Prof. Kristin Stephens-Martinez

 Generative AI (GenAI) exploded into the academic teaching landscape in 2021, and we have been coping ever since. I’ve been quietly thinking about it since then. I’ve shared resources via my podcast’s social media feeds ( Twitter/X , Facebook , Patreon , YouTube ) and my LinkedIn . But I have not written about it here on my blog nor created a podcast episode focusing on it. [ Also posted on medium. ] I haven’t posted anything about my personal opinion because I wanted to provide an informed one, and I prefer to do my thinking quietly. However, it’s been long enough, and the landscape keeps changing, so I think it’s worth saying something. By posting something, I hope to try to move beyond the initial “what do we do?” conversations. These conversations are the ones I feel like I keep having. And my response/conversation now is often about the same terms and frameworks that I’ve been saying for a while, which often signals to me that it’s time to write a blog post. So here are my cu...

 When it comes to anyone’s advice on how to run your own course, your “mileage may vary.” So, I thought it would be interesting to revisit my series on how I organize my teaching staff in my 200+ student class . The first post of that series is my most viewed post on Medium. I published that series during the second half of 2020, and times have changed since then (**cough** pandemic **cough**). In addition, I’ve moved on from that introductory computer science (CS1), and I primarily teach an elective data science (DS) course, which has a high variability in enrollment. In this post, I revisit that series from the perspective of what I still do versus do not between my CS1 and DS courses. [ Also posted on medium. ] Current Course’s Context Before I start my comparison, I need to go over how the context is different since it influenced many of the differences between the two courses. My DS class has a semester-long project and no labs/discussions. The class also uses Python, whi...

Time for a reflection on being the Hybrid Experience chair for SIGCSE TS 2023, a.k.a. round 2! This year was so much more manageable in terms of time commitment. I also helped introduce new processes and aspects to the symposium. In this post, I will start with the new processes and structures and then talk about the time commitment since the latter section references things from the former section. [Also posted on  medium .] New Processes and Structures The most significant difference is rather than being a committee of one, I was part of a committee of four! Dela Yazdansepas was my junior Hybrid Experience Co-Chair. Jacqueline Smith was the Authors’ Corner chair and Jessica Yauney was the Online Experience chair. Spreading both the workload and the mental load was extremely helpful and reduced so much of the stress. In addition, three other things. The first was to create a Trello Workspace for the committee. You all know I love my Trello boards ( class Trello blog post , pers...

I consistently teach over 200 students at a time. Therefore, I heavily rely on autograders and teaching assistants (TAs) to grade everything. I use and love Gradescope. But, like all interfaces, Gradescope is limited in the affordances of how to use it. So I thought I’d write a blog post on the logistics side of how I use Gradescope to manage my grading. This post will cover a mix of small and big effort things I do to handle the logistics of grading homeworks and exams. [Also posted on  medium .] The “Prof. Double Check” rubric For those unfamiliar with Gradescope, it enables hand grading via rubric items that TAs can check off to mark student work. Rubrics help make grading more consistent, and Gradescope automatically handles live rubric updates and multiple TAs grading the same problem. In turn, Gradescope shows summary statistics on these rubrics and allows filtering by a rubric. I take advantage of this feature by adding at the bottom a rubric called “Prof. Double Check,...

 Last semester I started a practice to help me better connect with my teaching assistants (TAs). It worked well enough that I decided to continue it this semester. This practice, I feel, helps me get to know my TAs and helps me notice them as themselves rather than just a part of my teaching staff, for lack of a better way to describe it. This practice takes me 15 minutes a week across my 12 undergrad and grad TAs, so your mileage may vary on how long it takes you. For those with a very different number of TAs, I’d say this scales linearly, but not by adding one minute each week for each TA, see below for details. [Also posted on  medium .] What I do The short answer is I checkin on each TA twice a semester via Slack. It’s a direct message with a mix of general how are things and specific stuff happening at the moment. I also use this weekly time to reflect on all the TAs and note anything I’d like to remember for future reference. The notes are usually good, like how one...

