The “how we spend our time” exercise was really interesting. There is lots of useful feedback in there – I will try to take it into account. Thank you for your feedback.
The actual designs were a mix – tree maps, pie charts, just text, … The most unique thing I saw was a hand drawn wordle/word cloud.
It’s interesting to see how wildly people’s perceptions of what we do varies. I don’t have the ground truth. But I saw estimates of lecture time between 25% and 90% (to me it feels like about 70% – but this is a rough feeling).
Not surprisingly, there are a wide range of opinions. Some people love the things that others would like to get rid of. This is to be expected. I think there is also a bit of availability bias at play (people react most strongly to what just happened).
“Feed forward” is more important than “feed back” – the trick now is to try to figure out what to do to make the class better. (realizing that I can’t make everyone happy). Some of the detailed written comments are particularly helpful.
Feed Forward (what I want to try to do in the future):
- Each component seems to work for at least a reasonable subset of people, which is re-assuring.
- Small group activities (especially critiques) are very popular, so I will try to do more of them – and use them for more things (not just in-class design). I will try to have other small group activities.
- Design exercises seem to go over well. It becomes increasingly difficult to do them as the topics in class become more computational, so I’ll try to have more. And not just in class.
- All-class discussion is mixed (as might be expected). Doing a summative wrap-up to show things from small group critiques serves many useful roles, so we should try to do more of that.
- I should do better at scheduling – so we allow enough time for things. Lecture first isn’t always the best thing.
- Getting feedback is really useful – I will try to do a survey about out-of-class activities as well.
- Lecture less. Use lectures ahead of readings, rather than behind them.
Some more specific commentary…
Lectures
No one said get rid of them entirely (phew), but I generally I think there’s a consensus that there is a bit much of them.
I struggle with the redundancy with the readings thing. On one hand, it seems like a waste of time. On the other hand, it can be important to set up/frame things so that we can extend what you’ve read. I am thinking that there should probably be a little more “read –behind” – that is, use the lecture to set up the reading. But generally, I think I could use to spend less lecture time reviewing what you’ve read.
Design Exercises: People generally like them.
One thing we have not done much of (until today): design at home, critique in small groups in class.
People generally like the individual design practices. Those that don’t comment that it’s inefficient to use class time for individual activities. While there are some upsides of doing it on the spot (time pressure, using ideas right after discussing them, …) , it could be that a lot of the benefit could be done with design at home/critique in class. There were some reasons I shied away from this (what happens if people don’t do the homework, …) it might be the best of both worlds.
All class discussions
People are sharply divided on this. Some people like it and want more. Other people hate it and want less. This actually isn’t surprising: there are students for whom this works (generally the people who are more outspoken), and some for whom it doesn’t.
The advantage to all class discussion (over smaller discussion) is that it allow for some moderating and direction. And “expert” feedback (to the extent that I am an expert).
