Teaching Computer System Courses with an Online Large-Scale Method

ABSTRACT

Domain-Specific Architectures (DSAs) and hardware-software co-design are greatly emphasized in the CS community, which demands a significant number of participants with Computer System (CSys) capabilities and skills. Conventional CSys courses in a lecture-lab format are limited in physical resources and inherently difficult to cultivate talents at a large scale. Online teaching is a potential alternative to instantly enlarge the face-to-face class size. Unfortunately, simply putting the lecture contents in CSys courses online lacks 1) personal attention, 2) learner-instructor interactions, and 3) real-hardware experimental environments. To tackle the above challenges, we introduce a four phase online CSys course program and the related teaching methods for a cloud-based teaching platform. The four-phase course program included two basic/required stages and two advanced/optional stages to promote students' knowledge and skill level with appropriate personal attention. We studied if online interaction methods, such as in-class chat and one-on-one online grading interview, can strengthen the connections between teachers and students in both lectures and labs. We created a heterogeneous cloud platform to enable students nationwide to reliably conduct labs or projects on remote programmable hardware. We believe that our proposed course design methodology is beneficial to other CScourses in the post-COVID-19-era. © 2021 IEEE.