Teaching Highlights
- The Partially Flipped Class Room: I have taught Network-based application development (ITIS 4166/5166) an undergraduate/graduate combined course almost every semester since 2003. This course has evolved from a concept course in 2003 with an enrollment of 25 students to a heavily programming oriented course with an enrollment of 80-90 students across two sections with heavy undergraduate involvement. The assignment definitions were structured to help students develop their critical thinking, problem solving and application design skills in addition to improving their ability to develop software for a large application. I have introduced more hands-on interactive sections during the lecture. The TA goes over the implementation of the techniques I lectured about every other class meeting; I also had students with the best homework solutions present their solution in class. Finally, students with prior experience on topics relevant but not covered in class such as JQuery were encouraged to present on the topics in class. There were several extra credit options to challenge the students who are doing well in the class while not penalizing those who are still struggling with basic java and object oriented skills. The students were given several helpful hints to make progress in their assignments. This is a potentially transformative effort to find the balance between a course that requires significant in-class lecture time as well as lab time.
- PI and Director of CCI’s DOE-funded 2013-2016 GAANN Fellowship program (Fall 2013 – July 2014 when I left UNCC) to increase number of qualified researchers and teachers in computing. Lead efforts to recruit, develop, graduate, and place six students with superior academic abilities into the UNC Charlotte PhD in Computing and Information Systems (CIS) program and ultimately into academic careers, Fall 2013 onwards. The fellowship website is gaann.uncc.edu. As of Fall 2014, seven CIS Ph.D. students are part of the program.
- 8 hour start-up: In Fall 2010, I organized the second installment of the 8-hour start-up, a web-based application design and programming competition for undergraduate and graduate students this Fall with a focus on a mash-up application that leverages existing API (http://www.sis.uncc.edu/~anraja/8Hr09). Over 15 students at the graduate-level and undergraduate-level participated. Three other faculty from the department as well judges from industry helped make this a successful event. The competition was well received by the students and they appreciated the lessons on teamwork and feedback from both faculty and industry affiliate judges.
- Principal PI and Organizer of AAMAS 2013 First CRA-W/CDC Discipline-specific Mentoring Workshop. This was a week long workshop to expose 12 undergraduate students under-represented groups in computing to cutting edge research in agents and multiagent systems; attend technical talks by current doctoral students that would motivate other participants to think and get excited about research; talk about career paths in multiagent systems and the skills the students should acquire to be successful researchers. This workshop was rated as very beneficial by the attendees.
- Undergraduate and Graduate Mentoring: Supervised ten undergraduates including five senior projects and two NSF-funded REU students. Received the CCI 2006 Essam El-Kwae Student-Faculty research award that recognizes productive undergraduate mentoring efforts and joint publications. Supervised eight MS students (two as chair) and six Ph.D.-level students (3 as chair, 1 graduate). One undergraduate advisees, George Alexander was the 2006 TIAA-CREF fellowship recipient and another is the first author of a best paper award mentioned above. One of my graduate students, Mohammad Hasan, won the Chair’s prize at the 2013 CCI Ph.D. student Poster competition.
- Member of UNCC’s CCI Center for Education Innovation (http://cei.uncc.edu/)
