Joining the Teaching About Programming Languages Project

Contents:

What is involved?
What is expected to be shared?
Should solutions to tests and homeworks be available also?
Is any particular format required?

What is involved?

Any academic may join the teaching about programming languages project.

All you need to do is to send email to leavens@eecs.ucf.edu and indicate for each course the following information.

The level of the course (undergraduate or graduate),
The textbook that the course uses (or say that you don't use a textbook),
The URL for finding information about the course.

To make this easy to maintain, please send each course's URL wrapped as a piece of HTML that looks like the following.

  <LI>
  <A HREF="http://www.cs.your.univ/your-course.html">Your Name</A>

Make each URL refer to one specific course's information; that is, don't just send your home page. (But put a pointer back to your home page on the page about each course.)

Don't forget to keep us updated if your URLs change. To make that easier, it's best to send a URL that won't have to be changed every year (or every semester). Here are two ways to do this.

Send us the URL for a page that gives access to each edition of your course.
Send us a URL which will always describe the current (or last) edition of your course, and to have that point back to each previous semester's edition.

Choose the first way if you don't want to emphasize to your current edition's students that there are materials from previous editions available. I use the second way, but only maintain one version of lecture notes. Of course, if you change textbooks, you should start a new page for the new textbook.

What is expected to be shared?

You can share as much or as little as you like. But it would be most helpful if you would share course notes, homework problems, and test problems. Please either make them directly available from your URL, or indicate that others can write you for this material.

Should solutions to tests and homeworks be available also?

To avoid student cheating over the web, it may be best not to allow access to solutions from outside your college or university. (Thanks to Scott Smith for pointing out this problem.) There are several ways to do this it you want to give solutions out to students.

Pass out solutions in hardcopy form.
Post solutions to a local newsgroup for your class.
Make the solutions available in files that aren't accessible from the web.

None of this is enforced policy; the choice of what to do is up to you. (Personally, I provide solutions for test questions during an actual course, but will take the solutions off the web after the course is over. I only provide a few homework solutions on the computer during the semester.)

Is any particular format required?

No, there's no particular format that you have to follow. Just make the information you are making available to students available to other academics. The only thing required is a willingness to share.

Are there any formatting aids?

If you want a sample organizing page for a course, copy the individual course page blank, save it in HTML format, and then edit into it information about your course. If you wish to edit from a sample instead of a blank form, copy a sample of a graduate course or an undergraduate course taught by me. These have slightly different formats.

There is also a page you can fill in as an personal course information organizer for the courses you teach.

Gary T. Leavens