assignment using JDF, then save your submission as a PDF. Assignments should be submitted to the corresponding assignment submission page in Canvas. You should submit a single PDF for this assignment. This PDF will be ported over to Peer Feedback for peer review by your classmates. If your assignment involves things (like videos, working software prototypes, etc.) that cannot be provided in PDF, you should provide them separately (through OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.) and submit a PDF that links to or otherwise describes how to access that material.

This is an individual assignment. Even if you already plan to work on a team for the project, this assignment should still be completed individually.

Late work is not accepted without advanced agreement except in cases of medical or family emergencies. In the case of such an emergency, please contact the Dean of Students.

Grading Information

As with all assignments in this class, this assignment will be graded on an 11-point scale (0 to 10), in accordance with the grading policy outlined in the syllabus. If your deliverable receives below a 9, you may revise and resubmit it once within one week of receiving a grade. Resubmissions may receive up to a 9. Note that this should not be treated as a de facto free pass to submit sorely lacking work initially; we reserve the right to deny resubmission or grade a resubmission more harshly if we perceive the original submission was lacking in earnest effort.

Peer Review

After submission, your assignment will be ported to Peer Feedback for review by your classmates. Grading is not the primary function of this peer review process; the primary function is simply to give you the opportunity to read and comment on your classmates’ ideas, and receive additional feedback on your own. All grades will come from the graders alone. See the course participation policy for full details about how points are awarded for completing peer reviews.

Qualifier Question

Before you can move on to proposing a contribution to the educational technology community, you need to demonstrate your mastery of the portion of the field to which you want to contribute. Because everyone’s interests and project ideas will be different, there is no question we can ask everyone that will be simultaneously deep enough to be challenging and general enough to cover everyone.

So instead, on or by Friday of week 3, your mentor will send you a personal qualifier question targeted specifically to what you wrote on the first few assignments. This question will ask you to think deeply about the topics you have chosen. For the research track, it might ask you to synthesize and describe the viewpoints of different communities or research methodologies on your ideas. For the development track, it might ask you to describe the broader issues or pedagogical challenges associated with your intended designs. For the content track, it might ask you to consider elements of pedagogy and or instruction you have not yet considered.

The primary goal of this assignment is to demonstrate your mastery of the portion of the field to which you want to contribute. In simpler words, the primary goal of this assignment is to show off what you know and how you can think. This is the closest thing this class has to a test. Adequately completing this assignment will require a significant command over the literature on your topic (in other words, several citations to others’ work in your area).

Your assignment should be approximately 4 pages long in JDF. This is neither a minimum nor a maximum, but rather a heuristic to simply describe the level of depth we would like to see. Feel free to write more, or if you believe you can complete the assignment in fewer words, feel free to write less. Please make sure to include the question text itself so that your peer reviews know what you were asked to answer.

Submission Instructions

Complete your assignment using JDF, then save your submission as a PDF. Assignments should be submitted to the corresponding assignment submission page in Canvas. You should submit a single PDF for this assignment. This PDF will be ported over to Peer Feedback for peer review by your classmates. If your assignment involves things (like videos, working software prototypes, etc.) that cannot be provided in PDF, you should provide them separately (through OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.) and submit a PDF that links to or otherwise describes how to access that material.

This is an individual assignment. Even if you already plan to work on a team for the project, this assignment should still be completed individually.

Late work is not accepted without advanced agreement except in cases of medical or family emergencies. In the case of such an emergency, please contact the Dean of Students.

Grading Information

As with all assignments in this class, this assignment will be graded on an 11-point scale (0 to 10), in accordance with the grading policy outlined in the syllabus. If your deliverable receives below a 9, you may revise and resubmit it once within one week of receiving a grade. Resubmissions may receive up to a 9. Note that this should not be treated as a de facto free pass to submit sorely lacking work initially; we reserve the right to deny resubmission or grade a resubmission more harshly if we perceive the original submission was lacking in earnest effort.

Peer Review

After submission, your assignment will be ported to Peer Feedback for review by your classmates. Grading is not the primary function of this peer review process; the primary function is simply to give you the opportunity to read and comment on your classmates’ ideas, and receive additional feedback on your own. All grades will come from the graders alone. See the course participation policy for full details about how points are awarded for completing peer reviews.

Project Proposal

The time has come to propose your project. We’ve included more advice on how to do this in How To: Move from Exploring to Investigating and How To: Select a Good Project Topic.

