Strategies for Teaching “Mixed” Computational Linguistics Classes

Many of the computational linguistics classes at Ohio State draw a diverse crowd of students, who bring different levels of preparation to the classroom. In the same classroom, we often get graduate and undergraduate students from Linguistics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and other departments; teaching the same material to all of these students presents an interesting challenge to the instructor. In this paper, I discuss some of the teaching strategies that I have employed to help integrate students in two classes on automatic speech recognition topics; strategies for a graduate seminar class and a standard “lecture” class are presented. Both courses make use of communal, online activities to facilitate interaction between students.