MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD


DATE:		January 12, 2016

Prepared by:	Dr. David A. Gaitros
		Chair, Undergraduate Curriculum Committee 
		Department of Computer Science

RE:		ABET Course Reports for COP4710		

Course number: COP4710		
Course name:   Database Systems   
Course review committee members: Chris Lacher, Peixiang Zhao, Dan Schwartz  
Report submitted date: 12/11/2015 

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1. Were there any problems with the coruse last year? If Yes, describe the problems. 
 There was some concern about the organization of the class and whether the students were being
prepared to be able to produce database applications using scripting languages and relational
database systems.   
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2. Course committee recommendations to the current/future instructors.

The whole curriculum worked very well throughout the semester, and we have got very positive 
feedback from the students. Some important improvement has been made in this class: 
1. We proactively set up three to four surveys in the class, which are evenly distributed 
throughout this semester. In the surveys, we ask for the feedback from students, 
including the merits and disadvantages of this course. We collect the criticism and 
suggestions from the students and adaptively adjust the teaching behavior and materials 
to meet their needs. I think this is an important way to communicate with the students and 
share the ideas with them. It can also help improve the teaching effectiveness for this class. 
2. We set up a semester-long programming project involving extensive programming for an online 
based database application. Students need learn how to do Web-based programming and use 
back-end relational databases to support information repository, retrieval, and management. 
In this semester, we provide more online help to the students to familiarize them on the 
LAMP/WAMP platforms. We include a series of tutorials on PHP+MySQL programming in the class, 
and also provide a lot of very useful resource if they want to adopt other programming languages. 
3. We include in-class demos for SQL programming and share all database setup and SQL code with 
the students, which have proven to be extremely useful when students are conducting their 
programming projects. Generally speaking, students are very satisfied with the current setting 
of this course and in their feedback, they show strong interest in learning the database 
materials and they like the programming project very much.
The committee suggests these continue to be done in future classes. 

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3. Course committee recommendations to department/UCC regarding this course.

NA.