From 80 students to 170 in three weeks
By: Brian Aubrey Smith
Tags: College, Startup, Edtech, Education, Higher Education

How Northwestern NUCS 349: Machine Learning used Campuswire to move instruction online

Two months before the Spring 2020 quarter began at Northwestern, Florian Schiffers was planning to TA and co-instruct 80 students in NUCS 349: Machine Learning. By the end of the first week of classes, registration had ballooned to 110.

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PhD Student in Computational Photography, Computer Science Department, Northwestern University (expected 2023)

MSc in Physics 2018 and MSc (Hons) in Advanced Optical Technologies, 2018, FAU Erlangen, Germany

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Then coronavirus hit, and swaths of Northwestern classes were canceled.

With students looking for the best remaining classes that would still be taught online, 60 more students signed up for Machine Learning, and enrollment finally plateaued at 170.

“That was a lot — and unfortunately, it was too late to get an increase in Peer Mentors (Northwestern’s version of undergraduate TAs),” said Florian. “At the beginning of the pandemic, we were a little bit afraid, but we were fortunate to have this course really well designed and planned. I’d like to thank our colleagues Prof. Bryan Pardo, Dr. Prem Seetharaman, and many others who created this course at Northwestern and gave us an amazing base to work from.”

The course turned out to be so successful that by the end of the term, Florian was promoted to be a full instructor of NUCS 349 for the summer term at Northwestern.

“But as in any course, there’s just a lot of questions from students coming up in terms of debugging, in terms of how exactly the algorithms that we covered in lecture work, and that’s just all moved online to Campuswire,” said Florian. “I personally think that having an online space to answer questions made it a success. In a traditional format without Campuswire, I think the course would go bust.”

“In a traditional format without Campuswire, I think the course would go bust.”

Florian (and Professor Oliver Cossairt, the listed instructor for NUCS 349 — Florian was essentially the Head TA), faced the same challenge hundreds of thousands of college courses in the US faced this spring: moving a large, in-person lecture course that requires lots of face-to-face instructor and TA support to a fully online format in a matter of weeks with very little warning.

With many schools moving classes online for the foreseeable future and others moving to a hybrid in-person/online model of instruction, this is a challenge more and more instructors will face. They'll be expected to deliver online classes that meet the standards of the on-campus classes they taught before the Covid-19 pandemic.

"This is a big problem for US universities and schools around the world," said Florian. "Now, with coronavirus, everyone realizes that one actually can do a lot more remote/online than what we originally thought. Universities have to ask themselves, what's the difference between a large, well prepared online class and physically going to a school such as Northwestern? To me, what's different is that there's much more intimacy in an offline course because I can see and directly interact with my students.”

“However, thanks to Campuswire and other tools, even though we had 170 students, we still had a great connection with our students. There’s a good class feeling, and I can see my students interacting and being engaged in discussions. They feel that they get good support from us on a personal level if they have questions. In times where everything has moved to remote learning, I think that's what distinguishes us as university from massive online courses such as Coursera,” said Florian.

For Florian, moving content online or learning to deliver a video lecture was never a real issue, though he did have to receive special permission to visit campus to record better video lectures on department computers.

The challenge was always going to be finding a way to maintain the quality of office hours and the level of personal instruction that NUCS 349 had planned to provide: “Especially for me, the transition to online was quite smooth. I don’t think the course quality suffered from being an online course. Before the quarter started, we were a bit anxious because of how the course was run before where we offered lots of office hours. People would run into office hours, and they’d get all their questions answered,” said Florian.

Without the ability to host in-person office hours, Florian needed a way to make sure students could get the individual help they needed in a way that was scalable and personal.

“I think what’s made this more effective is Campuswire,” said Florian. “We now have about 1,000 questions asked already in six weeks this quarter so far in our Campuswire class. We have all those questions, but way more answers — almost every question gets two or three answers.” It helps that students can receive up to 10-% extra points on their final grade depending on how much they engage with classmates and content on Campuswire.

There were, of course, other options when Florian looked for ways to build the most engaging class possible — “Maybe we were lucky, for example, that I had never used Piazza to teach and hence were unbiased for other options. I used it one time as a student and found it rather confusing and uncomfortable to navigate,” he said. “Campuswire was just so easy from setting up to actually using it. I get a lot of feedback from students, and it’s the first time they’ve used Campuswire — they’re very happy about it.”

With that decision wrapped up, there was still the question of how to actually provide instruction and support the basic class infrastructure, with even the smallest glitch making for more work that would never be necessary in a traditional quarter: “We decided for our course to pre-record lectures instead of doing live video lectures. When my wifi connection drops during a live lecture and the screen freezes, it creates a very awkward situation. This is already very annoying in project meetings with few people attending, but really nothing we wanted to face with 170 students dependent on the lecturer. In any case, asynchronous lectures were really the only option, because we had students that went back to their families in all parts of the world.”

Fortunately, much of the learning in NUCS 349 was already designed to happen on the students’ own time. That part of the course could remain mostly untouched.

