The pain points of teaching computer science

Austin Henley:

We identified 6 categories of pain points:

  • Where are students struggling? It is a huge challenge for instructors to know when students are struggling. There is often not an effective feedback loop since instructors often rely on students to ask questions. However, two instructors expressed why this doesn’t work: “I can’t see where they get stuck and many don’t ask questions” and “students are doing lots and lots of things but I can’t process all they are doing”.
  • Answering student questions. In contrast, instructors and TAs are overwhelmed with responding to questions and problems. These questions are often last minute, repetitive in nature, and require technical troubleshooting. For example, “Why does Python no longer exist?”.
  • Limited TA support. You might be thinking that teaching assistants will just solve all these challenges! Sadly, most departments are understaffed with TAs, if they have any at all, despite growing enrollments. Instructors said that even when they have TAs, they sometimes require considerable time to manage and may not be reliable.
  • Grading and feedback. Nearly every instructor brought up the time and tedium of grading. In fact, one instructor told us “grading is probably the biggest burden of the courses”. Instructors also described how critical it is to design a rubric and feedback mechanism that is transparent and minimizes lawyering.
  • Course material preparation. Instructors lamented about the high cost of creating and maintain course materials, such as lectures, assignments, and quizzes. They often don’t update them over the years because they “just don’t have the resources”. The shift to online courses because of COVID-19 required significant upfront investment, though instructors complained they saw little engagement from students.
  • Administrative tasks. The grunt work of running a course includes managing social dynamics, accreditation tasks, enforcing academic honest policies, dealing with LMS issues, etc. Several instructors said they wished they could spend this time improving the course instead. Dealing with cheating was probably the least favorite task of all!