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

[alec story (from livejournal.com)]

Course projects seem sensible for an NLP class, and mine had the same "it's ok if it sucks" idea, but if you do that, it's really important that you *do* establish what you're looking for and what you're grading on, preferably with a public rubric.

If you don't do this, it's really hard for your students to know when they can stop stressing out over their non-functional thing they spent the last month working. That's awful. You feel bad, and it keeps sucking up time.

As for quizzes, one class I took last semester had these little "i-clicker" things, which were a pain at first, but let us vote on things in class and answer little quizzes. Ours were basically counting attendance, but it really improved participation and engagement since you had to answer something, but the answer didn't matter. (This class was also very sensory based (wine), so it was useful to see how peoples' perceptions varied across the class)

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

If you don't do this, it's really hard for your students to know when they can stop stressing out over their non-functional thing ...

Really good point, yeah. I think providing early feedback could mitigate the danger here...

I don't think the class is big enough to warrant clickers! I think when I first heard about them, I thought it was kind of crap (did you have to buy the clicker?) -- maybe I'll just have the students close their eyes and raise their hands if they got it right, honor-system-wise.

[schizobovine.livejournal.com]

Buying them sucks, but I did like them for taking-attendance-caliber-quizes. Paper-anything can be a pain to keep track of.

Does Indiana have a student laptop policy? If so, you could ask them to bring theirs and do some kind of web-form quiz as a replacement. Probably cheaper/easier to administer, too.