I thought I’d go back to the SIGCSE TS theme for this blog post, but with one of my conference reflections. Though it’s not really one of my classic reflections since this was my first hybrid conference ever, and I was also creating the hybrid experience! I also attended the hybrid Learning@Scale and ICER conferences as an online attendee. Hopefully, I’ll find time to write reflections for those too. But first, SIGCSE TS 2022 because it’s better late than never! [Also posted on  medium .] What Happened Responsibility mainly drove the sessions I attended rather than interest. During the pre-symposium on Wednesday, I attended an all-morning Peer Teaching Summit that I helped organize. The focus is on facilitating discussion among college teachers about undergrad teaching assistants (UTAs). We also had UTAs present to contribute. During the symposium, I was a panelist on “Technology we can’t live without! (Covid-19 edition).” I attended one special session as an attendee just out of ...

I’m going to take a break from my hybrid conference series and write a post about my latest attempt at handling late work. So far, this system is my favorite, and I plan to reuse it almost unchanged this coming semester. I created it to balance the needs of my students, my teaching staff, and myself. The single-line explanation for my late system is I used tokens to empower my students to decide when they’ll turn in late work. But the devil is in the details, and I put a lot of thought into how and why I set things up the way I did. This post will outline the system itself, what the students thought of it, what I thought of it, and my plans on what to do next time. [Also posted on  medium .] The Late Submission Token System This policy applied to the homeworks that were part of the course’s ten modules. They were released as soon as we had them ready and a minimum of one week before they were due. Each homework had a one-week late window. We aimed to grade and return the home...

 The Authors’ Corner was the brainchild of a SIGCSE TS 2022’s chairs meeting. By the time we articulated the idea, I didn’t know who contributed what to create it. The event aimed to enable authors to answer questions about their work online. The Authors’ Corner was primarily for online attendees and authors. [Also posted on  medium .] However, once we decided to do it, I said it had to be something where no one was left alone in a video call, “sitting in a black void,” waiting for someone to appear. The in-person equivalent event was presenters at posters or tables; if someone was interested in the project, they could talk to the presenter. However, the online versions of this I’ve participated in as a presenter and attendee put presenters in a video call alone, where they sat in a “black hole,” hoping someone would come and talk to them. Such events often make presenters feel insignificant and “unpopular” if no one comes, or maybe that’s just me. I refused to put our present...

Video chat side channel in a remote class (or an experiment not good enough to keep) Talking about failure is hard. Talking about an experiment that didn’t completely fail but didn’t wholly succeed, is something that I could easily “sweep under the rug.” However, I think it’s important to share the good, the bad, and the ugly. It shows we are human and no one is perfect. Moreover, for this particular experiment, I could see myself rationalizing trying again, and I want to make sure I remember the lessons I learned. In Spring 2021, when we were teaching our CS2 class fully remote due to covid-19, I had a crazy idea. What if we gave students a second video chat outside the lecture Zoom meeting? What if we used this video side channel to simulate the “talk to your neighbor” practice that I used a lot in my lecture teaching? It did not go as well as I had imagined, and this blog post is a reflection on why we did it, how things went, and what we did when things weren’t working. [Also p...

This is also posted on medium . This is the last post of a 5 blog post series on how I organize the teaching staff for my 200+ student class. This post discusses how I run my weekly meeting with my head staff. The head staff is a subgroup of my teaching staff that helps me organize all the others. In this post, I discuss how I split the meeting into two phases to allow some head staff to leave when talking about topics that are not relevant to their responsibilities. I also include a discussion on what I do between meetings because that is just as important as what happens during. The other posts in this series are as follows (I’ll update with links as I post): Overview Teaching staff roles How I communicate with my teaching staff How I track the to-do list How I run the head staff meetings (You are here) Terminology Rather than require you to read my teaching staff roles post , here is a quick refresher: Teaching Associate (TA+)  — A full-time department staff member (not a student) a...