Current Teaching

None.

Past Teaching

Dr. Roy taught the following courses a number of times.

CMPT 370: Intermediate Software Engineering

CMPT 470/816: Advanced Software Engineering

CMPT 856: Special Topics in Software Engineering

CMPT 846: Software Maintenance and Evolution

CMPT 898-08: Big Data Analytics in Software Engineering

Statement of Dr. Roy’s Philosophy of Teaching

One of the main benefits of continuing my career as an academic is the opportunity to interact with, educate, and guide the next generation of students, both in a research laboratory setting as a mentor, and in a classroom setting as an instructor.

From my teaching and tutoring experience, I have found teaching to be tremendously rewarding, fascinating and enjoyable. Teaching provides me the opportunity to share the knowledge that I acquire through my education, research, and industrial and academic careers. Classroom teaching allows me to prepare students for their future careers. It also allows me to reevaluate and broaden my own understanding of course materials, not only through my lecture preparations and delivery, but also from the unique perspectives of individual students. There is also a strong connection between classroom teaching and research supervision. A good researcher becomes a valuable resource to those students in the classroom who are motivated to pursue their own research careers. 

However, as a classroom teacher my aim is not just to educate and prepare, but also to motivate and inspire. I try hard to convey enthusiasm for the course topics. While my passion for teaching is the primary source of my enthusiasm, it also comes from recognition of the technical and societal implications of computer science topics. I try to maintain an active and discursive lecture style that increases student enthusiasm. The use of examples from real life, associating topics from the classroom with either current events (e.g., active research) or my professional experiences, helps show the students why the topics being covered are useful and important.

As a teacher I guide the students in the learning process. I noticed that most students are often unaware of their excellent intuitive grasps. I feel proud to see how motivated such students become when they can apply their intuition to the problems in the subject. My focus therefore is to create an environment where students feel free to explore the subject matter from various angles to develop ideas, definitions, models, applications and case studies. In particular, I always challenge the students to excel, foster collaborative discussion and group projects, and prompt individual critical thinking. It is also important that the students feel comfortable asking questions and providing feedback, as it helps them learn to articulate their thoughts and approaches, and in the same time, it helps me ascertain the changes I can incorporate to convey the course materials effectively.

Gaining students’ trust is very important to me. I do this by being well organized in the management of the course materials, preparing relevant and stimulating assignments and practice problems to aid understanding of the curriculum, setting realistic goals, assigning reasonable course workload, being available outside the classroom, maintaining consistency in grading where hard work is repaid with either a good grade or specific reasons for failure and an opportunity for redemption, identifying and addressing misunderstanding early, and establishing close rapport between myself and the students and between the students themselves. In this way, we build a strong circle of trust and my students do well in the course on their own right.I believe in the principles of encouraging students to challenge assumptions.

I also try to appeal to different learning styles. I thus took a semester long course SGS 901: Teaching and Learning in Higher Education in Winter 2009 at Queen’s University Kingston. This course further helped me to become a skilled, thoughtful, and confident teacher in higher education by fostering understanding and reflection about learning approaches and effective teaching in a university setting. I seriously consider students’ comments and then improve my teaching. I also seriously consider any suggestions I have in my peer teaching evaluations and improve my teaching.