Curried Lambda: Geoff Wozniak’s weblog Musings on just about anything

A small report on my course

Yesterday was the final exam for the course I've been lecturing. It's been a wild ride. For good or bad, I took on some challenges with this course because I really enjoy the course material. That can be dangerous as you can get caught up in your own enthusiasm and maybe miss that the students don't have a clue what you're talking about. Also, I'm busy trying to finish with my doctoral work, so I didn't really need the extra work. But I needed the money. Money takes precedence, since food is something I need to live.

Some of the things I did were risky, but different and potentialy interesting.

• A heavy focus on assignments. I pushed the students here. The work stressed thought over brute-force attacking the problem, which is something they didn't seem to get used to. Most assignments had a short, elegant solution if you sat down, did some research, read documentation and tried things out. The students seemed the most comfortable writing brute-force approaches.
• Which leads to the next point: heavy emphasis on trying things out. The textbook I elected to use was supposed to be something you work your way through by entering the examples. I have doubts that most students put any serious effort into doing this judging from the assignment submissions. The pitfall of this was that, as a student, if you got behind, it was very difficult to catch up. That is generally true of university courses anyway and I went on the assumption that this was a condition they had seen before, since it was a third-year course.
• Minimal lecture notes to encourage/nudge students to actually work through the textbook. I spent a lot of time putting lectures together that complemented the textbook, but did not regurgitate its content. Some of the lectures went over very well, some didn't. I got the impression the lectures were appreciated, but I still got requests for more comprehensive lecture notes. I just said, "read the textbook".
• A modern looking website in the style of a blog. It was dead simple to do, so I did it. I am of the opinion that our department has a very poor web setup for course instructors seeking to use the web in their courses. I was aiming to demonstrate ways of using the departmental website to do reasonably interesting things that students could probably relate to, given the ubiquity of the web. My criticisms of our department setup, however, is a discussion that should be held in a different context.
• All my assignments were done electronically. Submissions were done through the departmental electronic submission system. I then wrote some programs to process these and turn them into PDF files, which the teaching assistant and I marked. Feedback was provided by annotating the PDF files using Preview. I returned the assignments using the course web page and password-protecting the files. Student could only access their own files. Almost no paper was used at all for the course.
• I made a screencast to demonstrate the desired behaviour for some assignment code.
• For the exam, I created a question for each student based on something they submitted in an assignment. This was more difficult than I thought, but it was immensely satisfying. I strove for fairness above anything else, but I also wanted to connect the material to the work of the student by using the student's own work to demonstrate some concept. This might encourage students to reflect on what they do in the future, outside of the course.

Overall, I enjoyed it, even if it was incredibly difficult. I certainly hope the students enjoyed it (and the feedback has been positive, so far). I would certainly do it again, but I would only do it were I to be paid more. Now the job search is going to supplant teaching as something that consumes my time.