The three units I have this semester are: COMP115 (undergrad), ITEC802 (Postgrad), PICTFDN (Postgrad - external?)
My first observation this semester in COMP115 is how wonderfully chocolates work irrespective of what demographic is your class coming from! They participate very actively given this reward system! I don't like to call it a bribe because "bribe" is something you provide in return for an "unjust" favor. while a reward is something provided for someone who does their job beyond expectation. A general student is not "obliged" to participate. But the participation, if there, should be appreciated and chocolates are a good way. Of course, there are other gestures that show that their class involvement is appreciated like a pat on the back and applause. Generally, students derive self-confidence from the confidence their lecturers have in them. And if they are confident (of their capability to learn new things) coming into the university, they are more likely to perform better during the entire degree.
My second observation is in the external postgrad unit and how difficult it is to teach a programming component without any visual aids whatsoever! I have been given a sound recorder to record my lectures that external students can listen to, but without any visual tools, the lecture notes really need to be more graphical to help students understand the point. this generalizes to the problem of verbose lecture notes. Lecture notes should sparsely and miserly use text and should contain graphs and figures and other media if possible. this might be hard for areas like literature, I understand, but for fields like computer science, history, politics, I am sure lecturers can find relevant images and include them in lecture notes or slideshows. As I understand (intuitively), images help students correlate the text with the topic thereby acting as learning catalyst.
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(15/04) The workshop yesterday emphasized upon the importance of structured classes as compared to on-the-go design (even if that of a workshop). Now here, I am only talking about workshops. An "agenda" should always be prepared in advance. Maybe the students will have enough questions to keep you busy but just in case they want you to explain things one more time, it always helps to prepare some simple examples. I made the mistake of discussing a complex example and that only discouraged the students from getting involved - there's one mistake i won't repeat. NO COMPLEX QUESTIONS FOR GENERAL CLASS! (For those interested, I gave them the question of solving quadratic roots through pass by reference)
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(21/04) Wrote eleven practice questions on http://comp115.createforum.com/ for students to help them with pass by reference. Feels nice :)
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(22/04) This is a long one so you might wanna get some coffee. Mr. Fox (English name) is a Chinese student in my class and for the first 2 or 3 weeks he was completely and utterly unresponsive. I presumed that he is an uninterested student like a few others and tried to pester him into participating but to no avail. Then in week 4 or 5 I think I called him after the class and asked him why is his performance not satisfactory and he told me about his inability in understanding me ... now I remember, it was actually week 4. We only have one lecture of this subject and no recordings unfortunately. So, I started taking a camcorder to classes and also recording screencast videos using Camtasia Studio. The other measure was the forum I talked about in the previous entry. The results are fantastic. Many students improved performance, and Fox in specific has not become an excellent student, and when I say that, I don't just mean that he answers my questions and gets decent scores but also that he has become "critical" of what I do - he questions... HE QUESTIONS!!! and that, my friends, is a good student, one who questions. Inquisitiveness is the basis of all knowledge. I awarded Fox with a PI mug in the class (I picked up about 30 mugs from a geek shop in crows nest) to appreciate his improvement. It is one of the most rewarding things in my academic career in a while. Before this, I think it was the success of a Masters student Amireh who initially struggled but picked up Java quite well later in the semester. Anyways, moral of the Fox story for me is "show a little concern for students individually and you wil help them tremendously"
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(19/05) It was terrible :( I struggled to give a demo in the class today because of unforeseeable problem in technology :( I had an example in mind that I wanted to create in front of the students but as I proceeded, it just wouldn't work. We all pondered over it for a good 20 mins but it didn't work. It was a waste of time for me and more importantly, for the students. Lesson learnt - keep a backup working demo!
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(07/06) Today was a good day for a few reasons. I got my "learners evaluation of teaching" from SIBT. and I did not have a single "strongly disagree" against my name :). The average scores were all around 4.7 to 4.8 out of 5. But it were the comments that were really satisfying. My favorites were "Best lecturer ever" and in response to "areas of improvement" someone wrote "NO, he is a great lecturer
The other reason for me being happy is the unofficial feedback i received from my masters students - my masters students!!! (they are always VERY demanding and unforgiving, having experienced the corporate life and everything). Shirren, who is by far one of the best S/W professionals I have come across, commended my teaching which is a big honor for me (in an email he said "...you were easily my best lecturer all semester...". I had two students this semester for whom I hold special respect, Shirren and Thierry. There are other students who didn't have the same level of experience as these two but I am sure they'll be equally good in 3-5 years (Kok-yan, Alan, Jimmy to name a few). Alan, in his final 20% assignment wrote "I think I am in love" while describing one of the topics implemented. This simple statement shows that your students have actually gotten into what you taught and they are taking it as a fun-thing rather than a sob-this-stupid-assignment attitude they might have if they don't understand it/ like it. That one sentence for me is actually more important than any other LET/ LEU outcome.
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- Change of programming language to Processing which needs a higher amount of time to setup programs and more complicated execution process (console output is TINNNNY so that cannot be used). This results in students not getting a chance to write programs in the lecture room.
- Video lectures - something that started as a goodwill gesture has gone wrong I think :( Because lecture videos are available, some students do not come to the class and obviously recordings are not the same as in-class participation.
- Quality of students in general - I feel that the cohort quality isn't the same as it used to be.
- Possibility of improvement from teaching staff - We need to be more clear, consistent and proactive
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1 comment:
Gaurav,
How are you using the chocolate to engage your students? I've tried giving stuff to students to get them to work, but have not used chocolate as I thought female students might not like it (or like it too much).
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