Automation of it faculty work from the teaching staff perspective

Automation of teaching tasks is a contemporary approach to decrease the high workload of the instructors who teach courses with a large number of students. To identify the processes that could be automated in information technology courses, eight one-hour mini-group interviews were conducted with 17 instructors responsible for teaching these courses at the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Tartu. The collected ideas covered a wide range of topics related to different aspects of course organization and teaching. The analysis of the ideas gathered from the interviews was conducted in two phases. In the first, qualitative, phase of the research, the proposed ideas were classified for the second phase – evaluation of their importance (ideas related to the automated assessment and feedback system were not included in the latter phase, because they require separate research). The second phase of the study was quantitative: 15 topics were prioritized based on their importance for the faculty and for the instructors themselves according to the evaluations expressed by 13 instructors. The most important topic from both the self and faculty perspective was the safe environment for online-exams. It is possible that the pandemic of coronavirus disease would have increased the interest in the topic even more due to the fact that the whole teaching process was moved to an online environment at the University of Tartu. The central database for tasks, automated tests and feedback has the second highest priority which shows there is surely room for improvement. Interestingly, attendance checking is still also a major issue. It seems that finding relevant examples for different topics is not an issue for the teaching staff as it received one of the lowest scores. Topics related to students such as the student’s assistant, virtual teaching assistant, and virtual contract with the student were also rated lower than other topics. It seems that the faculty’s teaching staff does not see a need for automating the student’s assistance. We suggest that other institutions might also benefit from the findings of this survey and from the description of the process. The results contribute to the implementation of automation tools for instructors for everyday use in teaching practice.