The project proposal is effectively an agreement between you, your teammates (if you’re in a team), and your mentor regarding what you will do for the rest of the semester. You’ll submit a draft of your proposal, but there may be a bit of back-and-forth between you and your mentor to reach a proposal on which you can agree. This shouldn’t delay you from getting started with the work you propose for the first week or two.

Although there will still be weekly discussions and conversations about general EdTech topics on Piazza, the vast majority (>90%) of the time you spend in the class for the final ten weeks will be spent on the project. As such, projects should likely be scoped to demand ~100 hours of work from each individual (note that estimated numbers of hours to spend on each task in the Full Calendar). A single individual should propose a 100-hour project, while a team of five should propose a 500-hour project.

As part of your project, you’ll also deliver a number of related deliverables. You’ll submit:

• Five weekly status reports, detailing your progress the past week, the challenges you’ve encountered, and any revised expectations for the final project.
• Two intermediate video milestones (1 and 2), showing off what you’ve accomplished so far and specifically soliciting feedback to help you move forward.
• A final paper and presentation, reporting on your project.
• The final project itself (such as the data and research methods for the research track, or the tool itself for the development track, or the course material for the content track).

You should make sure to include these deliverables in your proposal as well.

You do not need to wait until the proposal is accepted to begin work on your project. Some projects will actually need work to begin sooner. The proposal acceptance will check the scope of the overall deliverable, but it likely will not affect the fundamental design of the project, and so these foundational steps can be taken earlier.

Proposal Outline

Every proposal will be different. There is no one template outline that will apply to all proposals. However, there are sections that will be covered by every proposal, as well as sections that will be covered by any proposal in a particular track. This sample outline is meant as a starting point: if you have good reason, you can add other sections or remove some of these.

Your proposal should be approximately 6 pages long in JDF, excluding the task list described below. This is neither a minimum nor a maximum, but rather a heuristic to simply describe the level of depth we would like to see. Team proposals are expected to be a bit longer. Submit your proposal as a PDF.

Header

Every proposal should start with a title and a list of team members.

Introduction

Briefly introduce your topic. Your goal in the introduction is to set up a narrative for why your project is actually valuable.

• If you’re on the Development track, this would frame the problem, specifically referencing why it’s a problem and why existing solutions aren’t sufficient, in order to leave room for you to contribute something meaningful.
• If you’re on the Research track, this would frame the phenomenon or question, especially in terms of what data or results exist to show the phenomenon exists (or may exist).
• If you’re on the Content track, this would frame the content, why it is valuable to learn, and who may benefit from it.

Related Work

Cover what others in the same area have done. This sets up the foundation for your work and tells the reader how what you will do is different from what is already out there, as well as how they should interpret the results of what they do in a broader context.

• If you’re on the Development track, this may mean other tools targeting the same area, although you’ll absolutely want to cover tools developed in both industry and academia. Academic tools tend to have more robust results published about their successes and failures.
• If you’re on the Research track, this would be the other findings that set up the value of your investigation, showing that your question is prompted by others’ work.
• If you’re on the Content track, this would cover either alternative material on the same content to show what will make yours different, or other content that you want to emulate if there is little to no content out there on your content area so far.

Proposed Work

This is the crux of the proposal. What are you going to do? Your description of your proposed work should be detailed enough that you could hand this proposal to someone else and they may be able to implement it themselves. We would expect every proposal to have subsections to the proposed work, but what those subsections are will differ based on your project.

• If you’re on the Development track, this would describe the tool, including what it will look like, how the user will access it, what languages or libraries it will be build in, etc. You might also have a section on evaluating the tool.
• If you’re on the Research track, this would be the methodology of the study you would be doing, including your hypotheses, how you’ll gather your data (Surveys? Interviews? Observation? Log analysis?), and how you’ll analyze it (Quantitatively? Qualitatively?).
• If you’re on the Content track, this be what content you plan to produce, how it will be organized, what tools will be used to build and share it, and what pedagogical theories you will use in development (e.g. active learning, blended learning, etc.).

If you are working on a team, you should note throughout the proposed work who will be responsible for what general parts. You will go into more detail on this in the task list. You may also want to include fall-back plans for portions of the work that may be unpredictable: for example, what will you do if you cannot recruit enough participants for a study, or if you are unable to integrate a certain pair of tools?

Deliverables

As part of the project, you will produce two intermediate milestones, as well as the final project. Describe what these deliverables will be. Take a look at the course calendar to see when the intermediate deliverables are expected.

