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andrewpbray / stat-375-website

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class 1 welcome to class feedback #3

Open andrewpbray opened 3 years ago

andrewpbray commented 3 years ago

Hi @ischmidt20 , I'd like to try getting into the habit of making notes on what worked and didn't class and actually changing the content this semester. Figured we could store that feedback in issues. Please add your thoughts - either comments on these points or new impressions that you had. As an aside, there's a ticket filed both about wifi and room temp, so hopefully that gets resolved in the interim two weeks.

  1. Using the whiteboards centrally is not possible given the room layout, so work will either need to be pre-baked into the slides or written on a tablet and projected.
  2. Highlight parts of syllabus most relevant to students and present it as slides so that it's clear an unambiguous, asking for Q in between. Slides to include:
    • overall goal of course
    • assignments, timeline, grading
    • waitlist: have name/email signup sheet for people still waiting to get permission numbers
  3. Add to the get-to-know-you questions whatever things the instructor will answer as part of their own biography.
  4. Start with self introduction and build it into slide deck with office hour
  5. This lesson plan had two rounds of group work / think-pair-share: the community standards and the critique. We may not have time to do both well, in which case, which should we prioritize?
  6. Sharing out the group work is very challenging with such a large class. We'll need to consider other methods: posting work to Ed, collecting thoughts via something like poll everywhere. Both of these will require wifi, so I'll need to get configured to run ethernet.
  7. The silent thinking/writing time for the critique seemed useful but it could be good to have that a bit more intentional. We could push that out as the first assignment both so that people really do put some thought into it and so that they get practice / proof of concept of how assignment submissions work
  8. The panel I thought worked out really well but we should use software like poll everywhere to get questions from students for panel during the part when the moderator is asking questions.
ischmidt20 commented 3 years ago
  1. Yes, I think we could have done a better job presenting the syllabus, but another point is that we could have had a more clear syllabus to begin with. For example, more clear explanations of grading and timeline like you mentioned, but also maybe an example assignment or something.

3/4. Agreed. Students were mentioning this when I was walking around during the critique. We never mentioned OH at all but nobody bothered to ask so probably not a huge miss.

  1. I like the critique as it gets the students to translate this class to their own teaching. If pressed for time, the community standards can still be there, but just with less time spent on it.

  2. I think a bigger question is to what extent each group's ideas actually need to be shared with the larger class. For discussions where there will not be a wide variety of answers, asking a few people to share from their group is fine. For tasks where we need a response from every group, either Ed or some polling format would work I guess.

  3. Tough to see the whole room. But I think it's fine to solicit questions via hands, because between the moderator and the panel the whole room should be covered, and I think we can expect students to be comfortable publicly asking questions.

A couple other notes:

Students were asking about where material will be released. I think we need to clarify what exactly are the roles of Ed vs. Bcourses vs. website. It seems like we want Ed for online class discussions, Bcourses for assignment submission, and website for course materials. But when a homework is released, will we blast it on Ed, and/or have a thread to discuss the homework?

Also, the doors lock behind us after class ends. I found this out the hard way by leaving to use the bathroom before heading back to clean up and reorganize—doors locked. I asked and they don't have the system configured for individual key card access. So we have to be careful not to leave anything in the room after class. Not sure if this has much bearing on the students but something to note.

Finally, I think it's time to publish the bcourses website (I don't think I have privileges to do this). Also, we should sync bcourses with CalCentral if that's not already done automatically.