Re: A dream?

[Martin Steffen <msteffen@ifi.uio.no>]

Hi,

I also do some teaching, different courses, in earlier times lab
courses/project work, recently a quite large bachelor level course.

Some of the courses (like the ones mentioned) require keeping track of
many, many details (from my side), including administrational,
organizational stuff, open issues web-pages, instructions, exercizes,
deadlines, exams, grading etc).

To keep all of that under control, I use org. Also managing the masses
of students, I get a bunch of student assistents and graders that needs
also to be organized and, including a ``lead student assistent'' that
helps orchestrating the other student assistents (and the students
taking the course). For those cordinating tasks, keeping an overview, 
use org (though special tasks require special other solutions. For
instance, slides are done in latex, and ultimately, information, like
exam results, have to be uploaded into official administrative tool).


Some of the student assistants actually also use org. Some master level
students (not just the assistents) in another course use org as well for
things like documentation. For courses that involve more extensive
course work I use git and seem students appreciate that github honors
org as format for simple documentation and readmes etc.

That being said, it seems that among students I have in my courses,
markdown is more popular for such simple web-compatible documentations.
Also most student assistants use md, only some do org.


For really collaborative course works (like multiple students track
stuff on a joint project or all students need to have the same
org-setup), I never imposed org as format. Org is too flexible, perhaps,
as soon as one get's into it, everyone has one's own specific style to
use various features and it's tricky to get comfortable with someone
else's style (and _forcing_ all of them to adhere to one predescribed
style probably takes away what makes org great and makes it cumbersome.)

As a general observation in courses I gave where documentation (of
features, interfaces, plans, etc) was required (but where I did not
necessarily specified the exact tool or format), the best groups were
those that wrote the documentation not for me (``gee, the lecturer wants
some documentation, it seems mandatory, let's write up something for him
who cares anyway'') but those that realized that for a successful
collaboration and project they themselves profit from cleanly stating
and writing things.

And sometimes a well-organized Todo.txt-file does the job, as long as
the people feel it's the best solution for them. Though an org-file sure
would be superior.

So I think the tricky part will be to convince some of them, that doing
org is not some weird idiosyncrasy of the teacher, but may actually be
helpful. But that's hard. If you are grown up with eclipse or whatever
for hacking, and first have to learn yourself emacs, to learn yourself
org, to ultimately see the light, that org is good for todo lists in the
course, the semester is sure over...


For projects where something like a overall and common issue-tracker for
bugs etc was required for _all_ I normally also did not rely on org (or
do-what-you want-as-long-as-its-clean-and-helpful-for-you), but on
specialized issue-trackers, in the last course, github-issues .


best, Martin



>>>>> "Marko" == Marko Schuetz-Schmuck <MarkoSchuetz@web.de> writes:

    Marko> Dear All,

    Marko> I teach some software engineering courses and in each of them
    Marko> students work on semester-long projects in teams. So far,
    Marko> have let them choose their own tools for all the tasks
    Marko> (implementation language, documentation tools,
    Marko> etc.). Personally, I have been using org-mode for what feels
    Marko> like forever. I was thinking that it would be nice to have
    Marko> students use org-mode also for their project. I can see it
    Marko> provide so many features that would benefit the projects:
    Marko> easy links for e.g. traceability, tagging of requirements for
    Marko> categorizing, responsible developer,..., of course todo
    Marko> lists, priorities, progress tracking, rendering to web page,
    Marko> PDF,...

    Marko> Since these are students from a very technical background I
    Marko> would hope they would be open to this.

    Marko> Anyway, does anyone have any experience related to this,
    Marko> maybe not specifically related to teaching, but software
    Marko> engineering projects (with documentation of domain,
    Marko> requirements, project approach, progress, references, source
    Marko> code, testing, design, etc. etc. etc.)?

    Marko> Best regards,

    Marko> Marko