Second, describe what you expect to be in your final project deliverable. This could be code, data, artifacts, courseware, videos, etc.

Task List

At the conclusion of the proposal PDF, your proposal must have a task list. To create your task list:

• Download or make a copy of the task list template. Delete the sample tasks.
• Fill out the task list. You may add or remove rows as necessary. If you have multiple team members, you’ll definitely need to add rows.
• Make sure to set aside some time for preparing each milestone, the final paper, and the final presentation.
• Copy your task list into your proposal document.

We recommend using the task list to monitor your progress throughout the semester. Each week, you should re-outline the rest of the semester to ensure you and your mentor remain in sync about your progress and expected final project.

Submission Instructions

Complete your assignment using JDF, then save your submission as a PDF. Assignments should be submitted to the corresponding assignment submission page in Canvas. You should submit a single PDF for this assignment. This PDF will be ported over to Peer Feedback for peer review by your classmates. If your assignment involves things (like videos, working software prototypes, etc.) that cannot be provided in PDF, you should provide them separately (through OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.) and submit a PDF that links to or otherwise describes how to access that material.

If you are working on your project on a team, only one person needs to submit each assignment. Make sure to coordinate who is submitting each, however.

Late work is not accepted without advanced agreement except in cases of medical or family emergencies. In the case of such an emergency, please contact the Dean of Students.

Grading Information

As with all assignments in this class, this assignment will be graded on an 11-point scale (0 to 10), in accordance with the grading policy outlined in the syllabus. Note, however, that your proposal serves an additional purpose: it acts as an agreement between you and your mentor. The proposal is a set of work your mentor agrees would satisfy the requirements of the final project (assuming, of course, that the work is also done adequately well). As such, you should ensure that your mentor accepts your proposal as satisfactory. This may be stated by them explicitly in your mentor thread, or it can also be inferred from a proposal grade of 9 or 10.

As usual, if your deliverable receives below a 9, you may revise and resubmit it once within one week of receiving a grade.. Resubmissions may receive up to a 9. Note again, though, that this should not be used as an excuse to delay your work on your actual project. You should begin work on the project as proposed, and refine the plan in parallel if your proposal is not accepted initially.

If your proposal is not still not accepted after revision, or if you choose not to revise your proposal after learning that it was not accepted, you may still progress in the class; you do so, however, without the agreement that the work proposed will satisfy the final project’s requirements. We will still grade your final project the same way we would have otherwise; an accepted proposal simply provides the reassurance that the work you proposed will meet those requirements.

Peer Review

After submission, your assignment will be ported to Peer Feedback for review by your classmates. Grading is not the primary function of this peer review process; the primary function is simply to give you the opportunity to read and comment on your classmates’ ideas, and receive additional feedback on your own. All grades will come from the graders alone. See the course participation policy for full details about how points are awarded for completing peer reviews.

Weekly Status Checks

To help the mentors monitor your progress on your project, you’ll submit weekly status checks. We’ve included advice on how to use these wisely in How To: Use Your Status Checks Effectively. These status checks will ask four simple questions:

• What progress has been made in the past week?
• What challenges have been encountered in the past week?
• Do you have any new expectations that your final project will differ from what was described in your proposal?
• (For group projects) Have your team members been fulfilling their responsibilities?

Each question can generally be answered in only a sentence or two unless there is a more significant answer. It is crucial that you be honest in these status checks, however. If we observe that your progress is slow early on, we can mutually adjust expectations and come to a new agreement. However, if we discover later that your final project will differ because of a discrepancy between your plan and your progress that you did not disclose when it arose, your final grade will be affected.

Submission Instructions

You will submit these status checks via your mentor threads; simply post the status check as a follow-up to your existing thread with your mentor. The mentors will mark separately how many status checks have been submitted, and this count will be used as your final status check grade (worth 5% of your average). Late work is not accepted without advanced agreement except in cases of medical or family emergencies. In the case of an emergency, please contact the Dean of Students.

Grading Information

Weekly Status Checks are evaluated simply for participation. Completing all five status checks will grant full credit for the status check portion of the grade; completing four out of five will grant 80% credit; completing three out of five will grant 60% credit; and so on. Your mentor will enter your status check grade into Canvas directly.

Intermediate Milestone 1

During the project, you will submit two intermediate video milestones. These are intended to show off your progress so far, as well as to allow you to get feedback from your mentor and classmates.

