I like to do flipped classes with H5P plugins on Moodle. When I do so I set up "from" and "to" time restrictions to ensure that the homework is done during the class period. It doesn't matter to me if the students are in the classroom or not. What's important is that they're doing homework […]
If you're an EECS instructor here at York University, you can obtain a lists of students that are currently in your course, text files that are easy to download and review. They're outside of eClass and found in one of three ways: To access the lists on an EECS server like indigo1, use an SFTP […]
Piracy of professor-authored teaching material is rampant. I've written about it before. Students and teaching staff have uploaded my material to Course Hero and I'm not happy about it. In spite of requesting that they don't do it, they still do it. I write explicit footnotes in my documents saying not to do it, and […]
A few of my colleagues here at YorkU have expressed an interest in using Python with Virtual Programming Lab on our Moodle-based eClass Learning Management System. I don't have a lot of Python experience, having only really used it for some data processing and toy embedded system demonstrations in the past. So I adapted the […]
This is the third post in the series on evaluating student assignments in VPL with C and unit testing. We're targeting using VPL on Moodle / eClass. Specifically, the bash scripts are based on the fantastic work of Smith College professor emeritus, Dr. Dominique Thiébaut. He wrote about his VPL work here and while his […]
As with the Matlab and Java versions of this, I'm working on creating a set of C language exercises that can be assigned to students in an automated way, like on eClass (Moodle) using Virtual Programming Lab or the "lab test mode" that we use in the EECS department at York University. Here, I'm focusing […]
One of my teaching assistants uploaded my instructional material to Course Hero without my permission. It didn't take me long to figure out who it was. I only had a handful of TAs and the TA used their university user ID as their Course Hero login. When I confronted the TA about it, the TA […]
The VPL server in the YorkU EECS department was recently updated (2022/23). This had a small impact on existing VPL scripts. With Java, any script that uses JUnit needs to have its vpl_run.sh and vpl_evaluate.sh scripts updated. Here, I have the run script do the JUnit test directly. The evaluate script does JUnit through the […]
Virtual Programming Lab can be a little intimidating to use, but once you get the swing of things, it's pretty good. So, let's get you started with the simplest possible working example. We assume that: you have Moodle working at your institution someone has installed VPL on Moodle and you don't need or have access […]
The Teaching in Focus (TiF) conference at York was held online in 2021 due to the pandemic. Here's a list of the abstracts. My "Welcome to my Classroom" talk was based on the work I did in EECS 1011, 1021 and 2021: Giving students rapid and accurate feedback is vital. We can do so with […]