teaching in the fall, input requested!

[alexr_rwx]

Hey, so, this course I'm teaching in the Fall. It's real; it's happening. There are 29 students signed up for it.

I want your wisdom about classes. What was the best course you took as an undergraduate, or took at all? What do you think made it the best?

Moreover: what do you think about having little intermittent non-graded quizzes, once or a few times during a class? I'm imagining something like the quizzes in the Coursera lecture videos: "if you understood the last five minutes, you should be able to work this out". They're typically multiple choice, which I like.

Also moreover: for mid/upper-level undergrad classes, tell me all your thoughts on course projects. Lindsey has pointed out that term projects are often terrible, especially if left unconstrained. My mental model is that an NLP course should have a course project, and it's OK if they turn out badly. But reflecting on this, a bad course project can be demoralizing...

Thoughts and considerations?

Comments

[schizobovine.livejournal.com]

Operating systems already got mentioned, but probably my favorite class was the UI I took with you and pyrona. Perhaps it was just that our group was so awesome, but the projects there actually taught me a lot of stuff, despite how easy they were. It was the only class where I learned about human subject protocols and all that -- good to know, even in industry, as user surveys will almost certainly come up.

The idea of a continuous project that gets tinkered on the entire semester is pretty appealing. However, if someone gets stuck on one milestone, you don't want to fuck them for the rest of the class. CS 3210 back at Tech managed this by having the projects be modifications to a (much) larger one, that being the Linux kernel. Not sure if you can do that for NLP, though.

One idea might be to make the entire class a "project group," if you will. Each assignment would be a set of components, and teams could assemble based on which part they're interested in. This allows some group switching up to deal with drama and gives the whole class a feeling that they're building something Big. By the end of the semester, you'd want to assemble all the components into a working system.

This may also be a Terrible Idea, like the AI cage matches.

Also, huzzah on teaching! I cannot imagine a former classmate I'd like to have a professor more. :D

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

That was kind of fun, that HCI class :)

Building a big piece of software out of the work done by the whole class would be *amazing*. It also sounds really difficult to orchestrate, though, especially such that each student learns something useful. I think I'd have to design the whole thing at an abstract level first (or just build it myself), then chop it up into bite-sized pieces...

Also, huzzah on teaching! I cannot imagine a former classmate I'd like to have a professor more. :D

Awww! Thank you! That's a huge vote of confidence.