Both milestones should be video presentations of your work so far. They are intended to replicate short mid-semester poster sessions or class presentations you might see in a traditional class. You need not be limited only to video, however; if you have prototypes to show off, tools to test or demo, content to preview, data visualizations to test, etc., you may also include those in your milestone document. Your milestone grade will be primarily based on the video presentation, though.

Within those videos, we do have some recommendations depending on whether you’re on the development track, the content track, or the research track.

• Development Track. If you’re on the development track, we recommend you use the first intermediate milestone to get some feedback on your preliminary prototypes and design ideas. Your first few weeks might be spent compiling low-fidelity prototypes, wireframes, or interaction designs. Show these off to your classmates and mentor. For the second milestone, ideally you will be ready for some previews or beta testing with potential users. The tool need not be complete, but enough interaction should ideally be ready to show off some real interaction.
• Research Track. If you’re on the research track, we recommend you use the first intermediate milestone to preview your research methodology to your classmates and mentor. Get feedback from them on the surveys you’ve constructed, the recruitment procedures you have in mind, etc. Then, use that feedback to improve them before sending them to your participants. For the second milestone, you will ideally have some preliminary data to share; share your early conclusions and observations, as well as your plans for ongoing analysis leading up to the final deliverable.
• Content Track. If you’re on the content track, we recommend you use the first intermediate milestone to preview your high-level lesson plans and materials. You may also have some early scripts or visuals for some of the earlier lessons you’ll be creating, or a plan for laying out the content in the interface you chose. For the second milestone, ideally you’ll have some content ready you can actually preview.

The most important thing is to get the type of feedback you need when you need it. Construct your milestones with the types of questions you want your classmates and mentor to answer in mind.

Submission Instructions

Complete your assignment using JDF, then save your submission as a PDF. Assignments should be submitted to the corresponding assignment submission page in Canvas. You should submit a single PDF for this assignment. This PDF will be ported over to Peer Feedback for peer review by your classmates. If your assignment involves things (like videos, working software prototypes, etc.) that cannot be provided in PDF, you should provide them separately (through OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.) and submit a PDF that links to or otherwise describes how to access that material.

If you are working on your project on a team, only one person needs to submit each assignment. Make sure to coordinate who is submitting each, however.

Late work is not accepted without advanced agreement except in cases of medical or family emergencies. In the case of such an emergency, please contact the Dean of Students.

Grading Information

As with all assignments in this class, this assignment will be graded on an 11-point scale (0 to 10), in accordance with the grading policy outlined in the syllabus.

Resubmissions are not permitted on intermediate milestones; however, an intermediate milestone that receives a low grade may be replaced by the final project grade, capped at 9. After all, the goal of the intermediate milestones is to give you feedback to improve your final project; if your final project grade is high despite weak intermediate milestones, then they still accomplished their purpose. Therefore, a intermediate milestone grade below 9 will be replaced by the final project grade, up to a maximum grade of 9. Note however you are not eligible for this replacement if you skip submitting a milestone altogether, or if your effort on a milestone is gauged to be so low that it may as well have been skipped; this only applies to earnest attempts that receive low scores.

Peer Review

After submission, your assignment will be ported to Peer Feedback for review by your classmates. Grading is not the primary function of this peer review process; the primary function is simply to give you the opportunity to read and comment on your classmates’ ideas, and receive additional feedback on your own. All grades will come from the graders alone. See the course participation policy for full details about how points are awarded for completing peer reviews.

Intermediate Milestone 2

During the project, you will submit two intermediate video milestones. These are intended to show off your progress so far, as well as to allow you to get feedback from your mentor and classmates.

Both milestones should be video presentations of your work so far. They are intended to replicate short mid-semester poster sessions or class presentations you might see in a traditional class. You need not be limited only to video, however; if you have prototypes to show off, tools to test or demo, content to preview, data visualizations to test, etc., you may also include those in your milestone document. Your milestone grade will be primarily based on the video presentation, though.

Within those videos, we do have some recommendations depending on whether you’re on the development track, the content track, or the research track.

