annarlynch
commented
5 years ago I think this is well said! The things I remember most from this class are the moments we worked on a specific example. It was hard for me, too, to generalize what I learned to... basically anything else! One of the recommended books ended up being very helpful, and I think more readings from it should be recommended to students. It's the Empirical Methods in Law book. This book seemed to understand how to talk to law students and really helped me understand p-values and such.
I think the idea of the one quiz question per week is really good! I still don't know, for example, what the Benford's law problem set question was actually asking. Maybe questions could be given weekly to help you build toward a larger problem set at the end? I'm not sure. I wonder how it's done in computer science courses?
So I also have another comment regarding the conceptual layout of the course. I loved how each week we focused on a specific issue / lesson. I really enjoyed reading the Professor written lessons, as well as the additional material. All if it was very helpful in gaining a cursory understanding of what is important for each lesson.
However, I found it difficult to apply what was learned, or even think about applying what was learned, beyond the specific problems shared in the lesson. I think one the goal of the course is to help equip us to understand and use these tools. If that means knowing what issues to spot the course did its job well for me.
But I also would have loved more of a formal, structured, presentation practical-use material like syntax, stats, etc. With a degree in finance I found it hard to learn how to apply the material without doing technical practice problems/math :p I think that even just one quiz question per week that is graded might help get the ball rolling in stretching us in developing skills on how to apply the concepts. Or we do something as a team on the discussion board for extra credit. The goal for these mini assignments would be how to learn the mechanical skills, not applying them in a more advanced way as required by the problem sets.