Lecture Network Protocols and Architectures (NPA) – Some Observations

The first three exercise sheets have been handed in for our ananual undergrad course on Internet networking basics (see the NPA course page for further details). Here are some observations:

• The problem of plagiarism arised again, although we stated very clearly that this has never been allowed and actions will be taken.
• It seems like students have realised that we find the original sources in the Internet from where a text has been copied easily. I see more and more solutions containing citations. Unfortunately, the amount of text to be copied and cited seems to be unclear. Supporting ones argumentation by citing relevant and high quality sources is a clear benefit for a solution and very highly regarded. However, I also found cases where an entire solution has been copied from the web and completely cited. However, a solution should have a own contribution which is significant. Only a single citation cannot be graded.
• We use a self-implemented plagiarism detector to check if students copy solutions from each other. We highly encourage group work, but we require each individual student to be able to explain the solution in his own words. This is self-check to verify if things have been completely understood and thus supposed to be helpful for the students. The results are extremely positive so far; we did not found any copied solution so far.
• Foreign students in the German exercise groups tend to produce more correct German than some of the native speakers.
• We migrated the course to the Moodle e-learning platform hosted campus wide by TU Berlin and used by most of the courses. It has a lot of promising features like anonymous polls, user friendly discussion boards, online grading and grade notification etc. However, the discussion board could be used a lot more frequently. Questions tend to be raised when it is already to late to answer them (e.g. problems with the assignment).
• We offer the course in two languages simultanously, which means we hold the lecture twice and proivde an English tutorial session. However, as in the last year we started a poll asking for feasible time slots to place the tutorials and prefered languages. It was suprising to see that English was much less required than in the last year.