• Development Track. If you’re on the development track, we recommend you use the first intermediate milestone to get some feedback on your preliminary prototypes and design ideas. Your first few weeks might be spent compiling low-fidelity prototypes, wireframes, or interaction designs. Show these off to your classmates and mentor. For the second milestone, ideally you will be ready for some previews or beta testing with potential users. The tool need not be complete, but enough interaction should ideally be ready to show off some real interaction.
• Research Track. If you’re on the research track, we recommend you use the first intermediate milestone to preview your research methodology to your classmates and mentor. Get feedback from them on the surveys you’ve constructed, the recruitment procedures you have in mind, etc. Then, use that feedback to improve them before sending them to your participants. For the second milestone, you will ideally have some preliminary data to share; share your early conclusions and observations, as well as your plans for ongoing analysis leading up to the final deliverable.
• Content Track. If you’re on the content track, we recommend you use the first intermediate milestone to preview your high-level lesson plans and materials. You may also have some early scripts or visuals for some of the earlier lessons you’ll be creating, or a plan for laying out the content in the interface you chose. For the second milestone, ideally you’ll have some content ready you can actually preview.

The most important thing is to get the type of feedback you need when you need it. Construct your milestones with the types of questions you want your classmates and mentor to answer in mind.

Submission Instructions

Complete your assignment using JDF, then save your submission as a PDF. Assignments should be submitted to the corresponding assignment submission page in Canvas. You should submit a single PDF for this assignment. This PDF will be ported over to Peer Feedback for peer review by your classmates. If your assignment involves things (like videos, working software prototypes, etc.) that cannot be provided in PDF, you should provide them separately (through OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.) and submit a PDF that links to or otherwise describes how to access that material.

If you are working on your project on a team, only one person needs to submit each assignment. Make sure to coordinate who is submitting each, however.

Late work is not accepted without advanced agreement except in cases of medical or family emergencies. In the case of such an emergency, please contact the Dean of Students.

Grading Information

As with all assignments in this class, this assignment will be graded on an 11-point scale (0 to 10), in accordance with the grading policy outlined in the syllabus.

Resubmissions are not permitted on intermediate milestones; however, an intermediate milestone that receives a low grade may be replaced by the final project grade, capped at 9. After all, the goal of the intermediate milestones is to give you feedback to improve your final project; if your final project grade is high despite weak intermediate milestones, then they still accomplished their purpose. Therefore, a intermediate milestone grade below 9 will be replaced by the final project grade, up to a maximum grade of 9. Note however you are not eligible for this replacement if you skip submitting a milestone altogether, or if your effort on a milestone is gauged to be so low that it may as well have been skipped; this only applies to earnest attempts that receive low scores.

Peer Review

After submission, your assignment will be ported to Peer Feedback for review by your classmates. Grading is not the primary function of this peer review process; the primary function is simply to give you the opportunity to read and comment on your classmates’ ideas, and receive additional feedback on your own. All grades will come from the graders alone. See the course participation policy for full details about how points are awarded for completing peer reviews.

Final Project

At the end of the semester, you will submit your project. Your project submission should be a cataloged .zip file with the work you completed during the semester. Include in root of your .zip file a Catalog.pdf file that describes the contents of the archive. If you need to host some material online, you may; include links to that material in the Catalog.pdf file.

The contents of the archive will vary based on the nature of your project.

• If you chose the development track, you should submit the code for the tool. If the tool is runnable locally, you should include the executable. If your tool runs on a server, you should include a link to a working version of the tool, along with a script for testing the tool out. You should also submit any design documents, documentation, or anything else proposed in your project proposal.
• If you chose the research track, you should submit all the materials used to conduct the research: consent forms, interview scripts, surveys, etc. You should also submit the data itself that was gathered, as well as the results of any analysis and any research design documentation you assembled to prepare for the work.
• If you chose the content track, you should submit all the materials developed for the content, including scripts, lesson plans, images, outlines, etc. in addition to the final content. If your content lives on the internet, you can feel free to submit a link to the portion available online instead of also uploading it to Canvas.

If you have any doubt about what you should include in your submission, talk to your mentor before submitting.

Submission Instructions

Assignments should be submitted to the corresponding assignment submission page in Canvas. For this assignment, you should submit a single ZIP file. This submission will not be ported to peer review; the only people with access will be the instructional team, so you may include raw data, original code, etc.

If you are working on your project on a team, only one person needs to submit each assignment. Make sure to coordinate who is submitting each, however.

Late work is not accepted without advanced agreement except in cases of medical or family emergencies. In the case of such an emergency, please contact the Dean of Students.

Grading Information

As with all assignments in this class, this assignment will be graded on an 11-point scale (0 to 10), in accordance with the grading policy outlined in the syllabus. Final projects are not eligible for resubmission.

