Editing Software Engineering (Fall 2025) (section)

=== Case discussion ===

The course relies heavily on the case study method: a particular form of instructor-mediated discussion. A standard "case" usually involves reading an example—an event and the surrounding context, or an organization or group. It is important to realize that '''I will not summarize case material in class and I will not cover it in lecture'''. I expect you all to have read it and we will jump in and start discussing it.

Cases ask students to put themselves in the positions of individuals facing difficult situations to tease out the tensions and forces at play in the case and to construct — through group discussion — the broader lessons and takeaways. Cases are a wonderful way to connect the sometimes abstract concepts taught in many academic courses to real examples of the type of ambiguous situations that you will likely encounter in your career. Generally speaking, there are multiple right answers in cases, and there are definitely poorly-prepared answers versus carefully-considered ones!

==== Cold Calling ====

Cases rely roughly on the [[:wikipedia:Socratic method|socratic method]] where instructors teaching cases cold call on students—i.e., instructors call on people ''without'' asking for volunteers first. I will be doing this in each class. Modern technical work environments include very similar situations: very few lectures (except for "all hands" type meetings and "training" activities), and a range of types of team meetings and group conversations, where you will be expected to be prepared and then participate in key moments.

Because I understand that cold calling can intimidate some students, I will be circulating a list of questions (labeled "Reading Note" in the syllabus) that we will discuss. These will be finalized at least 6 days in advance. I will only cold call to ask questions for which you have time to prepare your answers, or where the general format / structure has been announced in advance so that you can prepare. Although it is a very good idea to write out answers to these questions in advance, I will not be collecting these answers. You are welcome to work with other students to brainstorm possible answers. Although I may also ask spontaneous questions that I do not distribute ahead of time, I will never cold call when asking these questions.

I have written a computer program that will generate a random list of students each day and I will use this list to '''randomly''' cold call students in the class. To try to maintain participation balance, the program will try to ensure that everybody is cold called a similar number of times during the quarter. Although there is always some chance that you will called upon next, you will become less likely to be called upon relative to your classmates each time you are called upon.

==== Assessment for case study discussion ====

I have placed detailed information on case study-based discussion on [[User:Kaylea/Assessment#Case Discussion|the case discussion section of my assessment page]]. This describes both the rubrics I will use to assess your case discussion and how I will compute the final grades in the course.