Studio courses have become a key way in which professional skills, especially those involving collaboration and design, are taught in many fields, including computer science. Studios typically involve students working on a design problem, periodically presenting their work for critique, and critiquing the work of other students or groups. They support productive inquiry, as well as teamwork, communication, and reflection. However, although studios have become an important mode of instruction for on-campus students, they have not typically been offered for online or distance education students. In this paper we describe a studio critique process that is designed to work asynchronously, using short videos, and a tool that we have built to support it. We also describe qualitative observations from a pilot study, in which video-based critiques were used at a university whose students predominantly study online rather than on-campus.

In previous work we introduced a software studio course in which seventy students used continuous integration practices to collaborate on a common legacy code base. This enabled students to experience the issues of realistically sized software projects, and learn and apply appropriate techniques to overcome them, in a course without significant extra staffing. Although the course was broadly successful in its goals, it received a mixed response from students, and our paper noted several issues to overcome. This paper considers experimental changes to the course in light of our previous findings, and additional data from the official student surveys. Two iterations of the course and their respective results are compared. Whereas our previous paper addressed the feasibility of such a course, this paper considers how the student experience can be improved. The paper also considers how such a course can be adapted for more heterogeneous cohorts, such as the introduction of an unknown number of design and database students, or the introduction of online students.

Previous courses addressing the gap between student and professional programming practice have either isolated small groups' development in such a way that larger scale difficulties that motivate many professional practices do not arise, or have required significant additional staffing that would be expensive to provide in a large cohort core undergraduate software engineering course. We describe the first iteration of a course that enabled 73 students to work together to improve a large common legacy code base using professional practices and tools, staffed only by two lecturers and two undergraduate students employed as part-time tutors. The course relies on continuous integration and automated metrics, that coalesce frequently updated information in a manner that is visible to students and can be monitored by a small number of staff. The course is supported by a just-in-time teaching programme of thirty-two technical topics. We describe the constraints that determined the design of the course, and quantitative and qualitative data from the first iteration of the course.

One of the major causes of patient harm in hospital is poor communication. We are developing a video review and visualization platform to research and improve medics' communication skills. It intended for use by experimenters, as a deployable training tool for medics, and also for forensic review of communication. It supports pluggable analysis modules and visualizations for research teams, and configurable workflow for educators and hospital administrators.