Project Paper

At the end of the semester, you will submit a paper on your project. The primary intention of this paper is to summarize your work for the semester in a clear, comprehensive fashion, and allow for an easy transition to submitting your project for publication if you so desire. You are not required to submit the paper to the conference or journal, of course, but the goal is to make it as straightforward as possible for you to experience the next step. We’ve included additional advice on how to write this paper in How To: Write an Academic Paper.

Because most conferences have maximum length requirements, so to does this: your paper must be a maximum of 12 pages in JDF. Note that references and appendices do not count against this length, and that while this is a maximum, we expect any good paper to also be at least 10 pages.

In writing your paper, we recommend selecting a conference or journal most relevant to your work and reviewing some of the papers published there in the past as well. This will help you understand the general priorities of that venue. Do they expect rigorous statistical analysis, or are they more design- and idea-oriented? Are they more interested in the design of the user interaction, or in the design of the tool under the hood? Do they prefer qualitative or quantitative methods? You can also use this review process to choose the venue most appropriate for your work.

The primary goal of this assignment is to set you up to take the next step with your project, whether that be submitting it for publication, seeking research funding to continue work, or soliciting investors to turn it into a start-up business. A secondary goal is to give you a more thorough medium to share your work; as with the project presentations, with your permission, we’ll add your paper to the course library for future students to view. We also encourage you to submit your work to SMARTech.

Submission Instructions

Complete your assignment using JDF, then save your submission as a PDF. Assignments should be submitted to the corresponding assignment submission page in Canvas. You should submit a single PDF for this assignment. This PDF will not be ported to Peer Feedback, but will be shared to the course assignment library and optionally (with your consent) with future semesters of the class.

If you are working on your project on a team, only one person needs to submit each assignment. Make sure to coordinate who is submitting each, however.

Late work is not accepted without advanced agreement except in cases of medical or family emergencies. In the case of such an emergency, please contact the Dean of Students.

Grading Information

As with all assignments in this class, this assignment will be graded on an 11-point scale (0 to 10), in accordance with the grading policy outlined in the syllabus. The final paper is not eligible for resubmission.

Project Presentation

In addition to the project itself, you’ll also put together a short (5 to 10 minutes, no longer) end-of-class presentation on your work in the course. This is the equivalent of the presentations we would do at the end of this course on-campus, where students and teams would take turns presenting their work to the rest of the class.

Your final presentation must be a video including narration. It generally should include a traditional presentation of some sort (including slides), although it may also include footage of you presenting your project in person; a screen capture with audio of you walking through and demonstrating your tool; a presentation showing off your analysis; a preview trailer for your course content; or any other kind of video content. We’ve included additional advice on how to give a good academic presentation in How To: Give an Academic Presentation.

The primary goal of this assignment is to show off what you’ve worked on to your classmates and mentor. If you consent to this, your project presentation will also be added to our course library so that future students in the class can see what you worked on and draw inspiration from it. Who knows: maybe a future team will even come to you asking if they can build on your work.

Submission Instructions

Complete your assignment using JDF, then save your submission as a PDF. Assignments should be submitted to the corresponding assignment submission page in Canvas. You should submit a single PDF for this assignment. This PDF will be ported over to Peer Feedback for peer review by your classmates. If your assignment involves things (like videos, working software prototypes, etc.) that cannot be provided in PDF, you should provide them separately (through OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.) and submit a PDF that links to or otherwise describes how to access that material.

If you are working on your project on a team, only one person needs to submit each assignment. Make sure to coordinate who is submitting each, however.

Late work is not accepted without advanced agreement except in cases of medical or family emergencies. In the case of such an emergency, please contact the Dean of Students.

Grading Information

As with all assignments in this class, this assignment will be graded on an 11-point scale (0 to 10), in accordance with the grading policy outlined in the syllabus. The final presentation is not eligible for resubmission.

Peer Review

After submission, your assignment will be ported to Peer Feedback for review by your classmates. Grading is not the primary function of this peer review process; the primary function is simply to give you the opportunity to read and comment on your classmates’ ideas, and receive additional feedback on your own. All grades will come from the graders alone. See the course participation policy for full details about how points are awarded for completing peer reviews.

Class Participation

Because of the collaborative and discussion-oriented nature of this class, participation is required. However, we understand that requiring participation has a tendency to incite inauthentic participation. Our goal with the participation policy is to give students enough ways to fulfill their participation credit in the way that is most natural and useful to them.

There are a number of different ways to earn participation points. Our goal is for the participation policy to be “invisible” to most students, in that organic participation is sufficient to fulfill these requirements. If you are active on the forum (e.g. posting high-quality topics or comments a couple times a week) and complete your peer review tasks, you shouldn’t ever need to worry about the participation policy. We expect that for the majority of students, you’ll earn your participation points without really trying.

