Making my work easier- more efficient

As Mark is fond of saying - Work Smarter, not harder.

Since your passing comments last night I have been thinking about it a lot, but what I come down to is the fact that over the years I have been working on making the teaching of technical subjects like Advanced Network Systems easier. You might remember that a year or two ago there was a big fuss from the students when I didn't do lectures, but just posted the slides appropriate to the lab.

Over the years I have reduced the number of lectures that I do from weekly to bi-weekly, But of course I have been bringing in guest lecturers, typically about 6/year. This means that the lectures dropped from 20 to 10, and are back up to about 16. In order to add value to this I extend the invitation to attend these to academics in the Business School and DEC. That has been a non-starter, in that I have only seen perhaps half a dozen academics in total over the years at these guest lectures.

At the last away day CB agreed to assign a specific time each week for academics to talk about their work or bring in guest lecturers. This never happened. What a good way of spreading knowledge that would have been.

Also the labs have been reduced from 2 hours/week to 2 hours/fortnight, with better documentation of the procedure to help make them easier. It still needs someone to assist in talking through the work and the configuration of the equipment, which has now fallen on to the academic as the demonstrators have been eliminated.

I have been thinking how I could apply the academic version of IT guru as a simulation tool before the labs, but that is an extra level of complexity, not a quick win. I think that if the simulation were to replace the actual lab, the student experience and learning would be reduced.

Having taught on a similar course in DEC, and seen how the labs have been reduced to a trivial task, and the loss of interest from the students, I do not want to go that route.

Ideally I suppose, it would be to give them access to IT Guru, create a bunch of exercises, and post some questions to be answered and a discussion forum on Blackboard, and never see them. Of course, In the networks environment this is not a static exercise as the rate of change of technology would require the reworking of some of the work every year. Are you aware of how far ANS has come in the years that I have been teaching it? How much work actually goes in to staying current so that our students are leaving with insights in to the current state of business technology and not a a snapshot of 10 years ago?

I think that Advanced Database Systems also needs the actual technical work to stimulate and seal the learning. As far as I know there isn't a database simulator, though each student could have their own environment. Here there are copies of DB2, Oracle, MySQL that the students could obtain for free to work with, but it still needs an Academic to guide the learning and advise of efficient methods of use.

I would appreciate a discussion to help me generate ideas of how to do it. I'll even buy the coffee.