Improving the Efficiency of Database-System Teaching

The education industry has a very poor record of productivity gains. In this brief article, I outline some of the ways the teaching of a college course in database systems could be made more e cient, and sta time used more productively. These ideas carry over to other programmingoriented courses, and many of them apply to any academic subject whatsoever. After proposing a number of things that could be done, I concentrate here on a system under development, called OTC On-line Testing Center, and on its methodology of root questions." These questions encourage students to do homework of the long-answer type, yet we can have their work checked and graded automatically by a simple multiple-choice-question grader. OTC also o ers some improvement in the way we handle SQL homework, and could be used with other languages as well.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: SIGMOD
• Authors: Jeffrey D. Ullman
• Keywords: Database, OTC On-line Testing, Questions Encourage Students, SIGMOD 2003, Simple Multiple-choice-question Grader