The following are the ways you may earn participation credit. In some cases, some categories have a maximum number of points that can be earned: the intention is that everyone should complete peer reviews, and therefore it is nearly impossible to satisfy your participation grade without completing the majority of your assigned peer review tasks.

• 0.5 to 1.5 points: Provide a classmate a peer review. You will be assigned four peer reviews per assignment by default, and you may request to give up to five additional peer reviews. Reviews submitted within 4 days of the original assignment deadline are worth 1.5 points; within 7 days of the original assignment deadline are worth 1.0 points; and beyond 7 days are worth 0.5 points. Note that for all peer reviews, the peer review itself must be useful; simply filling out the form and writing a sentence or two isn’t sufficient to receive credit for peer reviews.
• 1.0 points: Complete one of the four course surveys (start-of-course, quarter-course, team selection, mid-course, and end-of-course), or other surveys indicated as eligible for participation points on the Quizzes page on Canvas.
• 0.2 to 3.0 points: Post a high-quality contribution on the forum (actual point value varies by post; make sure your Georgia Tech email is attached to your forum account). (Maximum 40 points.)
• 0.5 points: Complete a classmate’s request for project participation (e.g. complete a survey, beta test a tool, participate in an experiment, review some content).
• 1.0 points: Complete this page’s secret survey before week 2 to indicate you read the entire syllabus; to access it, click the word ‘secret’ earlier in this sentence.
• Additional points: Additional points may be awarded based on other things that come up (for example, completing a student spotlight or bringing in a guest for a Q&A).

Grading Information

Your number of participation points will be averaged out of 100 possible points and included as 15% of your final average. Earning 100 points or above will give 100% of the possible participation credit. To help you track your progress, we will post participation updates at least three times during the semester (around weeks 6, 12, and 17). Participation grades will be finalized on Friday of Week 17.

Generally, we encourage all students to earn roughly half their participation points by completing their assigned peer reviews within four days and completing the four class surveys. We recommend earning the remaining points by requesting additional peer reviews (up to five per assignment) and participating in your classmates’ surveys and studies (0.5 points per activity).

There is no mid-semester deadline on participation; you can take entire weeks off if necessary as long as you earn your points at some point during the semester. Most participation categories are reasonably objective (peer reviews, participation tokens, surveys, and library contributions), so you should be able to self-monitor between updates.

Course FAQ

The following are answers to frequently-asked questions from previous semesters of the course. You’re responsible for knowing any content on this page on the first day of the course; we also may add to this page as the semester goes along, but you aren’t responsible for knowing anything added after day 1.

I haven’t completed my foundational requirement. Can I still take this course?

You can. When we filmed the video advocating finishing your foundational requirement first, this course didn’t count toward it; that was changed about a year later.

That said, we still don’t recommend taking this course early in your OMSCS career. You’ll get a lot of ideas for what you want to work on while enrolled in your own classes, so waiting until later can help you brainstorm. But that’s just a recommendation: there is no requirement to wait.

Will I be penalized for failing to adhere to JDF on my submissions?

Yes and no. The primary purpose of JDF is standardize a document format in a way that lets us give useful expectations about assignment submission lengths that include both text and figures. So, there will be major deductions if you deviate from JDF in a way that breaks that purpose, such as deviations from the prescribed margin size, text size, typeface, and line spacing.

That said, the secondary purpose of JDF is to make your submissions look clean and professional, and to prepare you for the potential world of academic writing where you’re expected to adhere to document formats. So, if there are any cosmetic deviations from JDF that jump out immediately, they may be subject to small deductions. That would include things like: the formatting of section headers, paragraph spacing, and caption formatting.

We won’t be going through your document with a ruler ensuring that your spacing is exactly 1.26 instead of 1.25 or anything like that, though. If deviations can’t be identified during the normal course of viewing the document, you’ll be fine.

If I previously enrolled in this class and withdrew/failed, can I reuse my work?

If you already started this class and completed some of the assignments, it’s okay to resubmit them: we don’t consider that self-plagiarism. That said, we offer no guarantee that the assignment descriptions haven’t changed, so make sure that your submission meets the current criteria.

The syllabus states that the deadline is 11:59PM UTC-12 on Sundays, but Canvas reflects a later deadline. Which is correct?

