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

[ikeepaleopard]

Course projects are okay. That is always where I learned the most things, but you need to have really clear grading criteria, approve the projects before they get started, and check in often. Also the things I learned were often not the actual course material and if they're group projects then you have to be ready to deal with the drama of group projects.

My best class ever was operating systems which was basically a semester long project course, but everyone did the same project and it was exquisitely constructed.

I found classes that were a series of two week assignments had a good balance between depth and chaos. Especially if they're hard enough that after the first one the students realize they need to start ahead of time, but not hard enough that they need to spend all their time on them.

Quizzes are fine as long as they're non-graded. It's a good excuse to sort of sit back and make the students actually think about what you're talking about. I know that generally I don't really process lectures until it's homework time unless something forces me to.

Anyway, good luck. I am super jealous that you're teaching.

[bubblingbeebles.livejournal.com]

My best class ever was operating systems which was basically a semester long project course, but everyone did the same project and it was exquisitely constructed.

*proud* (not that i was on staff until long after you took it, just that it keeps getting better)

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

My best class ever was operating systems which was basically a semester long project course, but everyone did the same project and it was exquisitely constructed.

Yeah! Lindsey's been really excited about the compilers class at IU, which is exactly of that description, and you write a compiler for Scheme.

Maybe a really simple machine translation system would be an OK semester-long project. I don't think I'll do that, though, because I want to have some homeworks on a variety of topics. And MT deserves to be its own class.