Thank you for your feedback. As you're probably aware, you'll have a chance to give feedback at the end of the course. Unfortunately, while it may feel cathartic to fill out the form at the end of the term, it is not very helpful to you. It's helpful to me, since I can take the feedback and improve for the next time I teach, but you guys are out of luck since the course is long over by the time I read your comments.
Often times, students will have completely reasonable suggestions that instructors are happy to implement. Other times, students will have reasonable suggestions that the instructors choose not to implement, for their own reasons. Either way, none of this is helpful if students are frustrated after 12 weeks and an adjustment could easily have been made early in the term or if instructors could explain their thinking about why they choose to teach a certain way.
The point of this exercise is that hopefully if there are problems in the way the course is being handled, I'll be able to address it so that you can be successful in learning and preparing for the final exam.
At the end of class on June 4, I asked the class for some feedback using clickers. There was a relatively high response rate based on the usual attendance for this section. Obviously, those who don't attend lecture (about a third of those enrolled) wouldn't have been able to respond.
As a theoretical computer scientist, I'm aware that theoretical courses like this one aren't the most exciting to a lot of people, so I try to add some context to what we're talking about. Obviously, there's limits to what I can do, but I try not to do the usual "this is important because it's useful because" kind of thing.
This was a bit worrying because the response rate seems to suggest that a good chunk of you don't know that I put up lecture notes or where they're located (here).
The office hours for all the course staff are listed on the course webpage. However, many of you do take advantage of making appointments or dropping in to see me unannounced, which you are welcome to do.
This brings us to the next section.
Because of the response to the last question of the clicker survey, I decided to try asking for more free-form responses via PollAnywhere. The survey was open for approximately two days from June 11. The response rate was much lower than I had expected and I had expected it to be fairly low, but there was still some useful feedback. I'll try and respond to a few points that were brought up.
There isn't anything specific for me to say here, since many of you seem to like the notes and examples and pacing of the class. I do want to say something about the notes, because I've gotten comments about the fact that my lectures tend to follow the notes fairly closely, both postiively and negatively. I'll clarify my intent for the notes to hopefully address those who see this as a negative.
The notes are basically what I write up to prepare for lectures. They're essentially a rough plan for me so that I have a good sense of what I want to cover and how long it'll take. Often, my first iteration of a course will have me sticking very closely to these. The reason I make them available is largely for accessibility reasons, in the general sense. Those who aren't able to take notes, whether because of physical accessbility issues or because they need to miss class for whatever reason aren't negatively impacted. Neither are those who choose not to take notes. Hypothetically, I could choose not to release notes in order to force everyone to come to class, but I think doing that causes more harm than good.
early clicker questions
I am sympathetic to this, being a bus commuter myself. I intended for the early clicker questions to be a way to give those of you who were waiting for class to start something to think about and I think it works pretty well as a way to get people ready for class. I understand that not everyone's going to get there right at 8:30 (although technically you really should), so I had left open a window of two to five minutes before closing the question. I'm not willing to give up the early clicker questions so I've been compromising by starting on some announcements or lecture material first and then closing the clicker question even later. I will also try to add more clicker questions later in class to mitigate the effect of missing the first clicker question of the day.
I didnt really like the lessons where you went on huge proofs...
Thanks for this comment. Thinking back, I'm not sure I'm completely satisfied with how those classes went either.
...hard to understand the value of what we are learning.
Something that I've been trying to do is slip in some context whenever we do something new. Admittedly, there are stretches of the class that sort of go on without this context, particularly when we get deep into some examples. However, I will be sure to remember to provide more context when we get to new concepts and ideas.
Check up on us!...
Thanks for this comment. The point about using clickers more is noted. I'm new to clickers, so I'm still trying to figure out the best way to incorporate them into lectures. However, I'd also like to encourage everyone to always stop me if you don't understand something. We tend to say, and I'm sure you've heard this before, that if you feel like you're lost, you are very likely not the only one. As instructors, we do try to gauge how students are doing every once in a while, but please understand that there's no response, then there's really nothing more we can do except to move on.
Use a mic...
I'll be honest, I'm hesitant to use a mic because I don't like them. However, the point about being hard to hear when I'm writing on the whiteboard and talking is noted, and I will make sure to keep in mind to minimize that and project properly as much as possible when speaking.
if we could somehow ask questions anonymously during class
This is an interesting idea and I'll have to look into it and see if there's a way to implement this somehow.
The class is a bit long for a morning class so it's a bit hard to be enthusiastic.
I received a number of comments on the course evaluations to this effect last year, when I also taught an 8:30 class. So I'll take this opportunity to agree and say yeah, it sucks.
I took advanced (140s) math/CS in first year and [there's a lot of content overlap]
This is really interesting and I'd love to know what's covered in MATH/CS 14*. I tried looking for a syllabus but didn't find anything.