I’m working on developing a flipped/inverted version of a course I’ve been teaching for two years based on Ruby on Rails. The course is scheduled to begin late in August, but I’m on sabbatical this semester, so I’ve been able to put a decent amount of work into the course before the semester begins. I’d like to announce that I’ve completed the first section of the course with videos, in-class group assignments, and individual coding assignments. You can find the course site at
https://cms.cse.taylor.edu/moodle_v2.5.1/course/view.php?id=59
and access it as a guest user. I’m also in the process of putting up the videos made on YouTube for wider distribution. You can find just my videos at
https://www.youtube.com/user/JonathanGeisler/videos
I would love any feedback that you have concerning corrections that I should make before the course begins in the fall.
A little context to help you gauge where the students are coming from in the course: The students have taken several programming courses in Python or C++ and a previous web development course that focused on learning HTML, CSS, and Javascript sufficient that they could use a framework like jQuery to communicate with a REST-ful API. Most have also taken a course that covered basic SQL. They have not done any server-side programming unless it was on their own. The purpose of the course is to teach them how to develop applications in a multi-tier environment, so the course covers a web framework (i.e., Rails) and some database concepts necessary to run in such an environment. Additionally, I try to cover important topics like security, TDD, git, etc. when they naturally apply to the course content.
In case you visit the site and wonder, “What about topic X, I can’t believe you’re not talking about it at all,” let me give you insight into some of the next topics that are under development:
- Introduction to Bootstrap
- Introduction to SASS
- The asset pipeline (especially minification and compression)
- Database normalization
- ERDs
- Developing a resource with a 1:N relationship to another resource
- Developing a resource with an M:N relationship with another resource
