Interacting with students and providing useful feedback on student performance are common objectives of instructors. However, instructors cannot always achieve these objectives because of the limited amount of time they have available. As an instructor of undergraduate computer science, my goal is to improve the student experience and teaching staff efficiency through the use of innovative technology. Students often struggle to grasp concepts and apply concepts to real-world scenarios. As an instructor, I teach fundamental concepts that students must apply to real-world situations through in-class activities that use modern, real-world technologies. For example, as a teaching assistant for an undergraduate software engineering course, I adapted the software industry practice of continuous integrations to the academic setting to help increase time available to help students, reduce time spent grading student assignments, and introduce students to a real-world industry practice. In addition, through structured student feedback reports, graders provide detailed feedback on student performance and allow students to gauge their own performance with the performance of the students in the course, as a whole. Overall, innovative use of technology can not only benefit the student experience, but can also improve teaching staff efficiency with the objective of spending more time and effort teaching, helping, and interacting with students to provide useful feedback.

Jason Tyler King is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University. Between 2009 and 2011, Jason served as a teaching assistant for undergraduate software engineering, undergraduate senior design capstone, and graduate software security courses. Since 2012, Jason has served as an instructor for an undergraduate Java programming course. Jason’s research focuses on developing and validating software security metrics for measuring the ability to perform forensics based on software user activity logs following a security or privacy breach. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science and M.S. in Computer Science, both from North Carolina State University.