A Case for Intranet-Based Online Portal in Undergraduate Computer Science Teaching

Our proposal for selective subjects especially those involving intensive problem-solving assignments and/or tutorials, such as Introduction to Algorithms and Data structures, Discrete Mathematics, Coding Theory, Number theory, Combinatorics and Graph Theory (CGT), Automata theory, is to supplement lectures with a moderated online forum against an intranet portal. By way of illustration we take the example of a restricted view of OEIS (http://oeis.org). The restriction can be w.r.t. sequences in OEIS that are directly relevant to say CGT. N.J.A.Sloane's OEIS is a collection of over 2,39,147 integer sequences and their properties. In particular OEIS contains definitions of many combinatorial structures, dense range of interpretations, generating functions and conjectured ones, cross references within OEIS and to outside resources, references to texts and technical articles, codes in Maple, Mathematica etc. For organizing courses such as the above mentioned, a first task is to partially create an OEIS-like instructor-moderated portal in a university intranet. During the course of lectures and tutorials students are invited to contribute to the portal and these may be augmented/approved by instructors suitably, to find a place in the portal. By this many concepts can be conveyed to the students in an interesting way with the desired results. In the arguments presented, examples related to Combinatorics and Graph Theory are given