Review Syllabus designs with Professors

[lerongil]

1. Reach out 3 Professors
2. Ask 3 questions about their existing syllabus creation workflow
3. Show syllabus and take notes about feedback

[pandasa123]

Syllabus Review with Mattias

Takeaway

• It's really simple to pick Qiskit content and have it nicely linked
• Physics Professors use LaTeX. We might need to provide an export option after MVP

Notes

What do you think a Syllabus is?

• Objectives of course
• Goals
• Break out by week by week
• Problem Sets
• “It’s a bit hard to figure out what we want to add at the beginning, but we could figure this out as we go”

Syllabus Walkthrough

It looks good and it’s easy to use

• It’s nice to have it hosted on Qiskit, but I might need to have it hosted on Blackboard / export that PDF [course] down the road
• A spreadsheet would be nice…having a reading, a problem set

Syllabus Organisation

• The paragraph usually cover an abstract
• People always want to know the grade distribution…you could do it in the textbox
• “This format is fine [for breaking by weeks]…but it’d be nice to put in custom link or text to add other content…could we link Qiskit Youtube, flipped classroom, etc?”

Downloading a PDF

• “I just don’t really know…at a high level most faculty will make their own Syllabi. I like doing this with LaTeX since I can control the formatting a lot more”
• “I won’t have all of the course material developed at the beginning of the course. A lot of new courses are built one week and then the next two or three”

How does integrate with your actual syllabus?

• “The thing that would be really cool is exporting it into a LaTeX formatting”
• “It’ll be hard to convert…but this gets a lot of the content + linking to the Qiskit Textbook well”
• “Flipped classroom is here to stay”

[pandasa123]

Syllabus Review with Amir

Takeaway

• Amir is very excited to use this Syllabus, and it'll replace his existing one
• His Syllabi are written in LaTeX and it's not a great experience managing them but it does let him include custom formatting

Notes

Taught Quantum course to MIT undergrads 5 or 6 times over 5 years

What do you think a Syllabus is?

• Structured for a course
• Educational steps, one by one
• Time ordered
• Later material will draw on the things

Syllabus Walkthrough

• Looks amazing and I can see how I would use this!
• Usually broken down by time, what’s in the material
• I like to keep my syllabi neat and few pages
• I don’t have links in my syllabi but I love the links to Qiskit textbook or Mike and Ike! And I can see the content with one click for my students
• I’m emphasising using online resources like papers on ArXiV

What should be in a Syllabus

• I’d like a list of links to additional links…it changes from year to year
• I do have a PDF Syllabus

Fields in here

• The fields at the top are perfect!
• The very top section should have two versions with physical vs online. This is great for physical, but online but Instructors and TAs and Zoom links matter
• In a conventional syllabus

Workstreams

• I can see this replacing my existing Syllabus. This is an interactive syllabus with links which is pretty great
• I currently have a LaTex template. It’s not pleasant to work with…like with spilling sections etcs. LaTeX formatting is great but I’m open to using something else
• This Syllabus paves the way for me to share how I teach in the future
• There are other people who are teaching more advanced courses and I feel like they would love to share their course syllabi as well

Canvas / LMS

• This online version is great and I don’t really need any other formats. This could reduce our need on Canvas…Canvas is really good but the issue it we have to pay for it…it’s good for organising content but it’s not good for content links or zoom recording links etc
• Homeworks are also in LaTeX PDFs. It’s easy for typing equations

[pandasa123]

Post-MVP items:

• Export to PDFs
• Custom links (is the content free-text not sufficient though?)