Tips and Tricks for teaching students using Oracle Academy and the Cloud

Oracle Academy Tech Chat

In this episode Tyra Peirce speaks with Dr. Gisella Bassani Assistant Teaching Professor of Information Systems at University of Colorado Denver about her use of the Oracle Academy cloud program in her classroom, and some of the things she does to get her students started using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. ---------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript:

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Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started. Welcome to Oracle Academy Tech Chat, where we discuss how Oracle Academy helps prepare our next generation's workforce.

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I'm your host here appears in this episode. I'm joined by Dr. Gisella Bassani, assistant teaching professor of information systems at University of Colorado, Denver, about her use of the Oracle Academy Cloud program in her classroom and some of the things she does to get her students started using Oracle Cloud infrastructure. Welcome, Dr. Barzani Thank you so much for having me, Tyra.

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To start off, can you please give me a bit about your background and the class you teach? I am a information systems professional. I have been working in information systems for over 30 years. And much of the time I was implementing business intelligence systems, working on databases and reporting. About 13 years ago, I decided to switch to academia so that I could pass on my knowledge to the younger generation.

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And I've been teaching at universities ever since. Both at BYU and now at Sea Denver. I teach multiple classes, both for graduate and undergraduate. My main focus is databases. Although I do teach everything from business classes and intro to business classes all the way to Excel and Tableau. But my happiness and the thing that I enjoy doing the most is teaching database classes.

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How does the cloud environment make it easier for your database students? Did the cloud makes it easier for my database students for multiple reasons. The main one is that many of my students do not have a lot of space on their laptops to run the programs. Many of their laptops barely have enough space for the things that they need to have for other classes.

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So this allows them to have a big database and use the software and without any problems. The second reason is because they can use both PC and MAC and different operating systems. So Linux, iOS and Windows all work with the database being in the cloud, and that makes life much, much easier. They also each have their own databases to work with, and I don't have to create an environment in my job at my school to host all of these databases.

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So it makes it a lot easier for me, also for maintenance, not just for the students. On the flip side, are there things that make it a bit trickier for your students? Yeah. So there are a couple of things that do create some trickiness. First of all, the cloud database starts every seven days that you are not using it.

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So if they go on a break or for some reason they're not focused on your class for about a week and then come back, they have to go in to the Oracle Cloud and actually physically restart the database rather than from the sequel developer on their computer. So that is a bit tricky. They get very flustered with that.

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You have to have instructions for them to get through that. Additionally, every semester there seems to be one or two students that once they restart their database, the database does not fully restart correctly. So what happens is that it starts and then every 10 minutes it goes back to the services being stopped and they cannot restart it and keep it on for a long time.

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So this seems to be an issue that has not yet found a resolution and it could be linked to creating a database is always free. So you may want to have them delete the database and recreate it, and that might help the student if they do it. Just slightly different with the not always free version checked and the third thing is really understanding the architecture.

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They are not very intuitive about client server or cloud software architecture. Sometimes they think it's just all on their computer. And so sometimes you have to just explain that to them a little bit better about what be having something in the cloud means and how their actual computer software is different than the cloud software. I actually like that.

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And honestly, I think it's really interesting because we don't they don't understand. A lot of times students are particular that it is different for client server and cloud. Like they don't understand that the software is not living on their machine. The software, the software will probably have the same feature functions, but it will be a little bit different in terms of access points, storage and when they're saving things and things along those lines.

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So I think that's another thing that's interesting for them to learn. Also, they can access it from any computer, so they could be on a lab computer one minute or their computer at home the next, and they're still going to be able to have access to their to their database or their OCI in the cloud. Exactly. And this doesn't just happen with Oracle Software.

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It's any cloud. Like when they're using the OneDrive, it takes them a very long time when they're freshmen to then understand how the OneDrive sort of works a little bit, you know, compared to having it on their computer. And yeah, it's just a little different. So what are some tips you have for faculty teaching database using OCI that will help their classroom run more smoothly?

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Well, that's a great question. So there's quite a few things that you can do to make the classroom run more smoothly. The first thing is make sure that the students know to go in once a week, at least to keep the database operational. So that's number one. The next thing that you should really do is make sure that all of this information is also on your learning management system.

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So you should create some videos for the installation and how they install, for example, and how to make sure that they can put the database and start the database again and the services for the database again. You can they can watch those multiple times, so that be helpful for them. With that, you should probably also create a step by step written manual, like in a word doc or something to go along with a video.

