For Instructors
Our Commitments
After 8 years' experimenting with the SEED labs, we have not only
matured the design of these labs, we have also matured the
process of helping others (instructors and students) use these SEED labs.
We hope more and more instructors and students can benefit from
the SEED project.
We have committed to help those who would like to or are planning to
adopt our labs in their classes. To fulfill our commitment,
we plan to provide the following supports:
- Instructor Manual. For most of the labs, we have a lab manual
that are only for instructors. These manuals come from
students' reports; they describe in details how each of the tasks in the labs
are carried out. The manuals can help instructors prepare their
labs. To prevent these manuals from falling
into students' hands, the instructor manuals will only be provided
to instructors. To get a copy of the manuals, please send an email to
wedu@syr.edu with your physical mail address, and we
will send a hardcopy of the manuals to you.
- RA Support. Our budget allows us to hire a Research Assistant
to help you prepare your labs. If you have any question while preparing
the labs, feel free to send an email to wedu@syr.edu. We will
answer your questions in a timely fashion.
If you have a TA who can help you prepare the labs, our RA can work with
your TA to ensure that your TA know how to carry out the tasks in
the labs. This has been working quite well in the past.
- Feedbacks. To help us improve the labs, we really appreciate
the feedbacks from you. In particular, we would like to know how you
think about these labs, how students think about the labs,
what problems you or your students have encountered while working on the labs,
where do you think we can improve, and so on. Feedbacks do not need
to be formal; they can be your impression or the words
from students.
Adoption Guidelines
Over the last few years, we have worked with a number of instructors who
adopted our labs in their classes. Based on the experience, we
have summarized a list of guidelines to help you decide whether
to adopt our labs or not, how to adopt our labs, what labs to
adopt, etc.
Details of the guidelines are described in a pdf document
titled
"Guidelines: Which SEED Labs Should I Use?"
Lab Setup
Although each SEED lab is called a "lab", none of our SEED labs
needs a physical lab space for any of the lab exercises.
Students can work on the labs using their personal computers.
Details of the environment setup are described in a pdf document
titled
"Environment Setup for SEED Labs".
We have been using Ubuntu Linux as the basis of most of SEED labs.
For several labs, we have to install some specific software to
set up the lab environment. If you do not want to go through
the installation process, the easiest way is to send us an email,
and we can let you download our pre-built Ubuntu virtual machine for
VMware (the image is too large to be put online).
Here is the
"User Manual of the Pre-built Ubuntu 9 Virutal Machine".