Blog : Course Guide

This is a course that pushes you to explore the world outside the boundaries of the course. You test a real-world application writing and evaluating bugs, perhaps contributing to the test plan or other troubleshooting. This gives you an opportunity to build a reputation with people who might help your career later, in many other ways.

There are different opportunities for software testers to interact with people with similar interests:

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In each course, you will be asked to review and provide feedback on assignments written by other students. The instructors will monitor your comments and will assign grades. Peer-to-peer feedback is very important in these courses:

• It gives you a way to switch roles from creator to evaluator, which will help you more objectively evaluate your own work.
• It can help you see opportunities to improve your work, by seeing patterns of problems in the work of other students.
• It provides feedback to students from several sources, rather than from one instructor. Peer feedback is more credible to some students than instructor feedback.
• Most important, careful evaluation of the questions and comments of other students gives you another type of opportunity to step back from your work and reflect on what the course is teaching.

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Student work in each of the BBST courses will be reviewed and evaluated by the instructors as well as peer-reviewed by other students.

Each course will include several assessments, quizzes, assignments, and an exam. Each assessment has a primary objective. Here are typical examples of what we might be trying to achieve with a specific assignment:

• evaluate the student’s performance and make a decision if she/he has successfully completed the course or not yet.
• help the student identify strengths and gaps in knowledge and skill
• give the student practice working through a specific type of problem or task
• help the instructor understand where the course is failing to motivate the students or to help them learn
• motivate the students to spend a little more time, effort, or attention on favored tasks

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Online students attend and participate in classes by logging in to the course web site and participating in the discussions. To succeed online, it is essential that you:

• log in to the course several times a week;
• read and respond to course-related emails on time;
• participate in the course discussions as outlined by your instructor;
• complete all assigned work on time; and
• ask for help if and when you need it.

Active participation is particularly important in the BBST courses because we have set them up to last three weeks each. If you fall significantly behind, you miss the course.

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