We add some extra time in Canvas for two reasons: one to account for daylight savings shifts (since if we went strictly by 11:59PM UTC-12, it would mean deadlines would shift back and forth an hour by most of our time zones) and two to allow a grace period around the submission window in case Canvas is momentarily slow, your internet goes out right at the deadline, etc. Canvas’s deadline is always later than 11:59PM UTC-12, so as long as you aim for that deadline you’ll be fine; you will not be penalized as long as you submit before Canvas’s deadline, though.

Note that we do not encourage trying to submit right against the deadline; the reason we use UTC-12 as our time zone is to make deadline-tracking simpler. You know that as long as it’s before midnight wherever you are, you’re still eligible to submit.

I was added to this class from the waitlist, how do I get added to Canvas?

You should receive access within about 24 hours of enrolling in the course. If after 24 hours you still cannot access your course materials, please contact canvas@gatech.edu.

Is there a way to use JDF without using LaTex?

Georgia Tech students get free professional license to OverLeaf, an online browser based LaTeX editor: https://www.overleaf.com/edu/gatech

It works much like an online IDE/interpreter and you don’t need to install anything locally—you can just import the JDF LaTeX template and compile directly in the browser window and see the results. There is a GitHub integration that lets you push directly from the page and PDF export as well.

If you don’t want to use LaTeX, there is also a word template (.docx) and a Google Doc template here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xDYIomn9e9FxbIeFcsclSbXHTtHROD1j

You can export a Word doc to PDF in both MS Word and OpenOffice. Google Doc has export to PDF as well. Our recommendation if you don’t want to use LaTeX is that you make a copy of the template and enter your content directly.

Are forum posts considered course content that should be cited?

If someone points out a resource on Piazza you don’t need to cite that the forum was the place where you found out the resource exists. If someone’s forum post is actually the source itself, though, you’d be expected to cite that. Otherwise, you should generally cite videos, articles, journals, or other intellectual works.

Can I cite Wikipedia?

Generally speaking, citing Wikipedia for an academic paper is not a good idea, and Wikipedia even agrees. If you are citing work that was original to academic literature, you should reference the original work and use your own prose. After all, Wikipedia is a conglomeration of prose from others’ interpretations of the sources referenced for a given subject matter. it is an abstraction and summary of secondary sources. Those interpretations may be inaccurate and paraphrasing them again in your own words might be a complete deviation from the original work.

It is always a good idea to cite the original work, interpret it yourself, and use your own prose to describe it. If you’re citing Wikipedia because Wikipedia is quoting an original work, then you would still want to cite the original work, which is typically cited at the bottom of the Wikipedia article (and if it isn’t, it’s even less likely that you want to cite the claim as it appears on Wikipedia).

Wikipedia actually has good information on Academic Use.

Should I cite sources on [assignment]?

There are two answers to this. One: the expectation in this class is that you’ll cite sources on every written assignment.

Two: to gauge whether you should cite a particular source, there are a number of times when you should always cite a source, both in-line and in your references section. I’ll use this paper as an example.

First, most obviously, if you’re writing about a paper, you would cite it:

One paper in this field looked at the interactions between motivation and student demographics among TA applicants (Joyner 2017).

If you are directly quoting or near-paraphrase another source, you should always cite in-line. If you are directly quoting, you would put quotation marks around the quoted material as well. For example:

Joyner writes that “scaling expert feedback while preserving affordability is possible.” (Joyner 2017)

When you are providing the source for an objective fact that is not common knowledge and that you did not discover yourself, you would cite in-line as well. For example, you would cite the following statement, as it is not common knowledge nor discovered by you:

58% of online TAs cite intrinsic motivations for wanting to be teaching assistants (Joyner 2017).

You do not need to cite common knowledge. For example, you would not do this:

The earth goes around the sun (Copernicus 1514).

Finally, if you are summarizing or using as foundation the higher-level ideas, methods, or structure of another source, you would cite that. This is a little fuzzier to describe, but you’ll probably know when you’ll use it. These are times when you want the reader to know there is precedent for your ideas, methods, or structure. For example:

One key challenge with scaling online education is keeping access to expert feedback in larger class sizes (Joyner 2017).

Regardless, for all of these examples, you would have the full citation at the bottom of the paper:

Joyner, D. A. (2017). Scaling Expert Feedback: Two Case Studies. In Proceedings of the Fourth Annual ACM Conference on Learning at Scale. Cambridge, Massachusetts. ACM Press.

For more, check out Yale University’s excellent Warning: When You Must Cite.