“We have eight coding homeworks with excellent structure using GIT, an auto grading system integrated in Canvas and a free response section. They’re actually very hard, and students have to work a lot. They probably spend twenty hours a week on those assignments. I know, it’s a lot, but I think it’s very rewarding. Students really develop a good grasp for the basics of Machine Learning and it forces you to learn how to efficiently prototype in Python,” said Florian.

Still, these forced changes in course structure and content delivery have left Northwestern instructors (and professors and TAs all over the world) with interesting questions to answer. What possibilities does this online instruction create for their courses? What limitations do now exist? How can they teach more effectively if they invest in planning for online teaching?

“[Without Campuswire] there would be no interaction between students, or at most in really small groups of 2 or 3,” said Florian. He added, “An offline class would be of course nicer because I would get immediate feedback from students, but on the other hand there’s so much good content on YouTube, which is really hard to compete with. I spend many hours preparing one pre-recorded online lecture, but it’s still not at the same level as what those YouTube Educators are providing. When I was a student, I enjoyed those additional resources online a lot. For each lecture we upload to canvas, we prepare a list of additional free online resources (blogs, websites, and videos) that we find useful to consume.

“But the nice thing is that the way we’ve currently set up our course, I think it could scale, which is important for a core course which has such a large student demand. As long as you get more TAs, I think we could go to 200, 300, 400 students, and I don’t think that the course quality would diminish,” said Florian.

And with Campuswire Live Sessions on the way to make delivering great live video lectures and office hours from anywhere at any time far easier, there’s more potential for world-class online instruction to continue.

“I’m definitely going to spread the word (about Campuswire),” said Florian. “It’s effortless to use, and I’ve already started spreading the word to professors that I know. We’re definitely going to use Campuswire for the Fall quarter for our other course ‘Introduction to Computational Photography,’ even though the enrollment of about 40 students is much lower… Even in an offline class, you really struggle to get feedback and see if students really understand the concept. You have those students who are afraid to raise their hands even if they don’t understand something. I’m looking forward to all the new features the Campuswire team is implementing now.”

As Florian, his fellow Northwestern instructors, and higher ed instructors across the world grapple with questions about the future of their teaching and of in-person courses on their respective campuses, courses like NUCS 349 provide a useful example of what’s possible in an online or hybrid teaching model with thoughtful prep, great instruction, and student buy-in.

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Below, you’ll find some direct feedback from some of Florian’s students — a huge thanks to Florian, Aldo, Yixin, and Nirvik for sharing their experiences this term!

The team here at Campuswire is committed to helping more instructors and students have incredible teaching and learning experiences, whether in-person, online, or some combination of the two.

If you’re interested in finding out more, getting to know the team, or sharing your thoughts, get in touch with us via email here: brian@campuswire.com or on our homepage here: campuswire.com.

-The Campuswire Team

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Aldo Aguilar, 2nd-year Computer Science major in the McCormick School of Engineering:

“Due to the pandemic, academic life has been really different this quarter, but the CS 349 course transitioning online was able to thrive. This has been in large part due to such an active course staff and students. Campuswire has been a great medium for the staff and students to communicate any questions, concerns, or problems that arise during the course. Having the ability to help solve other students problems has been the greatest benefit. By answering others questions you have the ability to really reinforce concepts, and learn from your peers. I will say I miss in person classes; however, if all of my classes were handled like CS 349 I don’t think my education would be hindered. Thank you Florian Schiffers, Ollie Cossairt, and Sushobhan Ghosh for providing such a great course, especially given the conditions!”

Nirvik Sinha, 1st-year PhD, Northwestern University Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program:

“This is the first time I have used an online group discussion forum like Campuswire for university coursework and it was a unique experience. While it’s true that physical attendance is vital to the success of most courses, I found that this course was ideally suited for Campuswire interaction among the students and the instructors. From thought provoking discussions to sharing of useful trivia, course updates and, most importantly, 24/7 accessibility to help with homework, Campuswire has been a seamless platform for it all. With a huge class size of 170 students, I’m sure that the logistics of managing these issues would have been way more complicated and laborious if the classes were held in person instead. As an added perk, the fun concept of engagement-based extra credits remarkably harness the electronic social networking and computer gaming habits of the modern generation for the constructive benefit of all! Campuswire has facilitated the continuity and persistent engagement of both the learners and teachers in this course, and I am confident that it will significantly advance the cause of technology-augmented smart classrooms.”

Yixin Zhou, Junior majoring in Math and MMSS at Northwestern University:

“I think Campuswire has helped me a ton this quarter — it is a well-designed platform for anyone to ask any questions about the course at any time. The website is straightforward and provides us with all kinds of options to make our questions and answers easier to read. Moreover, most of the time I can get feedback really quickly, which is extremely helpful when I am stuck on a bug in my code and not able to proceed without fixing it. By going through other students’ questions and trying to answer them (or at least think about them), I am also able to understand the materials much better than I would without Campuswire.”