Teaching Elements for Database Courses: An Analysis and Design
Nurul Aqma Salleh, Amy Hui-Lan Lim, Fang-Fang Chua · 2024
Database course is an essential course for Computing students. This course introduces database concepts and design which are needed to build any database system. When students fail to grasp fundamental concepts to database designs, they will likely fail the course. The student's failure can possibly be attributed to the adoption of inappropriate teaching elements by teaching instructors during teaching and learning. Teaching elements consists of teaching approaches, methods, strategies and techniques that are interconnected. Relevant sequence in teaching elements helps teaching instructors to build an effective and engaging learning environment that responds to their students’ learning process. This paper aims to elucidate distinctions among teaching elements and highlight the challenges faced by teaching instructors and students and review teaching elements that have been adopted by researchers for database courses. This paper concludes with the introduction of DBTutor to solve the challenges faced by teaching instructors and students during teaching and learning of database courses. DBTutor offers step-by-step guide in learning ERD topic in database course. It supports constructivist approach and problem-based solving strategy. DBTutor caters for multiple levels of users, by allowing teaching instructors to set questions of different difficulty levels. Students can either experience guided learning to ERD topic or attempt questions related to ERD topic by difficulty levels. Feedback is provided when the students have attempted the questions so that they can learn from their mistakes and improve their understanding of ERD topic in database course.