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This will help them greatly. Some students are very video oriented and want to go through step by step on a video. Others really want something in writing and some students want both. So providing all of that will make sure that there's accessibility for all of your students. The other thing is to create student teams in the classroom. So that's what I have done during my classes, is I create basically study groups or debugging groups where by the students help each other out with technical questions and software issues because some of the low level debugging can easily be done by some of the students that might have higher skill sets within your class.

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As you all know, probably the you know that the students don't come in with all the same capabilities. Some of them will have looked at databases before. Some of them may have even program databases before. Whereas others may have never been working much with a computer at all. And there's everything in the middle. So having students help each other will help the classroom more smoothly.

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And one more thing. While you're in the classroom and you are lecturing. One of the things that I do is that I pause often and say, Are there any questions? And you can stop me now if you're not where we are so that they catch up better as opposed to waiting till the end where some people got lost somewhere in the middle.

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You want them to keep following you? I think those are really useful suggestions and I think it's always important for students to make sure that they work together, that they're collaborative. And I think as students learn how to debug, it helps other students learn how to debug. And so I think that's a that's some really, really helpful advice.

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What are some key skills that students studying database should learn? Another great question. So the very first thing to me is database architecture. I think that database architecture is fundamental. You need to understand these. You need to understand what a good database design is. Most interviewers will ask you about normalization and normal forms and relationship types. During the interview, if you don't teach them that and you just teach them how to code, they may not do so well on the professional interviews on the other side.

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When I was the manager of a big team, those are the types of questions that we would ask just as a base to know that they understood sequel. So that's one. In terms of coding sequel, of course, from creating tables to querying tables, it's important not to just teach them how to query tables, but also how to do the creation of tables and modification and things like that.

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It's really important to have both aspects because if you don't do that, they may not really truly understand what they're querying and what other options they may have for querying. And their querying skill level won't be up to par with other people that are graduating with this type of class. You also want to make sure that they really understand how to find help on various topics once they leave the class where the online help resources are, where how to ask the right questions of those resources and how to assign.

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You don't always use all of the coding all the time, so sometimes you use that one set of elements and if you do that, then you need to know how to go and retrieve information. One final question. If you could give one piece of advice to faculty or students, what would it be? Well, it's hard to just give one piece of advice.

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So my piece of advice is a multi-pronged piece. The fact is that learning, coding and learning classical database architecture, it's really very much like learning a new language. So many students that I have do know a different language. They just not one language students, Right. So they remember what it's like to learn a new language. If you tried to learn Spanish in high school that you need daily practice to have these language skills.

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And if you just read about the topic without practicing it out loud or in this case coding it on to a database, you're not going to remember that skill very well. And so it's very important that you learn it in order for language. Right. You start with the Hello, how are you? Right. And you move on from that.

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So you learn to select from and then you move on from that. And then you've got intermediate skills and then finally the advanced. So you can't just start in the middle, like with other topics that you're that they're learning. So because of this, I think that they should remember to give themselves grace because it takes a lot of time to learn a new language and especially the older people get, the more that they think that learning something takes just a few minutes or a day or just a little bit of time because we don't remember how long it actually took us to learn even our primary language that we spoke.

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Right? It took us years to learn it well. So remember that this is the same thing with learning this language. I think that's really good advice. I like what you said about giving yourself grace because when we learn a new topic, we're not just going to be experts overnight and that we need to take time, learn to digest and recognize that failure is going to come and that we're just not going to be able to get proficient overnight.

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And just to give yourself some grace and some thought to actually going at your own pace and everybody's going to learn at their own pace, which I also think is is really important. So as well. So I really believe that you said that everybody learns at their own pace because sometimes you see other people and it all has to do with what you've learned before, how fast your learning goes.

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Like if you have coded before, you're going to learn these languages faster than if you've never, ever coded before. And you can't just look at somebody else in the classroom and think, my gosh, I'm just not good at this. No, no. They just happened to have some knowledge that you didn't have. That's long before they even came to class.

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So that's part of the giving yourself grace. I agree with that. And then some people, they have natural inclinations to be to pick one kind of thing up and then somebody else has a natural inclination to pick something else up. So maybe for one ear design is easy and then for another one, the actual coding is easier. And so just where our natural skill sets have a tendency to lie, I think that's also important as well.

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We're giving ourselves grace is learning new skills. Absolutely. A special thank you to Dr. Bassani for speaking with me about how she utilizes the Oracle Academy Cloud program in her classroom. To learn more about Oracle Academy and our resources, visit Academy about Oracle dot com and subscribe to our podcast. Thanks for listening. That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.