I’m working on developing a flipped/inverted version of a course I’ve
been
teaching for two years based on Ruby on Rails. The course is scheduled
to
begin late in August, but I’m on sabbatical this semester, so I’ve been
able to put a decent amount of work into the course before the semester
begins. I’d like to announce that I’ve completed the first section of
the
course with videos, in-class group assignments, and individual coding
assignments. You can find the course site at
https://cms.cse.taylor.edu/moodle_v2.5.1/course/view.php?id=59
and access it as a guest user. I’m also in the process of putting up
the
videos made on YouTube for wider distribution. You can find just my
videos
at
I would love any feedback that you have concerning corrections that I
should make before the course begins in the fall.
A little context to help you gauge where the students are coming from in
the course: The students have taken several programming courses in
Python
or C++ and a previous web development course that focused on learning
HTML,
CSS, and Javascript sufficient that they could use a framework like
jQuery
to communicate with a REST-ful API. Most have also taken a course that
covered basic SQL. They have not done any server-side programming
unless
it was on their own. The purpose of the course is to teach them how to
develop applications in a multi-tier environment, so the course covers a
web framework (i.e., Rails) and some database concepts necessary to run
in
such an environment. Additionally, I try to cover important topics like
security, TDD, git, etc. when they naturally apply to the course
content.
In case you visit the site and wonder, “What about topic X, I can’t
believe
you’re not talking about it at all,” let me give you insight into some
of
the next topics that are under development:
- Introduction to Bootstrap
- Introduction to SASS
- The asset pipeline (especially minification and compression)
- Database normalization
- ERDs
- Developing a resource with a 1:N relationship to another resource
- Developing a resource with an M:N relationship with another
resource